I was involved in a very heated thread on the Sportspecific.com site relating to Nomar’s recent penchant for getting hurt. My point was is it possible that Nomar is getting hurt because his training protocol is flawed (Mark Verstegan)? You would of thought I took a shot at the Pope. It was suggested strongly by a professional strength coach who trains a notable major league baseball player that baseball is tough on the body and that at 32 Nomar may just be breaking down. I personally thought, and still think, that this assertion is inaccurate. I would agree that playing professional baseball is more of a grind than most people might think. However, it seems to me in this day and age that a 32 year old shortstop might just be in his prime. Would love to hear the experts thoughts on this.
There’s a lot of holes in the argument either way. I think it’s more often the exception to the rule if a player goes through a career without any injuries (especially with a position like short stop). You haven’t really supported your claims though, so I can see how your disagreement became heated. What do you think was flawed about his training? What about his training do you think is contributing to his injuries? It’s always easier to criticize but it’s more difficult to explain a positive solution. Consider taking your disagreement in a different direction and never take disagreements personally.
You could claim that nomar’s training is too “functional” with movements that merely contribute to overuse patterns common to nomar’s position. Perhaps his programming is not balanced properly with too much specific work. But unless you have direct knowledge of his actual training, it’s silly to assume that his training is the problem.
Anyway, you’re wasting your time with most of those sportspecific.com forum people. Give them a year and they’ll be preaching the next evolution in training is some other bs, and they’ll swear up and down that they’ve never used a swiss ball. A good coach recognizes his successes and his failures and builds on both.
Thanks Speedkills. I don’t know what is/could be wrong with his training. I was simply posing a question. If one of the objectives of a conditioning program is to prevent injury and a guy is suffering consistent non-contact injuries is’nt it possible that his training protocol is’nt optimal? Once again, this was not an open critiscism from me, simply a question. One of the things that I’ve thought about pertaining to Garciapara is the very “functional” bent to Verstegan’s philosophy, i.e. little emphasis on heavy, basic lifting blocks. Do I know this first hand? No. All I know is what I’ve read in his book “Core Performance” and what I’ve been “prescribed” on his new web site. Definitely NOT taking a direct shot at this guy.
I often wondered the same thing. He was out part of last year with an injury also. He is a very intense individual.
TNT
One thing is for sure, it may be unlikely that nomar would even be in the league if not for verstegen. If you read some of the stories from when nomar was at GA Tech, he credits mark with a lot of his success (if not all of it. He must be doing something right because that is one hell of a facility. If only they would lose some of the swiss ball work.
http://www.athletesperformance.com/articles.php
Read “An All-Star’s Big Build-Up”.
Clemson,
When are you going to open up a facility and tear things up?
RE: Nomar and Injuries- His wrist injury was not from training but from getting hit by a ball and getting a lot of cortisone injections. He has injuries and plays 100% when healthy so he is allways risking things. I doubt his training is causing any real problems since he does’t get hurt under Mark’s care.
RE: Facility- I work at a great facility now and train the way I want to train. We have had 3 All-Americans, 6 All-state athletes, and 12 league all-stars this year. Also athletes performance requires huge capital.
I will move to Tampa and start killing things…
RE: Tearing things up- I like training track and swimming since you can control everything year round. Working with someone for 6 weeks is nothing to brag about. I would like some more football guys and some more pro soccer people but that is not regular income.
Thanks for the input Clemson.
If he is working out 10 hours aday for what is an explosive sport, he could just be overtrained thus breaking down. As for Vestergen, he may just get good athletes who have to train optimally. If Nomar was 150 pounds in college I doubt he put himself under the bar a lot . . .
AN ALL-STAR’S BIG BUILD-UP
2000 USA Today Baseball Weekly Equipment & Training Guide
March 1-7, 2000
By Pete Williams
TEMPE, Ariz.
NOMAR GARCIAPARRA is standing in the end zone of an ariificial turf practice field at Arizona State University It is a warm early morning in late January, and Garciaparra is wearing a harness around his waist connected to an eight-foot cable that extends to a red metal sled holding 85 pounds of cast iron plates.
Lou Merloni, Garciaparra’s longtime workout pariner and former Boston Red Sox teammate, makes sure the hookup is tjght. Garciaparra looks 50 yards upfield. His eyes stop on the imposing figure with the flattop haircut, wraparound sunglasses and crossed arms. The guy looks like a younger Howie Long.
For over a month, Garciaparra would subject himself to Mark Verstegen’s grueling training methods and spend up to 10 hours daily with him - right up until leaving for spring training.
Verstegen gives the command and Garciaparra’s legs pound the turf, pulling the sled 60 yards downfield before stopping. Merloni unstraps the shortstop, connects the sled to his own belt, and hauls it back. Cody McKay and James Matan, minor leaguers for the A’s and Reds, respectively, switch off alongside them.
The sled drill is one of Verstegen’s earlier routines this morning. At one point, he has the players up against a building, pushing the wall at a 45-degree angle with legs stretched backward, marching in place.
“Fire those glutes, release those hip flexors!” Verstegen yells “Keep going. This is what’s going to get you out of the batter’s box, guys!”
Later, Verstegen and his three assistant “coaches” layout mini-hurdles and the players spend 10 minutes running backwards and forwards over the hurdles, building acceleration and stride length which, in turn, improves speed. The players move quickly from drill to dlill, with an occasional three-minute break for water.
One exercise looks like something out of American Gladiators. Verstegen lays out a half-dozen contraptions, each designed to test balance. There’s a foam roller-board, a giant rubber “physioball,” and a skateboard with just one wheel - in the middle. The players and Verstegen each take a balance device and form a circle, then hurl a Nerf basketball around, trying to knock each other to the ground.
At one point, Verstegen has them scissor-kick over high hurdles. The drill, which works the hip flexors, makes the players look like a chorus line of Rockettes.
As they work, Verstegen explains to them what they’re doing, how proper form keeps their bodies operating within the kinetic chain, which builds core stability, which in turn gives them more functional strength.
Garciaparra and Merloni, who have spent parts of four previous offseasons with Verstegen, just nod. Garciaparra can speak in depth about hip separation. Or the importance of running on the balls of the feet, with the toes slightly up, in order to better transfer the impact of the ground through the body, creating greater acceleration. Or the difference between “linear vs lateral explosivenes.”
“I can quote it, regurgitate it, demonstrate it, but I can’t do all this on my own,” Garciaparra says during a break. “Mark can push you to levels you never thought were possible.”
Like seemingly everyone else in baseball, Garciaparra lifts weights and takes protein supplements. But he says it’s Verstegen’s specialized training that transformed him from a 155-pound minor leaguer who was thought to have little power potential and just average range defensively, to an all-around shortstop who has taken his place alongside long-foretold stars Derek Keter of the Yankees and Seattle’s Alex Rodriguez.
These days, Garciaparra carries 191 pounds on a frame that is deceiving. When one stands next to him he doesn’t appear to be his listed height of 6-0. Yet from a distance he still looks long and lanky, like a 170-pounder, having built muscle but not bulk. Baseball people marvel that while Garciaparra has gained size and power in recent years, he’s also become quicker and improved his range.
“You tell someone you went from 155 pounds to 190 and they can’t believe it’s possible while maintaining the same flexibility, movement and smoothness,” Garciaparra says. "But it’s all functional lifting for functional movement. I wasn’t here to gain weight; it just kept coming on.
"Verstegen calls the process “innervation,” putting lean muscle mass on the body in a manner that’s consistent with performing baseball-related movements.
Verstegen, 30, is one of several performance gurus who specialize in providing complete training facilities under one roof.
Before arriving in Arizona last fall, Verstegen spent four years as the director of the International Performanee Institute. It was a dream job, training elite athletes in multimillion-dollar facilities in a palm tree-Iined campus setting in Bradenton, Fla.
But the entrepreneurial bug bit, and now Verstegen is overseeing the construction of a 30,000 square-foot training center on the Arizona State campus that he will own and operate. For now, he, his four-person staff, and clients use the school’s facilities.
Only the committed need apply. Verstegen requires his client, to sign a document pledging “maximum effort” and holds himself to the same high standards. He rises each day before 5 a.m., checks e-mail, then puts himself through 90 minutes of the same hellish routines he imposes on his athletes. At 6-2, 200 pounds, he still looks like the waJk-on linebacker he once was at Washington State.
“You want to work out extra hard just to show him how much you respect how hard he’s working,” says Merloni, who will play this season in Japan. "Look at me. I wa, a middling guy in the minor leagues. I came here, increased my power, speed and endurance and I made it to the majors. I credit it to what I’ve done here over the years.
Verstegen and Garciapara go back even further. Garciaparra had hit just three home runs in each of his first two seasons at Georgia Tech when he met Verstegen, then a graduate student, in the fall of 1993 Garciaparra weighed 150 at the time, but after working with Verstegen hit 16 home runs during his junior season.
In 1995, after his first full year in the minors, Garciaparra was exhausted. Realizing he’d never survive a 162-game season if he could not make it through a shorter minor league campaign, he called Verstegen who had taken a job with the Nick Bollettieri Sports Academy.
Verstegen examined Garciaparra as if he were a candidate to become a fighter pilot. He looked at Garciaparra’s past training history and injuries. He examined his diet and percentage of body fat. He measured power output by having Garciaparra throw different sizes of medicine balls. Searching for signs of muscle imbalnce, he had Garciaparra perform a series of slow squats holding a broomstick over his head.
Verstegen found that while Garciaparra had exceptional coordination, he lacked power and speed. So he outlined a program that borrowed from track and field training. He showed Garciaparra how to accelerate forward and sideways from a standstill and how to change directions as efficiently as possible. He had Garciaparra scamper over hurdles and around cones at increasing speeds to improve agility.
Once Garciaparra mastered that, he strapped on a harness attached to a bungee cord and had to field a rapid-fire succession of tennis balls, baseballs and rubber balls, all the while trying to maintain balance and fight the resistance. “You take that off,” Garciaparra says, "and you feel like you can fly.
Garciaparra ended up taking up residence alongside the tennis players and stayed four months. The following season he hit 16 home runs in just 172 at-bat, at Triple-A before making his major league debut. In 1997, he won American League Rookie of the Year honors by belting 30 home runs, a feat that stunned those who scouted him at Georgia Tech.
Garciaparra spent six weeks with Verstegen the next two offseasons in Florida, then made plans to come to Arizona this year once Verstegen moved. Each year, Garciaparra tells his agent not to schedule anything during his training period and makes himself scarce to everyone but family and close friends.
“This is my time to get mentally and physically ready with no distractions,” Garciaparra says. “This is what I need to carry myself through the season.”
Garciaparra’s days with Verstegen begin at 8:30 a.m., when he arrives in the locker room used by the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals at Sun Devil Stadium. He weighs in, then opens his training binder, a detailed journal Verstegen provides each of his clients to log everything from performance goals to energy levels to quality of sleep.
The first page is the maximum effort pledge, which Garciaparra has dutifully signed. Then there are a series of self-evaluations. Garciaparra has rated himself high for acceleration, body composition, lateral speed, absolute speed and eye/hand coordination, but low for balance and flexibility.
On another page, Garciaparra has chronicled his recent injury history. There are spreadsheets detailing each day’s workout, a vast matrix of sets and reps and times.
In the adjacent room, Verstegen has a more elaborate breakdown on his laptop computer.
Verstegen prides himself on details, and there’s little he can’t provide an athlete. He videotapes many drills and has physical and massage therapists on hand after workouts. He coordinates meals and nutritional supplements and places a huge emphasis on “regeneration,” spending two days a week on drills designed to stimulate muscle recovery.
For Verstegen, the weight room is not just a place to pump iron. Some days, the athletes don’t touch the equipment at all. Instead, they perform “plyometrics,” a rigorous series of lunges, squats and jumps. Or they toss medicine balls against a concrete wall.
When they do hit the weights, Verstegen adds to the degree of difficulty. Instead of lying on a bench to perform dumbbell curls, they lie on rubber physio-ball three feet in diameter, thereby building balance as well as strength. Instead of resting between sets, they do flexibility exercises.
Then there’s the not-so-minor matter of hitting in a batting cage and throwing, which the players so separately. Garciaparra says there’s nothing that can totally simulate the muscle movements he performs for the first time in months during the opening days of spring training. But any soreness and strain seems trivial after six weeks with Verstegen.
“My friends think that I come to Arizona for a vacation, but this is the toughest time of the year in terms of physical demands on you body.” Garciaparra says. “If I can get through this, I know I can get through the season.”
Pete Williams is a freelance writer in St. Petersberg, Fla.
Thanks for the post Nightfly.