have you thought about what your presentation’s going to be on, if you do one at the conference the next time it convenes, anoop?
NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 2
April 10 2010
Here is the second part of my review of the 2010 NSCA Personal Trainer’s conference held in Las Vegas. you can read the first part here: NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 1
Eric Creesey
Eric Creesey is an upcoming and strength & conditioning expert. He is also know to be rehab specialist, especially with baseball players. You can see his articles, books and DVd’s all over the web.
Eric gave 2 presentations. The first one I attended was about Shoulder Rehab in baseball pitchers. This was not good to begin with since it is a personal trainers conference and you don’t get much out of a shoulder rehab lecture for pitchers. And he could have done more to make it more relevant to the audience. He just had one slide up ( a flow chart) and just ran through the exercises and stretches. It was a hands on presentation so maybe that could have been his excuse.
He showed how pitchers tend to have limited ROM in their shoulders ( Internal Rotation) and showed stretches to improve ROM, exercises for scapular stability, thoracic flexibility and so on. He also talked about how breathing patterns, opposite ankle hip restrictions, poor cervical spine function can cause shoulder problems. He says he found the greatest improvement in shoulder ROM with improving thoracic flexibility and he has seen some studies; I haven’t see any though.
The second presentation was titled “Inefficiency vs Pathology”. This was interesting because I had gone through the handouts before and saw all those infamous studies which shows disc herniations, tendonitis rotator cuf tears, and all other problems in asymptomatic people (with no pain). I was looking forward to see how he is going to fix the disconnect because the studies basically shows the weak the structure - pain link and everything he talks about his based on structure deviations causing pain.
His argument was that the people who are free of symptoms in those studies haven’t reached the threshold and was a matter of time that they end up in pain or something to that effect. He continued talking about how you need mobility in your ankles, knees, hips, shoulder & thorax. It is the joint by joint concept by Gray cook( I think Boyle introduced it a T-nation article) where if one joint is weak or tight, the other joint will take the brunt. It is just another hypothesis, mind you.
Shannon Fables
Shannon Fables presented Balance Training “On the Edge”. She was the quintessential cheerful, bubbly group fitness instructor. She talked about how balance is important and showed exercises to improve balance with a BOSU ball and other unstable devices.
Balance training is another one of those areas in fitness which is beaten to death without having a good understanding of the physiological concepts behind it. We have to ask ourselves what aspects of balance are we trying to improve here. For example, we know that If we are on a unstable surface, the visual and vestibular elements are heigtened since there is less feedback from the propiorecptive components. Since most of the task which require balance are reactive or unpredictable in nature , should we do a lot of steady state, anticipatory balance training? How will your balance change if you had biomechanical constraints like limited ankle mobility and so on.
She talked about how her pain went away after she started going barefoot. And hence she thinks going bare feet is the best and hence we all had to do exercises on bare feet. She also gave some anecodotal examples of how bare feet running is the way to go. The barefeet running is still a hypothesis and we should be more careful when we make these sweeping conclusions, especially to a crowd of 40-50 personal trainers.
Susan Kleiner
She presented Protein and Amino Acid supplementation. Though she didn’t have anything new (atleast to me) , this was the best presentation at the conference I thought.
Her presentation was probably the only presentation which I would say had an evidence-base approach to it. She used phrases like. ” The research is unclear”, ” I don’t know”, ” this is a theory or a hypothesis” , ” haven’t come across any research” and so on which were completely missing in other presentations. And I took the time to tell her this after the presentation.
I wish she could have timed it better so that she had more time to get into some of the interesting topics stuff like protein-carb ratio for post workout shake , protein needs for people and so forth. There were a few occasions where I felt like she was trying a bit too hard to promote certain products which had no research to back them up.
There were a lot of questions asked about creatine, protein and other supplements and I wish NSCA had more speakers on the nutrition aspects of muscle growth.
I went to a few more, but I don’t’ want to keep on writing and make it into a 3 part article .It’s already too long for my liking.
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Joe Cannon MS CSCS NSCA-CPT | Fri April 16, 2010
I like your evenhanded unbiased writing style. I didn’t make it to the conference but appreciate you reviewing the topics and speakers.
Joe Cannon, MS CSCS NSCA-CPT
http://www.joe-cannon.com
Anoop | Sat April 17, 2010
Hi Mumford,
I haven’t decided yet. Maybe an evidence based approach for fitness professionals or something about the biopsychosocial component of pain or something about muscle growth.The thing is that I have to know my subject really really well to feel good enough to stand up and preach.
Hi Joe,
Thanks Joe for taking the time to write the comment. I always have to catch myself so that I don’t fall for the same confirmation bias that I accuse others of. I like your Jillian Micheals- Is she the best trainer? post.
