Strength & Conditioning World Tour 2014 – Part 1: Ljubljana, Slovenia
Most guys would probably describe their ideal vacation as a combination of sun, sea, surfing and leisurely sipping pina coladas on the beach while mingling with scantily clad young ladies.
Well, I’m not most people.
I’m a geek.
So I decided to dedicate this summer to traveling to far away places like Ljubljana, Slovenia to hear one of the top strength and conditioning coaches in the US, Eric Cressey, talk about shoulder performance and lower extremity mobility as I did with my buddy Teemu Mäki this past weekend.
Mandatory seminar pic with EC.
For those of you not in the know, Eric Cressey is perhaps the leading strength coach in shoulder health and performance, and has made a name for himself as the go-to guy for baseball players in the strength & conditioning industry.
When Eric started discussing the intricacies of scapular kinematics and dropping words like “glenohumeral internal rotation deficit”, “femoroacetabular impingement” or “spondylolisthesis” on the first day, I was eerily reminded of the time when I was invited to the Richard Avedon symposium on a Friday evening by a lady friend:
“I am so out of my depth! Who is Richard Avedon? What’s a symposium? At least I know which day Friday is, that’s something to cling onto.”
I’ve never pretended be some sort of corrective exercise ninja, so much of what was discussed at the seminar was new to me. Luckily though, Eric is great at breaking down and explaining complex concepts in a manner that allows you to get the gist of what he’s saying even though your understanding of anatomy is at a basic level.
Perhaps the greatest learning opportunity throughout the 2-day seminar took place when Eric used a few guys from the audience as his victims human dummies to show us how to assess and correct postural/movement dysfunction. Seeing – and later doing some of those same drills in small groups – really allowed to bridge the theory part of the seminar into a more practical framework.
Though I must say that I was slightly annoyed by the fact that Eric didn’t have any assistants to help us go through the drills. In a room with 80 seminar attendees and only one coach individual attention is understandably pretty much non-existent, and I believe is the one point that could have been handled better by the seminar organizers.
However, Eric was more than helpful when people were asking him to come over to check out their movement patterns. Also after the seminar he probably spent an hour taking pictures with everybody, answering their questions and giving free advice with no signs of being in a rush to get out of there.
On the evening of the first day a roof top party with food and drinks was organized for the seminar crowd at a downtown hotel (pictured above). It was pretty sweet talking to and getting to know some of the seminar attendees, among which were a former world class male gymnast, a highly successful strength coach from the UK, the strength and conditioning coach of the Slovenian national basketball team, and of course EC.
Slovenian breakfast
As far as Ljubljana as a travel destination is concerned, I gotta say I was impressed. I was half expecting some former Communist state in decay but everything was clean, the weather enjoyable for it being May and the landscape lush with green with the Alps looming in the background wherever you looked.
I know I said earlier that this wasn’t going to be a standard vacation but we did get to visit the slides and work on our tans at a nearby water park on our final day before heading to the airport for our flight back home. That trip also included quite a bizarre massage experience but as they say, that’s another story for another day.
Next stop on my S&C world tour is Munich next month.
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