Small Holes Sink Big Ships

“Small holes sink big ships.” I couldn’t find who to attribute that quote to but a friend who works out in our gym was the one that told me about it. He said it might make a good topic for a column.

What are your “small holes?” What is it that’s keeping you from your best health, your best self?

Time? OK…there are 168 hours in a week. Let’s say you spend 45 of those either working or traveling to work. And another 56 hours a week sleeping. That leaves 67 hours.

Let’s generously say that you spend 3 hours a day eating or snacking, that’s 21. It takes me 15 minutes to shave and shower but let’s say you take an hour a day. That still leaves 39 hours a week.

You belong to a club? Maybe an hour a week. Attend church? Another 3 hours for most. What else? Mowing the yard? 2 hours. Cleaning the house? 3 hours, maybe. We’re down to 30 hours a week.

30 hours of time that you can call your own. Hobbies, gardening, visiting, running errands, parenting. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say that you spend 20 hours a week on all that. Now we’re down to 10 hours a week.

10 hours every week that you can spend taking care of yourself. Exercising. Getting outside. Going for a walk.

But don’t take my word for it: Do your own math. If your health is a priority, you’ll find the time.

Opportunity? Well, for the getting outside part, that’s really easy around here. Our Greenbelt system is amazing and somehow keeps growing. It is a wonderful oasis in the middle of where we live. Haven’t been to the new Craig Jarvis Park yet? Oh, my. It is amazing and thank you Dr. Jarvis.

Have you looked to the east lately? One of the things that I brag about to visitors is that a huge part of our county lies within the boundaries of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  It’s right there! Everything you could possibly want.

There’s a gym on every corner so that’s not an excuse either. But you don’t need a gym to work out. A couple of kettle bells, a space in your garage or basement, maybe a jumping rope, a box to use for step-ups.

Eating better? That one does take some effort but not much. It all depends on what you put in your grocery cart. Put in the effort at the grocery store, a little more food prep, a little less fast food.

If you’re playing a sport or on a team, what are the Small Holes there? If an offensive lineman on a football team takes the wrong steps, the play could be over. If the running back hits the wrong hole, even by a little bit, it just won’t work. You’ve got to do the little things right. Small holes.

Little things might be preparation. If you expect to hit the majority of your free throws, you’ve got to put in the effort. I’ve never met anyone that was “naturally” good at shooting free throws. Maybe more than anything on a basketball court, the charity stripe requires effort.

It might be adequate sleep. Or eating right. Whatever it is that keeps you from being your best. Those are small holes that will sink big ships.

And here’s the thing about those small holes. Once the ship starts leaking a little bit, it doesn’t stop. Those small holes keep getting bigger. The excuses multiply. Your health or your performance starts to sink.

What are your small holes?

Sport Specific Exercises

My wife can be my biggest supporter and my best critic. So, every Sunday morning when she sits down to read the newspaper, I anxiously await her opinion of this column.

It’s usually “good column, Joesie.” After I wrote that piece a couple of weeks ago about sport-specific exercises for performance and injury prevention, she immediately said “good column, but now you need to tell people what to do.”

OK. Good point. Go back to that column and you will see that I told throwing athletes that they need to focus more on the deceleration of their arm and to work on trunk rotation strength. I told basketball and soccer athletes to work on ankle stability.  I told baseball pitchers to focus on their hips.

But how? What does that mean?

Let’s look at the deceleration of the arm during the throwing motion. Remember that the throwing motion is utilized in a variety of sports. Hitting in volleyball. Serving in tennis.

If you watch someone warming up to throw, hit, or serve, they might fasten an elastic band behind them and pull forward on it. I’ve seen that happen a thousand times.

Either that or they just throw (or spike or serve). But if you want to prevent injuries, you’ve got to work on those muscles on the back of the shoulder that slow your arm down after release.

To do that, you should take that same elastic band and fasten in front of you and pull backwards against it. Work on the muscles that pull your shoulder blades toward each other.

As for making those ankles more stable—run in sand, hop from one foot to another, hop up and down on one leg. There are all kinds of reaction devices which use lights to send you in one direction or the other. Old-fashioned shuttle runs help with this.

Pull an old couch cushion or pillow out (with permission) and walk on it. Then hop on and off of it. Now do it with one foot.

Take a yoga class or look at a video to learn good ways to stretch out your hips. Take that elastic band and fasten it around your ankle while seated, anchoring it under your other foot. Pull you lower leg to the outside. Do it slow and steady and then quick and fast.

Probably my favorite piece of gym equipment is the leg press machine. You can work everything from your ankles to your knees to your hips to your core.  I’m not a big fan of a full squat with heavy weight but squat jumps can develop explosive power.

I’m not a big fan of the bench press either—I understand that it can be important for some sports but it often leads to shoulder problems if you don’t pay equal attention to developing the back side of the shoulder.

And let me throw in my bias against dropping weights. Put simply…don’t! It really seems like the “thing to do” right now. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, visit a gym that allows it. You’ll find people repeatedly picking up a weight and immediately dropping it. Time after time after time.

What these folks don’t realize is that they are missing out on what may be the most important part of the lift, the eccentric unloading that comes from setting the weights down. You will develop better body control and more functional strength if you lower the weight to the floor instead of dropping it.

And if you need more ideas or better advice, consult a personal trainer, strength coach, Athletic Trainer, or Physical Therapist. 

 

The Best Teammate

I’ve decided that nobody looks out the window on airplanes anymore.

I’ve been on an airplane a couple of times in the last month but I just realized that everyone keeps their windows shut. All the time.

On one of those flights, I was seated by the window, instead of the aisle, which is my usual place, a concession to my bum right knee now healthy because it has been replaced by a new one. I’ve always liked the window seat ause it allowed me to look at the landscape from above. I’ve seen tiny islands in the ocean, the Grand Canyon, New York skyscrapers…all from 20,000 feet.

I watch that little map tracker thing on the back of the seat in front of me, keeping up with where I am in relation to the ground below. That lets me try and figure out what I’m seeing below. I am fascinated by travel and intrigued by adventure, still a kid who wonders where those people inside that amazing flying machine are going.

I’ve been fortunate to get out and see a lot of the world. I’d like to think it has made me more tolerant, more accepting of a world that can be quite different from my rural roots.

I went bike riding on the Greenbelt with one of my grandsons last weekend, on a beautiful Sunny afternoon. We had done this before, but it was usually my idea.  This time it was his idea, and he knew where he wanted to go.

First, all the way to the bubbling spring at the Ft. Craig monument. But he’s there just to see the map that shows the location of Fort Black, which was out near Chilhowee View School and was founded by Joseph N. Black. Maybe a relative, maybe not. He likes that maybe it is.

Then back to the upper end where the trail makes a loop, above Pearson Springs Park. There we can find the tree and plaque placed there to honor my dad, Carl H. Black.

He wanted to know more about my dad. Was he big and strong? Was he smart? What was he like?

This is my little Social Chair, more like me than any of the others. When he walks into a room, he wants to get to know everybody there. On this day, he spoke to every single person we encountered. 

Because that’s who he is. He played basketball this year and got the “Best Teammate” award. How could we want more than that?

The world is a big, beautiful place. People are generally wonderful if you look for that in them, if you give them the space to be wonderful.

I want my grandchildren to know the world yet not become worldly. I want them to fly in an airplane and wonder about the people down there.

I never want them to stop looking for the good in people, to stop being kind to everyone they meet. If it’s in them, I never want them to stop walking into a room and wanting to know everyone’s story.

And I want them to always be the Best Teammate.

 

Best Exercise by Sport

I was in a discussion on sports performance and training programs this week when the conversation turned to the best exercises for different sports. 

In other words, if you play softball, what are the most important exercises for you to do? Or baseball, or football, or pretty much anything out there. It was a pretty high level discussion so there were a lot of really great ideas thrown about. 

I took notes but the discussion was fast and furious so I didn’t get everything but I did get the basics. For the most part, you can divide the discussion into two parts—performance and prevention. The two go hand in hand.

From a performance perspective, prevention of injuries can be huge. If you’re injured, you can’t perform, you can’t practice, you can’t work on those things that translate to performance.

Let’s start with baseball/softball. You might think that they’re about the same thing but there are some important differences.

With any sport that involves throwing, those muscles that rotate the trunk, mostly what we think about when we consider our core muscles, are the single most important thing to consider from a performance standpoint.

And throwing is not just baseball and softball. Think about the volleyball serve or spike—those are both basically a throwing motion. Quarterbacks, discus throwers, shot putters, the tennis serve…all those involve a throwing motion and require strong trunk rotators to be effective.

For baseball pitchers, the hips are key.  The lead leg needs to have really good hip external rotation motion and really good trail leg hip internal rotation strength. In a huge study done by a friend of mine, these two factors were the best predictors of pitching success, not the shoulder nor the trunk.

In preventing injuries in the throwing athlete, the single most important exercises are those strengthen the “decelerators” of the arm. Think about the back of the shoulder and the muscles that pull back on your shoulder blade. Those are often neglected and that’s when you see me with an injury.

Swimmer’s Shoulder is a very real entity and is related to that same thing. So much of what swimmers do develops the front of the shoulder and ignores the back of the shoulder. It is absolutely necessary for swimmers to work on muscular balance at the shoulders.

Basketball and soccer players change direction a lot so their injuries tend to be more at the lower leg and ankle. Dynamic strengthening of those muscles that stabilize the ankle are essential.  Think planting your foot and suddenly changing direction—that’s where the importance of strong ankles comes into play. Same thing for running backs and receivers on a football team.

Working on sudden changes of direction in the gym can get you ready for practice and games. Hopping from one side to the other, plyometrics off of a box, jumping onto an unstable surface, all those will help develop the strength necessary for performance and prevention.

It just makes sense that if you’re a soccer player that heads the ball that you need strong neck muscles. Don’t forget that the foundation that those neck muscles depend are on the rest of the spine (core strength).

Training for performance is not all bench press and hamstring stretching. It’s more about focusing on what you need for your body to do in space—controlling motion and reacting to outside forces.