Cereal that helps fight the flu??

Is it true??

Can Cocoa-Puffs really help fight off the flu? I don't know about it but apparently Kellogg's is gambling that you're going to buy - pun intended - that box of lies.

There are a few key reasons as to why I am not buying this and what you can do to TRULY improve the immune system of your kids!!

First lets cover the reasons why you should not believe the label for a reason.

1. TO BE HEALTHY YOU HAVE TO START WITH A HEALTHY FOUNDATION. Does it even make sense that a sugary, chocolaty cereal will HELP your kids fight off disease? Everything else we are told is that sugar, highly processed foods are bad for us. So what is so different about puffed white rice (which is void of just about any nutritional value on its own) is going to help us? The answer: Nothing is different. Except...

2. FAKE VITAMINS AND MINERALS DO NOT MAKE FOR HEALTHY CEREAL. Kellogg's added some lab made vitamins that research has proven is not absorbed nearly as well as natural vitamins and minerals. An example of this is comparing the durability of real natural wood furniture vs. plywood furniture. Plywood is less expensive, but also breaks down much quicker than say, Oak furniture, and is not nearly as strong. Which would you rather have? One may cost more, but the quality is what you are paying for. Except now your decision does not just effect how long your furniture lasts. Rather your decisions effect the health of your child.

3. HIGH SUGAR INTAKE HAS BEEN SHOWN TO INCREASE RISK OF THE FLU. You are doing your child no favors by adding more sugar to their diet. A lie mixed with a little bit of truth is still a lie. An unhealthy food mixed with a few extra "goodies" does not make for a healthy food. Put it this way, do you really think whole wheat donuts are healthy?

Want to know how to truly improve the immune system of your child? Check out the "Fuel Like a Champion" DVD. Let Dr. Chris Mohr show you how to fuel your young athlete to build strong muscles, bones and immune systems the RIGHT WAY!!

Good or bad??

I watched a video today and I want you to watch it. This will take about 4:00 and I want you to consider what you have just seen.



Now considering how it appears this kid got this strong...




Was he lifting external resistance?

Well other than the curls no. He wasn't.

Is this going to destroy his bones??

Probably not. Why you ask? The way that this muscular system was stressed is in a systemic fashion. He is not doing isolation exercises but rather he is controlling and managing his own body weight. This puts the right kind of stress on bones, ligaments and joints.

Another interesting fact is that the 6-pack you see on this child was not developed by doing hundreds of situps but rather was developed as a result of his body needing stability during the inverted pushups, pullups, gymnastics and other calisthenics.

Reading the comments on this video when it was posted on Yahoo!, there were hundreds of people who were upset claiming this poor kid was ruining his body and developing a "complex."

Perhaps more american kids should "ruin" their bodies like this and develop a "complex" of fitness. Perhaps then we'll stop that runaway train that is childhood obesity. If what you saw in this video disturbs you, then it is definitely a great idea to keep your child away from the following:

1. Monkey bars at school
2. Jungle Gyms at the park
3. Tree's he/she can climb
4. Hills they can run up
5. Things they can jump off such as benches and steps
6. Fun group activities such as partner wheel barrow's, crab walks, bear crawls and other weight bearing fun stuff

So this child has a relatively large amount of muscle and a relatively small amount of body fat on him. That is no reason to say my 5 year old should not be active.

Now my disclaimer. If indeed the parents are pushing this boy to do more and to engage in weightlifting at such a young age, then perhaps there is cause for concern. But from what I see. This boy is perfectly healthy and a model for engaging in physical activity instead of parking it in front of his playstation.

Clean Slate

I wanted to talk all about injuries and how we attempt to control and prevent them with proper training. Many times trainers, including myself, like to advertise that their program is geared toward injury prevention. Many times you will see camps that are strictly for preventing a certain type of injury, say ACL tears.

If I don't put that claim in my flier, does it mean that I do not attempt to prevent injuries in your athletes? OF COURSE NOT!! That would incredibly irresponsible of me to do so.

Instead, what I want and need you to realize is that any good program should prevent injury. This occurs through making sure each athlete has solid movement and good muscle recruitment and coordination. If a player does not have a very clean squat, why the heck am I going to ignore it and say we'll go ahead and squat anyways? If a trainer did that to my child, I would have his head on a plate!!

Instead, realize that many young athletes will not use much more than body weight when they are first working with us. Many don't start working with weights even after a few years!

Why?

Let me give you an artistic example. If I were a painter and I paint a house that is covered in mud, do you think that paint is going to stick? Probably not. The first time I washed the house most of the paint would come off because the house I was painting was not clean.

And this is what happens with athletes and coaches who get too caught up in doing the "fun" stuff of plyometrics and speed work. If the athlete does not have clean movements, any thing a coach tries to teach is just going to be forgotten the first time they go out to play.

You have to un-teach the bad habits so that you're working with a clean slate. Only then will you see the all-star inside shine through the mud.

Sponges and Pruning

How many parents want their young athlete to better than any other player in his or her age group?

Probably a lot of you. When your young athlete outperforms the competition, it is definitely something to be proud about.

However, if you child isn't the all-star on the 11U team, don't worry. THEY'RE 11!!

Don't try to turn your young player into a college athlete right now, because they don't have to be. At Pair & Marotta's Peak Performance Camp we had a pretty wide variety of athletes coming in. Most played baseball, some played soccer and a few played football.

Many played the same sport year round and other played multiple sports throughout the year. And the one thing that myself and Brian both noticed -

The kids who played more than one sport were by a sizeable difference, the better athletes.

Why is this though? Parents dump a lot of money into club teams and making sure that their child is playing the same sport year round. I mean if they want to get better, shouldn't they play more and more?? Not necessarily.

At a young age kids are like sponges, both mentally and physically. This is the time when we should be flooding them with different stimuli to make sure that we are building connections between the movement of their limbs and their brains.

What also happens at this time is a phenomenon called "pruning". You can look at pruning as the "use it or lose it" stage. If a child does not build bridges from their locomotion nerves to their brain, the body will "prune" the connection site because it is not needed based on minimal usage.

After this very sensitive time, if the nerves are not used and the skill is not regarded as important enough to maintain, then it is often very difficult to retrain the skill.

All in all, it is very important to present a wide variety of stimuli to young athletes and to start with very general movements before specific movements. This will ensure that as athletes grow they maintain movements that are needed as the foundation for more sport specific movements that will be refined as they get older.

Be sure to expose your young athlete to a wide variety of movements, sports and games as it will not be detrimental (contrary to popular belief) but only serve to make them better ATHLETES as they mature.

Close your eyes, you're not going to want to see this...

With the start of baseball season, we are bound to see the rate of injuries go up. Yes, things happen and accidents occur. But many of these accidents do not have to happen. Many of them can be avoided if we only trained the muscles and reactive systems required to prevent many of them. It almost seems too easy.

Lets start from the ground up: the ankles.

Baseball along with many other sports is played on two feet. It also involves running. For the most part, the players are running on a flat surface. But it never fails you will see an athlete round the bases and sprain an ankle. Why does this occur? I mean he's done it thousands of times before, right?

We have no problem standing flat on our feet. But when we get a little sideways and we are standing on the outside of our feet, our ankle wants to keep on rolling. That is inertia - an object will maintain its path of travel until acted upon by an outside force.

If we can get the nervous system to recognize that our ankle is about to roll and quickly react and fix it, then we can prevent it from rolling. Some of you may have had this happen; you're running and the ankle starts to roll but you catch it and although it scared you, thinking you're about to sprain your ankle, but you caught it and it was nothing more than a scare.

To train this reactive ability, we need to train in what we call a proprioceptively enriched environment. Or simply a stability/balance challenged environment. At Pair & Marotta, we do this by having you stand on a single leg, or closing your eyes or placing you on an unstable surface such as an air disc, half a foam roll, or a airex pad.

This trains the muscles of your ankle to quickly recognize a potentially dangerous situation and react as opposed to having to think about it. The most convenient and beneficial time to work on balance and stability is during warm-ups. Balance on a single leg and reach in different directions, skip in different directions, shuffle and then change direction, run in different directions. These are all good things that will help prevent injury!!

You will see many of these types of exercises in "Peak Preparation: A On-Field Guide to Performance."

Are you doing more than just "something"?

I have to tell you guys, I am a big fan of music. But then again, who isn't?

One of my favorite bands is the White Stripes. I know it might be a bit trendy but they are great musicians. What does this have to do with sports performance? What does this have to do with getting stronger, faster, quicker and more powerful?

The White Stripes have a song called Blue Orchid. And in that song, Jack White sings something so profound that it took me till now to get it. What did he sing?

"Something's better than nothing...Something's better than nothing is giving up!"

As an athlete, no... as a person, you should never catch yourself saying, "Well, something is better than nothing."

Something's better than nothing is not giving your all. And not giving your all, is giving up my friend.

So whether you are in school, or you're practicing, or your doing chores around the house or your mowing the lawn, or you are at Pair & Marotta getting your sports training done, give it everything you have. Make it the best you've ever done. Make it something to be proud of, something that when people see it, they are amazed at the effort that went into it.

Sports is all about giving everything you've got. The ones who win, who are champions, who outlast and play their opponents...they out "give" their opponents. Because they have more to give. That is what Pair & Marotta Sports Performance training is all about. We give everything we've got, to give you more. We want you to be so well conditioned, so well athletically trained, so focused on the task at hand, that you give everything and not a drop less.

When you give your all, it says something about you as a person. It says something about your parents, it says something about your friends. Actions speak louder than words. So don't give anything less than 100% and never let anybody hear you say, "something is better than nothing."

Because that my friend, is giving up.
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Below is the workout of the week for your week off. Take it, work on it and give everything you've got.

Circuit type workout (follow each exercise immediately with the next, minimal rest)

1. Push-ups x 5
2. Rocket Jumps x 5 (tuck in when on ground, explode arms and legs into a star at highest point of jump)
   
3. Mountain climbers x 10
4. Hip Bridges x 10
5. Reverse Snow Angels x 10 (lie on belly, keeping arms and legs off the ground and make a snow angel)
   
6. Lateral shuffle 10 times each side
   

Do as many circuits as you can in 15 minutes. Coaches, this is a terrific workout to end a practice with. This is just a sample of what you can expect in "Peak Preparation: An On-Field Training Manual." You'll get that this summer.

Arm Care is Career Care

For a baseball or softball pithcer, their arm is often their career. Any quality sports training program bakersfield should consist of an arm care program. If an athlete does not know how to take care of their arm, then their career won't stand a chance.

But what does arm care really consist of? Arm care consists of many things. Not the least is proper preventative care and proper recovery.

Many baseball and softball players go wrong with arm care. They often abuse their arms without ever knowing it. But I have a very knowledgeable person who is very excited to help you with any problem you might have. Click here to visit their website.

So lets talk proper warm-up. Personally, I am sold on Jeager Bands. These things are awesome and can be taken anywhere. No matter what position you play, you gotta have these bands. Pitchers throw every couple of days. Position players throw every day. So don't think they are only for pitchers. They will strengthen your arm to create a cannon and keep you fresh and able to play day after day. The entire Jeager Sports program (long toss, arm circles, bands) is terrific. Their program is highly recommended.

The second thing is knowing when you've thrown enough. And that can be a bit more tricky. Follow this link to get some guidelines on throwing volume. Odds are most coaches are throwing their kids way to much and not giving them enough rest. Coaches, if you don't know how many pitches your athletes are throwing, you are doing them a disservice. Don't be that coach.

The last but possibly most important is proper recovery. Recovery is what we do to our body to help get fresh blood, oxygen and nutrients to the area that follows the stress of pitching at a very high velocity. We should take this very important. The first thing to do is ice it. Almost as soon as you come off the mound. The second thing is to exercise it the day after. Perform very low resistance exercises such as arm circles, fly's, and arm pendulum exercises to help loosen up the tight muscles of the shoulder.

These three things will take some extra effort, but rest assured, they will keep you throwing for years to come. Being consistent is the key. If you want to throw consistently, you need to

1. Prehab your shoulder for what you are about to ask of it.
2. Count your pitches. Have a coach keep your pitch count so you can track performance
3. Take care of yourself after the game. Ice, compression, and elevation. The next day, start your exercises.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at aaron@pairmarotta.com




Sports training Bakersfield, Baseball training, Pair Marotta Physical Therapy