I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Patrick Ward of Optimum Sports Performance. Patrick is an extremely knowledgeable and talented strength coach in his own right so I was grateful to have the opportunity to answer a few questions regarding my background and philosophy on strength and conditioning. I include it here to provide a little more insight into how and why I train the way I do. Thanks for taking the time to read it. Consider this my 15 minutes.

1) Thanks for taking the time to do this interview Steven. Can you please give a little bit of background on yourself and why you got into training?

I came into training quite by accident. I was a three-sport athlete in high school (football, basketball, and baseball) and picked up lacrosse in college. At A&M I also picked up a penchant for beer and pizza rolls. By the time I was getting ready to graduate I had put on about twenty-five pounds – some muscle but mostly fat. I had begun working out but really had no idea about what I was doing. I asked and observed others but was left even more confused. As such, I began reading fitness magazines and became intrigued with the science of training and nutrition. About this time, two fortuitous things happened: I saw a television program on the Olympic Training Center and I enrolled in a course in first aid to finish out some of my requirements for graduation. The first challenged my prevailing belief that great athletes were born and not made. The second changed the course of my future.

I don’t recall how but I had struck up a good relationship with the instructor of the first aid course (which just so happened to fall under the Kinesiology department). She learned of my new-found interest and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. With her letter of recommendation and my GRE score I got in. It certainly wasn’t for my grades. After grad school I took a job at a large, commercial gym, got certified, and soon after got my CSCS. The rest is history I guess.

If not for that one first aid course I never would have gone to graduate school and thus would never have embarked on a career that I am so passionate about. I also would not have met my wife and would not have the same two wonderful children. I owe that instructor my life and even made a trip back to College Station a few years ago to tell her as much.

2) At a time when so many want to specialize in working with athletes in just one sport, you seem to be more of a generalist; working with athletes in everything from motocross to football to lacrosse.  What is it about being a generalist that really sets you apart and allows you to hone in on the athletes needs?

I guess you could consider me a generalist. I love all sports and, fortunately for me, all athletes need a foundation of strength, power, speed, flexibility, mobility, endurance, etc. Sport-specific training is merely a manipulation of the modes and methods used to develop these qualities and knowing which ones need emphasis and when. Having done this for so many years and being a student of sport, I have a pretty good understanding about how to develop sport-specific fitness whether I have played the sport or not.

Case in point, I trained Supercross rider Heath Voss to a World Championship in 2004 even though I had never been on a motorcycle. Interesting side note: his main competition for the title that year was Damon Huffman who was trained by none other than Alwyn Cosgrove. Anyway, knowledge, observation and, most importantly, dialogue with the athlete are the essential elements for putting together a successful training plan. Having played the sport is merely a bonus.

My success as a “generalist” lies in my 15 years of experience and broad knowledge base. When you work with athletes from wildly varying disciplines, you have to spend considerable time studying areas that you might not be concerned with when working with just one sport. Doing so gives you the ability to see things from a different perspective and reduces the likelihood of being biased by tradition. Being an “outsider” does come with it’s own challenges but once the athlete buys in the results ultimately speak for themselves.

3) You have a great interest program organization and understanding how to manipulate training variables to improve strength and power. Can you tell us a little bit about your overall approach to training and philosophy?

Yeah, I guess you could say that I am obsessed with the planning and organization of training. From the single workout to the annual plan, I want to know how to best fit everything together to optimize the training process (wow, that sounds very guru of me). I’ve read just about all there is on the two-factor (fitness-fatigue) theory of adaptation and the various forms of periodization. Zatsiorsky, Verkhoshansky, Issurin, Siff, Bompa, Rippetoe & Kilgore, Loren Chiu, Dan Baker out of Australia are all guys that have a had a huge impact on my training philosophy. I’m particularly interested in post-activation potentiation in the form of complex training and the short and long-term delayed and/or residual training effects.

The cool thing is that, using my Micro Muscle Lab, Just Jump mat, and Brower timing system, I can test a lot of these theories. Not to sound too much like Dietrich Buchenholz but I can also use these tools to “autoregulate” my training. For example, I can use the vertical jump as a measure of preparedness for the day’s training or I can use a predetermined drop in power to terminate an exercise or a workout. These devices also allow me to individualize the training as well as quantify performance over time. I’m a total geek in this regard.

4) You’ve been in the industry for a long time. Looking back, if there were one thing you know now that you wished you knew then, what would it be?  What should young coaches in the field focus on if they want to be successful.

As an athlete, I wish I had known that you can get faster and jump higher with proper training. In high school, we lifted weights but it was all about getting bigger and stronger not necessarily about getting more explosive. At that time (mid to late 80′s), it was believed, by our coaches anyway, that you were either fast or you weren’t. You could jump or you couldn’t. There was no emphasis on power. Hell, there was hardly any emphasis on strength for that matter. The weight program was haphazard at best and voluntary. There certainly wasn’t any thought into injury prevention. What a waste.

Come to think of it, not much has really changed. I get kids in all the time that are weak and slow or strong and slow. Very few are powerful or fast. They either have no strength or can’t express what strength they do have quickly. I routinely put six inches or more on a kids vertical jump and shave several tenths off his or her forty-yard dash in a couple of months simply by having them train for speed and power. It’s not rocket science. Or, maybe it is.

As a trainer, I wish I had been taught the importance of quality of movement (over quantity) early on. It wasn’t until a few years into my training that I came across the work of Paul Chek. While he has gone a bit mad these days, the material that he was putting out in the late ’90s radically changed my approach to training and changed my mind about what a trainer could and could not do. He was a pioneer in the melding of exercise and therapy and much of what is being taught these days about “functional” training is the direct result of Paul’s work. There are a lot of guys doing that sort of thing now – Gray Cook, Stuart McGill, to name a few – but back then he was on the cutting edge. I actually spent a week with him in Miami getting his golf certification and was tested by the man himself. He is quite a character. Speaking of characters, I also had the good fortune of attending one of Mel Siff’s Supertraining camps before he passed away. The influence that these two men had on my career cannot be overstated.

I have spent the last fifteen years working “in” my business and it’s only recently that I have begun to work “on” my business. I have always sought the respect of my peers more than financial gain. Unfortunately, getting better means having to routinely find new peers and so I always feel like I still have so much left to learn – and I do – but this mindset can be paralyzing professionally. There must come a time when you just have to feel confident in your knowledge, move forward, and market yourself a bit. That’s not to say that you stop learning but honestly, after a while, the details can become a bit trivial. Practically speaking, how can you share your expertise with someone if they don’t know who you are? Fortunately, my clients appreciate my dedication and my ability to help them achieve their goals and have always been more than happy to refer others. My business has been and will continue to be built on these relationships. I think that’s the secret to any business success.

5) Steven, thanks for taking the time out of your day to answer these questions for us.  Could you please tell the readers where they can find out more about your articles, services and where they can get in contact with you?

My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity, Patrick.

Although I don’t get to update it as often as I would like, I have a blog where people can learn more about me and my training philosophy. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook if anyone cares to follow my ranting or keep up with my day-to-day musings. I can also be reached via email at steve@stevenbubel.com.

I doubt Benjamin Franklin was talking about the training of young athletes when he coined the phrase but he might as well have been. Getting an early jump on resistance training can go along way towards preventing injuries later on.

How early is “early”? According to the position stand of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), “if a child is ready for participation in sport activities, then he or she is ready for some type of resistance training”. This can include children as young as 7 or 8 years of age. Some parents might think that a bit too early. Most, unfortunately, give the idea no thought at all.

For the vast majority of young athletes, their first exposure to resistance training comes during their freshman year in high school. Research shows that that may be a little too late – at least when it comes to injury prevention.

In looking at the graph above we can see that the incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries spikes quite dramatically from 15-19 and more so in females. The reasons for this are quite varied and beyond the scope of this post but the take-home message is two-fold:

1. the liklihood of injury (especially ACL injury) is greatly reduced with a properly designed resistance training program
2. waiting too long to get started can be detrimental to your child’s health.

*Information on this site is provided for informational purposes and is not meant to substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professional. You should not use the information contained herein for diagnosing or treating a health problem.

When I run I sometimes get pain in my left shoulder close to the base of my neck. It’s always the same pain, only the intensity varies. It started happening once I broke the 10-mile mark in my training. Any thoughts?

Sounds like it could be fatigue of the primary respiratory muscle – the diaphragm. As the diaphragm fatigues there is increased reliance on the accessory respiratory muscles – namely the scalenes, sternocleidomastoid, and upper trapezius – to elevate the rib cage and draw air into the lungs. Overuse of these muscles can lead to pain.

This problem should resolve with better conditioning. Focus on deep, diaphragmatic breathing while you’re running and breathe through your nose as much as possible.

If the problem persists, you may want to look into soft-tissue therapy. Trigger points can often develop in these muscles with overuse.

While there’s no substitute for a pair of expert hands, there are ways for you to work on yourself.
The Trigger Point Therapy Workbookis an excellent resource for the self-treatment of trigger points in the neck and almost every other region of the body. I can’t recommend it highly enough

Do you know if there’s research linking sodium with a feeling of fullness? I generally keep my sodium around 3000mg a day, but when it drops below that, (say 2300mg) I start to notice that I feel hungrier than usual and have to seek out foods that will keep me feeling full.  I’m not actually sure if sodium is the culprit though (it’s just an observation on my part) so I thought I’d ask!

When it comes appetite or satiety, the first thing that comes to my mind is ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide hormone that stimulates appetite. Under “normal” conditions, ghrelin is suppressed postprandially (i.e. after a meal) reducing the desire to eat. However, it turns out that ghrelin is sensitive to “low” dietary sodium intake.

When sodium is restricted, salt-sensitive individuals exhibit increased postprandial ghrelin (relative to normal intake anyway) which may trigger a premature hunger signal leading, in turn, to increased food craving and intake. It is probably for this reason that white individuals in particular tend to lose less weight on combined calorie- and sodium-restricted diets than under calorie restriction alone.

Anecdotally, I have been adhering to an intermittent fasting regimen for the last two years and have found that a 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt several times during the day really increases my energy and blunts my appetite. Interestingly, research has shown that in the first 24 hours of fasting, sodium excretion accelerates by about 15% above normal which might explain my response.