Expert Profile: Eric Cressey
If you’re a sports fan, you’ve probably heard the term “swingman”. This is the player who is not necessarily best suited for one position or role exclusively, but instead has the innate ability to compete in multiple positions or events. This might be the player that plays both forward and point guard on the basketball court, the pitcher who moves between bullpen and starting rotation throughout the season, or the hockey player that can effectively play both sides of the ice. When coaches look to recruit potential athletes for their team, not only do they look at an athlete’s level of talent, potential, leadership abilities, dedication, and work ethic, they also consider a player’s versatility and ability to swing between roles.
In the world of performance-enhancing coaching, Eric Cressey has become the industry’s swingman. Though he’s well known for his work with baseball players, he still maintains a wide variety of clientele and has the ability to apply his knowledge in a way specific to each athlete. In fact, when we caught up with Eric, this was the list of athletes that he was working with that day:
9 pro baseball players
1 pro Ironman competitor
2 college athletes
1 high school post-grad athlete
1 marathoner
4 adult/weekend warrior clients (including 1 diesel 69-year-old who is his only personal training client)
19 high school athletes
2 middle schoolers (age 13)
Aside from working with all different levels and kinds of athletes such as triathalete Dede Griesbauer, Eric’s versatility also comes from wearing two hats at Cressey Performance (CP), a strength and conditioning facility in Hudson, Mass. As the president and co-founder of CP, his time coaching athletes intermingles with handling the logistics of running a facility.
On their first day at CP, each athlete spends time with Eric as well as his fellow coaches Tony Gentilcore and Brian St Pierre. Eric evaluates the athlete for the first 20 minutes in order to create their program, and then Tony and Brian take it from there, putting the athlete through training session number one. Off the floor, Eric takes and returns phone calls from parents and agents, or helps athletes travel from across the country to come to the site for an evaluation.
To keep up with such a broad variety of clientele, Eric has adjusted his own training. In the past, he competed as a powerlifter, setting records with a 650 pound deadlift at a bodyweight of 174 lbs. Though he’s confident he “could jump right in and do a meet anytime”, Eric’s moved more toward training for sprinting and jumping in the past 6-8 months. By adapting his training, Eric is able to jump, sprint, and lift alongside his best athletes and push them to higher levels but keep them healthy and competition-ready. And while he’s doing this, he has some goals of his own: he’d like to get his vertical jump up over 37″ and broad jump over 120″ in 2009 (currently, he says, they’re 34.7″ and 114″, respectively).
How does Eric juggle all these roles and demands? By using every available minute strategically, training hard, and fueling his day with the right food.
Veggie omelet
6:20AM: The day starts early and an active guy like Eric needs a good meal to get him going.
Eric cooks breakfast for his girlfriend and himself while she gets ready for work. Feeling too hungry and impatient to wait for the omelet to cook this morning, Eric eats:
¾ cup cottage cheese
½ scoop low-carb Metabolic Drive
1 tsp psyllium husk powder
2 mini apple cinnamon bars (Gourmet Nutrition recipe)
1 tbsp natural peanut butter
After that little appetizer, he sits down to his veggie omelet and supplements.
5 egg whites + 1 egg + spinach/mixed peppers/onions omelet with salsa
16 oz water
1 cup green tea
Multivitamin, 2,000IU Vitamin D, 1000mg glucosamine
6:45AM-10:15AM: After a breakfast or two, Eric settles in to do some work from home. This includes answering emails, writing four training programs and one throwing program, working on the weekly newsletter and daily blog, dealing with the hassles of transferring the website to a new server, and reading three journal articles on shoulder distraction forces during baseball pitching (“Exciting, I know,” he says). Oh, and Eric checks in on his Fantasy Football score from the day before. It was a good win.
9AM: While working on the computer, Eric has a meal of:
1 cup fat-free cottage cheese
1 scoop low-carb metabolic drive
1 tbsp natural peanut butter
2 Flameout
1 scoop Superfood
1 tsp psyllium husk powder
16 oz water
10:15AM: Time to shower, shave, dress, etc. Eric packs up his food for the long day ahead and leaves the apartment at 10:40 AM.
10:40AM-11:20AM: Eric handles some phone calls during the 40 minute commute to the CP facility.
All hail the Cressey FF trophy!
11:20-11:30AM: Once at work, Eric fires up the computer, checks his messages, and prints out any programs that need to be ready for the day, all the while paying homage to the Cressey Performance Fantasy Football Trophy.
Chicken and veggie stir fry
Before he hits the training floor, Eric squeezes in another meal he’s packed from home: a stir-fry made with approximately 6 oz of chicken and 1.5 cups veggies with a little bit of sugar-free barbeque sauce from when it was cooked. Throw in a handful of almonds and two more Flameout softgels on the side, and he’s ready to go.
11:30AM-7:15PM: Coach ‘em up! A typical Monday brings in anywhere from 35-55 clients for Tony, Brian, and Eric. They don’t really do any one-on-one training. In many ways sessions are run like a college weight room in the private sector. On this particular day, the team saw 39 athletes and clients, which is a bit low because it was the first day of winter sports tryouts for the high school guys.
In a recent article on T-Nation, What I Learned in 2008, Eric describes how the non-exercise physical activity he gets on the floor has contributed to helping him stay lean without much extra effort. Since the opening of the bigger facility, Eric walks just under 4 miles/day in addition to the caloric burn he gets from demonstrating exercises and helping to load and unload plates during his 8 hours on the training floor.
He also gets extra activity from working with his pitchers. Right now, almost all of Eric’s pro pitchers are in week 1 or 2 of their throwing programs, so he winds up tossing with three different guys: Tim Collins (Blue Jays prospect), Tim Stronach (Mets prospect), and Shawn Haviland (A’s prospect). Each of them does 15-20 easy throws in lead-up drills and then 20-40 throws between 45 and 90 feet. So, Eric easily gets in around 150-180 throws per day at this time of year.
And then there’s the “energy burned in periodically racing to the stereo to turn off the absolute crap techno music Tony Gentilcore always tries to blast.”
2:30PM: Time for Round 2 of the stir-fry/almond/Flameout concoction and 16 oz water as the high school crew rolls in. It’s identical to the 11:30AM one. “Don’t judge,” quips Eric, “it’s easier that way.”
5PM: 2 scoops low-carb vanilla Metabolic Drive and 1 scoop Superfood in 24 oz water, two Flameout, and a mixed nut bar one of Eric’s clients made for the team. The ingredients sounded pretty healthy, and she’s a Precision Nutrition devotee, so it seemed like a good fat source to Eric.
7:15PM-8:30PM: A training session with the CP staff and one of the team’s minor leaguers starts with a dynamic flexibility warm-up followed by an upper-body lift.
This is a deload week, so the volume of the training session wasn’t that high.
A) Close grip bench press: 300×3, 305×3, 305×3, 275×5
B1) Alternating neutral grip dumbbell bench press: 105 for 2 sets of 6/side
B2) Neutral grip pullups: BW (189)+65 for 2 sets of 5
C1) Pronated grip chest-supported row: 100 for 3 sets of 8
C2) Feet-elevated scapular pushups: 3×10
D1) Side-lying external rotations: 2×12/side
D2) Sleeper stretch (left side only): 1x30s
During training, Eric has a scoop of low-carb Metabolic Drive. Post-training, it’s 1 scoop of Original Surge with 5 g creatine mixed in to tide him over until he can get a whole food meal in him.
Not all days are like this for Eric, but it just happened to be a Monday, which is typically his busiest day of the week. He often lifts earlier in the day before athletes come in so that he’s able to leave earlier in the evening.
8:30-9:15PM: Eric makes a few more phone calls on his commute home.
9:15PM: Dinner consists of a broccoli/chicken/cottage cheese/fat free shredded mozzarella cheese concoction: approximately 1 cup cooked broccoli, 5 oz chicken, and ½ cup cottage cheese. Eric also has two hard-boiled omega-3 eggs and ¾ cup cooked spinach with it.
9:30PM: Shower, dress, etc.
9:45PM-11:15PM: More time answering emails, writing programs, and finishing the newsletter for Tuesday. Eric doesn’t work every night in this timeframe, but since his girlfriend was taking Part 2 of her Board exams that week, Eric went on academic quarantine with her during her final study countdown.
11:15PM: Eric’s last meal of the day:
2 scoops low-carb Metabolic Drive
1 scoop Superfood
1 tbsp psyllium husk powder
1 tbsp ground flaxseeds
½ cup fat free cottage cheese
A little bit of water
Eric mixes this all together. With this, Eric drinks about 12 oz of Crystal Light and some natural peanut butter off a spoon. (It might have been a tablespoon or a gallon; he’s not quite sure. It was late and he wasn’t really paying that much attention.)
11:20PM: Brush teeth and go to bed to read. Eric normally reads 2-3 books at a time, as his taste and interest tends to bounce around. Generally speaking, all his reads are at least loosely, if not completely related to training, business, and baseball. Usually Eric gets in about 30 minutes or so of reading but by the end of this day, he says was pretty spent.
I’d say. I’m tired just reading about his day.
And this didn’t even account for the time Eric spends lecturing and presenting around the world, acting as a PN Advisor, writing books, or contributing articles on-line and in print. Unlike many who lose their identity in an attempt to do it all, it seems that the more Eric’s time is shared among the multiple roles and contributions he makes, the more he finds a way to excel in everything he does. He just keeps on swinging.
“Eric Cressey is a great new coach to emerge on the high-performance scene. With his mixture of academic work, practical experience, and high level athletic achievement, he’s one of the coaches I’ll turn to now and in the future when I’m looking for unique insight into getting the most out of my athletes.”
–Dr. John Berardi, CSC
A PN interview: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/eric-cressey
Eric’s book, Maximum Strength