5 Questions: Tony Gentilcore
Tony should need no introduction, but we will give the bastard one anyway.
If you have never read his blog, read it.
If you have never read his articles, read them.
If you have never read our feature of Gentilcore-ism, read it.
Question 1: You are stuck on a beautiful island. You have a choice of being fed grapes everyday by the hottest woman you have ever seen or chicken breasts by the ugliest fat sweaty man you have ever seen. What do you choose?
Tony Gentilcore: If said woman is Krystal Forscutt, I’d eat diarrhea. Yes, I just went there. How’s that to start an interview?
Question 2: What are a few dynamic warm up drills that anyone can use, for all occasions.
Tony Gentilcore: While I normally don’t like to take a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to programming, I have found that I do tend to use many of the same dynamic drills for the majority of my clients; particularly for the “computer guys” I deal with.
While I was in Indianapolis visiting Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman at their facility (I-FAST) last week, Mike and I had a similar conversation in regards to how we both “pick” which corrective strategies (dynamic flexibility, foam rolling, pre-work, dedicated activation, what have you) we use with particular clients. When you think about it, each client is going to come to us with their own distinct/unique issues in regards to what asymmetries, postural dysfunctions, and pathogenic issues they may exhibit.
What I “program” for someone with no training experience and a history of low-back pain will undoubtedly be completely different compared to someone who has had a few years of solid training under their belt.
All else being equal, I can’t dismiss the fact that I do often see many commonalities among various training populations. Take for example the hips. To be quite honest, everyone has some sort of dyskinesis when it comes to the hips. Unfortunately, we’re a society that spends a lot of time sitting on our asses. As a result, we often see a lot of dysfunctions along the kinetic chain stemming from lack of ROM/mobility in the hips. Some of my favorite dynamic drills for the hips include:
Kneeling Hip Flexor Mobilizations
Reverse Lunge w/Posterolateral Reach
Squat-to-Stand w/Reach
Kneeling Rockback Mobilizations
Side Lying Clams
Question 3: I know you do a lot of baseball work with your athletes, but what other areas do you cover? Do you work with a lot of guys on jumping for example?If so, what are good beginner drills or training methods for increasing jump ability?
Tony Gentilcore: Baseball has definitely gotten to be our niche market at CP, and that’s perfectly fine with us. We actually had an awesome group of minor league guys train with us this past off-season, representing eleven Major League organizations.
Additionally, we train a plethora of local high school and college baseball players as well. We’ve kind of taken it upon ourselves to break many of the fallacies and misconceptions that baseball players/coaches have towards strength and conditioning. It’s absolutely mind-boggling how dogmatic it is.
However, like any other strength and conditioning facility, we have a wide variety of athletes that we train- everything from football, basketball, hockey, and boxing to marathoners, tri-athletes, and even fencing. It’s never a dull moment at CP.
As well, we also have a fair share of “weekend warriors” and fat-loss clients that come in and pay us to yell at them a few days per week. I swear my day is never complete till someone tells me how much they hate me, tells me I suck, mentions how much of an a-hole I am, and/or wants to punch me in the baby-maker for making them push the sled. I heart my clients.
As far as helping people improve their jumping ability, we do include the vertical jump as part of our initial assessment with athletes. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we do anything specific or revolutionary as far as helping to improve one’s vertical jump. While I am being rather simplistic here, it really comes down to force production. Many of the athletes that come to use are fairly weak to begin with, so it’s really a matter of getting them stronger.
A few years ago, I wrote an article titled “The Rule of 90%” for t-nation.com, and to help illustrate my point, I want to steal a section of the original article:
In his book, The Vertical Jump Development Bible, Kelly Baggett talks about how the vertical jump is one of the best predictors of athletic performance. Essentially, how much force you can generate in a short amount of time (0.2 seconds for the vertical jump) is going to separate a superb athlete from an average athlete.
Because I’m more of a visual learner, I’m going to share an example from Kelly’s book:
Bodyweight Maximum force or strength without time constraint (squat) Max force put out in the vertical jump (0.2 sec)
Athlete A 175 lbs 400 lbs 200 lbs
Athlete B 175 lbs 300 lbs 225 lbs
As you can see, athlete A can squat more than athlete B, but athlete B is going to have a better vertical jump because he can generate more force, rapidly. However, Kelly makes a point in stating that, “Although being able to apply force rapidly is a very useful characteristic, you still need to have enough potential force to tap into for anything to happen. Basically, a strong athlete will beat a weak athlete any day of the week.”
Maximum strength is the foundation for everything (power, strength endurance, force development, etc.). You can’t have strength endurance (being able to lift a sub-maximal weight repeatedly) or generate maximum force without first having strength.
Here’s another example from Kelly’s book to help illustrate this point:
Bodyweight Max Force (strength) in the Squat Max force in vertical jump
Weak athlete 200 lbs 100 lbs 95 lbs
Ideal athlete 175 lbs 400 lbs 325 lbs
The weak athlete is able to utilize 95% of his potential force and has a good rate of force development; however, he’s only able to squat 100 pounds. He has very little to “tap into” and is only able to generate 95 pounds of force off the ground. Needless to say, he’s going to be that guy who’s lowering his adjustable rim in his driveway to eight feet so he can dunk a basketball.
The “ideal” athlete is only utilizing 75% of his potential force (20% less than the weak athlete), but is generating 325 pounds of force off the ground because he’s strong. Again, strength is the foundation for everything. More specifically, relative strength trumps absolute strength from an athletic standpoint.
What does all of this tell us?
Short answer: quit being a pussy and focus on getting stronger. Good things will happen.
Conversely, I don’t want to make the wrong impression and imply that we don’t include any dedicated jumping drills into our programming. I mean, in order to get better at jumping, it’s only common sense that one would need to actually jump. In that regard, we like to include some low-level “plyometric” drills in the form of box jumps (emphasizing landing mechanics), skipping drills, jump squats, dedicated sprinting technique, as well as tons of medicine ball work.
Question 4: I know you are writing for the Boston Herald right now, sweet gig. What can readers expect from your blog?
Tony Gentilcore: Yeah, I’ve been writing for the Boston Herald’s website for a little over two years now. While I was at Sportsclub/LA (in Boston), I had a client who worked at the Herald and she mentioned to me that they were looking for someone to write a fitness/nutrition blog for their website. I figured it would be a good opportunity to get my name out there more, while at the same allowing me to work on becoming a better writer.
Anyone who has been a regular reader of my blog knows that I don’t take myself too seriously. I like to have fun with it. I mean, while talking about beta fatty oxidation or glute medius function is cool, it’s about as entertaining as watching an episode of The Golden Girls. People want information, but they also want to be entertained. I think I’ve done a decent job at combining the two.
Question 5: What is the last…
Book you read:
Tony Gentilcore: I’m always reading a few books at once.
I just finished Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. To be honest, I’d rather swallow battery acid than read that book again. I guess I just found it too similar to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (phenomenal book by the way), and just found his writing style a bit too dry.
The last novel I finished was one called Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, which was really good. I’m currently reading a book titled The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which is rocking my world. Absolutely amazing book. I’m also plugging my way through Muscles: Testing and Function. As you can probably guess, girls basically rip their shirts off when they see me pull that book out of my backpack at Starbucks on a Friday night.
Album/Single you got:
hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. I’m definitely setting myself up for being flamed, but whatever. I actually bought a compilation jazz album the other night. I don’t have the first clue about jazz, but all I know is that it relaxes me. I like to listen to it when I’m writing programs, working on an article, or just vegging out.
Other favs include Ryan Montbleau Band, The Frames, Ray LaMontagne, and Norah Jones.
When I train I like to listen to trance/techno or old school rap, such as A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang, Biggie, Mobb Deep, The Roots, Nas, etc.
Film/Show you watched:
I LOVE going to the movies. I often go by myself on the weekends, and I’m just as likely to go see the artsy, independent movie (was that a nipple?????), as I am the high budget, “popcorn” movie. I went and saw Adventureland the other night, which I thought was really good. As far as television shows, there’s only one I go out of my way to NOT miss, and that’s Lost. Holy shit nuts is that show amazing. Granted, it pisses me off half the time, but I’ve been addicted to it ever since the first episode.
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