Train Like an Olympic Athlete

written by JOSH GESSNER | The Athletter

The Athletter is brought to you by ThePitcherLab.

The PitcherLab is a program specializing in helping high school and college baseball players increase pitching velocity.

• A full stack, customized throwing, lifting and mobility program 

• Daily Mechanical Analysis and Feedback

• Unlimited access to 2 Professional pitchers who trained themselves to throw 98+mph

A full stack, customized program executed on daily + Daily feedback makes it inevitable for you to gain velocity.

Check out some of the crazy results here: ThePitcherLab.com

Just over a month ago, I went to visit KneesOverToesGuy in Clearwater Florida.

I was interested in his style of training, and wanted to learn how it could help baseball players.

What I learned?

A concept called ‘Structural Balance’.

Structural Balance is a term coined by Charles Poliquin.

Charles Poliquin is a coach who trained 20+ Olympic medalists.

Most notably:

Adam Nelson – A two-time Olympic shot put medalist, winning gold in 2004 and silver in 2000.

Dwain Chambers – A British sprinter who competed in the Olympics and other international competitions, excelling in the 100 meters.

Gary Roberts – A Canadian ice hockey player who represented Canada in the Olympics.

And a key part of his training: ‘Structural Balance’.

What is Structural Balance?

Structural Balance is training a body to become equally strong on both sides.

Example:

How strong are your hamstrings compared to your quads?

How strong is the back of your shoulder vs the front?

How strong are your tib muscles compared to your calves?

As a baseball player for the majority of my career I only focused on the accelerators.

Who cares about the decelerators right?

But since talking to KOTG and how he’s developed some of the highest jumpers in the world by incorporating Structural Balance - I changed my mind.

What he found was that as he trained the decelerator muscles in the jump:

His jump height improved at a faster rate.

You might’ve heard the saying:

You can only accelerate what you can decelerate.

This never made sense to me.

How can developing the decelerators help me throw harder?

But then I learned about structural balance, and it made sense.

It’s how Charles Poliquin developed athletes with elite sprinting, jumping and throwing ability.

How exactly does structural balance increase performance?

1. Increased force generation.

When you have balanced strength of both sides of the joint:

The joint is able to move more efficiently, leading to higher force output.

Imbalances can disrupt the movement and reduce efficiency.

2. Reduces overcompensations

If one muscle is way stronger than the other, the stronger muscle can overcompensate, leading to less efficient movements.

3. Reduced energy leaks

Compensations by a stronger muscle can lead to energy leaks.

4. Increased Protection

The stronger your decelerators, the more force it can handle keeping you healthy.

This allows you to continue to make progress and push your limits.

How to get started:

The first step is to start training the ‘forgotten muscles’.

There are a bunch of muscles that are ‘forgotten’, which cause imbalances.

The 3 major ones:

• Tibs

• Hip flexor

• Rear delts

I can’t think of a single program in my career that addressed these muscles to progressively get stronger.

Sure, we might do banded and light DB exercises…

(If you’re a baseball player you know about all those banded external rotations)

But never in a way to progressively get these muscles stronger.

This is what I talked about with KOTG in this video here:

Think about it.

As a baseball player you’re throwing everyday, putting the front of your shoulder through an explosive movement everyday…

While doing nothing to get the back of the shoulder as strong as possible.

We think that doing a couple banded and light DB exercises are enough.

The Path to being an Elite Athlete:

To be the best athlete you can be:

You want to be extremely strong on both sides of the body - achieving structural balance.

This means progressively overloading exercises that you normally wouldn’t.

And as both sides get stronger, your overall performance will increase.

As your tibs get stronger, your ankle power will increase.

As your hamstrings get stronger, your knee power will increase.

As your hip flexors get stronger, your hip power will increase.

As the back of your shoulder gets stronger, your shoulder power increases.

This is how KOTG has developed elite athletes for multiple years.

(This is an unlisted exclusive video for you as an email subscriber… lol)

Exercises to incorporate:

Backwards Sled

Tib Raise

Hip Flexor Raise

Nordic Curl

DB external rotation

These exercises are covered in the videos above.

These exercises train the muscles that are commonly disregarded - the opposite muscles of the common accelerators.

As you progressively overload these movements - you’ll start to see the benefits of Structural Balance.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, if you did let me know by replying to this email!!!

Also let me know what you’d want me write more about.

P.S. ThePitcherLab is currently running a package deal for athletes for the winter.

The PitcherLab is a program specializing in helping high school and college players increase pitching velocity.

• A fully customized throwing, lifting and mobility program 

• Daily Mechanical Analysis and Feedback

• Unlimited access to 2 Professional pitchers who trained themselves to throw 98+mph

A full stack, customized program executed on daily + Daily feedback makes it inevitable for you to gain velocity.

Check out the past results here: ThePitcherLab.com

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading!