Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

Continued from Part 3

You never quite know in business if what you are doing is the right or wrong thing. Unfortunately, by the time you know the answer, someone has beaten you to it and you are out of business. I used to tell myself that it was ok to make little mistakes, just don’t make the big ones. I would continuously search for new ideas. I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, 3 bucks for a magazine, 20 bucks for a book. One good idea that lead to a customer or solution and it paid for itself many times over. Some of the ideas i read were good, some not. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson.
Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it.
I remember going into customers or talking to people in the industry and tossing out tidbits about software or hardware. Features that worked, bugs in the software. All things I had read. I expected the ongoing response of “Oh yeah, I read that too in such-and-such.” That’s not what happened. They hadn’t read it then, and they haven’t started reading yet.

Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. Sure, there were folks that worked hard at picking up every bit of information that they could, but we were few and far between. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business. Of course my wife hates that I read more than 3 hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses. AT MicroSolutions it gave me a huge advantage. A guy with little computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because I put in the time to learn all I could.

I learned from magazines and books, but I also learned from watching what some of the up and coming technology companies of the day were doing. Its funny how the companies that I thought were brilliant then, are still racking it up today.
Every week a company called PCs Limited used to take a full-page ad in a weekly trade magazine called PC Week. The ad would feature PC peripherals that the company would sell. Hard Drives. Memory. Floppy Drives. Graphics Cards. Whatever could be added to a PC was there. What made the ad so special was that each and every week the prices got lower. If a drive was 2,000 dollars last week, it was $ 1940 this week. For the first time in any industry that I knew of, we were seeing vendors pass on price savings to customers.

The PC Limited ads became the “market price” for peripherals. I looked for the ad every week. In fact, I became a customer. I was in Dallas. They were in Austin.  I remember driving down to pick up some hard drives that I was going to put into my customers PCs. I had no idea up to that point, but it turns out that they had just moved from the owner’s dorm room into a little office/warehouse space. I was so impressed by this young kid (I was a wise old 25 at the time), that I actually wrote a letter thanking him for the great job he was doing, and…I’m embarassed to say now, I told him that if he kept up what he was doing he was destined for far bigger and better things.  I kept on doing business with PCs Limited, and Michael Dell kept on doing what he was doing. I dont think he really needed my encouragement, but i have since told him that I thought his weekly full page ads with ever declining prices, changed the PC industry and were the first of many genius moves on his part.

Michael wasn’t the only smart one in those days.

One of the PC industry’s annual rituals was the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. Every November, it was the only 3 days I knew I would get away and get a break from the office. It was work during the day. Visiting all the new technology booths. Trying to get better pricing from vendors. Trying to find out where the best parties were. If you could believe it, back in those days, the number one party was the Microsoft party. I sold some Microsoft products, so I could get in.
One particular year, I was on my way to having a memorable night. I had met some very, very attractive women (I swear they were). Got them some tickets to come with me to the big party. All is good. I’m having fun. They are having fun. Then we see him. Bill G. As in Bill Gates dancing up a storm. I’m a Bill Gates fan, so I wont describe his dancing, but he was definitely having fun.
At that point in time, Microsoft had gone public and Bill Gates was Bill Gates. If you were in the business you knew him or knew of him. The girls I was with were in the business. Long story short, I went to the bar to get some drinks for all us, I come back, they aren’t there. Come to find out the next day, Bill stole my girls. As I would learn later in life, money does make you extremely handsome. 

Bill G also taught me a few things about business. Put aside how he killed IBM at their own game by licensing PC DOS to anyone that wanted it. What MicroSoft did to knock Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect off their thrones was literally business at its best.
At that point in time, software was expensive. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 both sold for $495 and their publishers were proud of that fact. In order to be able to sell Lotus 1-2-3, you had to go to special training to become authorized. How crazy does that sound now going to a special class to be able to sell a spreadsheet. WordPerfect wasn’t quite as bad, but they had their own idiosyncrasies as well. Meanwhile, Microsoft was on the outside looking in. Excel, Word, Powerpoint were all far down the list of top sellers until lightning struck.  Microsoft decided to go against industry protocol and package those 3 programs as a suite and offer them as an upgrade to competitors’ products for the low, low price of 99 dollars. Of course you needed to have and use Windows for it to work, but in a time when people were buying new PCs with every dramatic increase in power and decrease in price, it was a natural move for us at MicroSolutions to sell the bundle. It made the effective price of the PC and software together far, far lower. We loved it. It also taught me several big lessons.

Always ask yourself how someone could preempt your products or service. How can they put you out of business? Is it price? Is it service? Is it ease of use? No product is perfect and if there are good competitors in your market, they will figure out how to abuse you. It’s always better if you are honest with yourself and anticipate where the problems will come from.

The 2nd lesson is to always run your business like you are going to be competing with Microsoft. They may not be your direct competitor. They may be a vendor. They may be a direct competitor and a vendor. Whatever they may be to your business, if you are in the technology business, you have to anticipate that you will in some way have to compete with Microsoft at some point. I ask myself every week what I would do if they entered any of my businesses. If you are ready to compete with Microsoft, you are ready to compete with anyone else.

Watching the best taught me how to run my businesses. Along the way I taught myself a few things those come next blog.

A slow news day

I think you can learn a lot about an organization (and a person's career) when you watch what they do on a slow news day, a day when there's no crisis, not a lot of incoming tasks, very little drama.

Sure, when we're reacting (or responding) and it's all hands on deck, things seem as if they're really moving.

But what about in the lulls? At the moments when we can initiate, launch new ventures, try new things and expose ourselves to failure? Do we take the opportunity or do we just sit and wait for the next crisis?

If you have ten minutes unscheduled and the phone isn't ringing, what do you do? What do you start?

Leave it to Tex Winter, who while on the Lakers' staff was one of Andrew Bynum's harshest critics, to have the explanation for why Bynum has turned his career and this entire Lakers season around.

Winter espoused a theory that has always stuck with Phil Jackson's longtime mental-health consultant, George Mumford, during their years together building up all those Bulls' and Lakers' brains to win all those NBA championships.

According to "The Readiness Principle," as Mumford calls Winter's idea: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

Click HERE to read the complete story of Andrew Bynum's breakthrought and how George Mumford, speaker at the 2001 BSMPG Basketball conference helped pave the way.

So many times we make good decisions off of bad intelligence.

I remember when a student-athlete approached me many years ago stating that his coach said he needed to lose weight in order to participate in an upcoming track meet.  His coach had measured his body fat and been nagging him for several weeks stating that he was too fat and that his weight was holding him back from achieving the success he was hoping for.

Subsequently, he cut his caloric intake down to a rabbits serving size (yes, it also included a lot of salad and carrots because that’s what the coach said would be most beneficial).  His training times, surprisingly (insert sarcasm here) became worse, and out of frustration sought help from our department.

It turned out that his body fat had first been measured using bioelectrical impedance, and then a week later with a skin fold caliper using only 3 sites. Yes, body fat is a good indicator of general physical preparation and a "lower" range tends to lend itself to improved performance to an extent. The problem however in this case is that the coach was taking a good measurement and inserting bad numbers.

I have no doubt that the young coach’s heart was in the right spot. I have no doubt that he really wanted to make a difference in that athlete's life and his athletic career. However, when we make what we would consider a good decision, we also need to make sure it’s been calculated from good intel.  Good decisions based off bad intel, can be just as dangerous as bad decisions made from good intel.

I once heard Mike Boyle say if you ever want to get fit, simply go to your nearest commercial gym and do the exact opposite of what everyone is doing.  I decided to put his theory to the test at our general student fitness facility this past week. 

Number 7-9

7. Commercial Gym Choice: Lifting Slow

Nearly 100% of all exercises you’ll see are performed slow and steady, (well, except for the guy on the seated calf raise machine that’s popping his heels up and down like a jack rabbit!)  That’s fine if your goal is to move slow, but most of us still want to kick butt on the weekend playing tennis, changing direction on the soccer pitch or simply running down their friends in a game of ultimate Frisbee.  Like the treadmill, it never hurts to crank it up a notch and vary the speed or tempo of your core lifts.

Opposite: enter heavy stuff moving fast. Now if you really want to scare people at your local commercial gym start performing an Olympic lifts or a variation thereof.

8. Commercial Gym Choice: Only Training in the Sagittal plane – besides the cable cross-over exercise I saw, every exercise was sagittal plane dominant, not to mention each and every piece of cardio equipment (treadmill, bike, elliptical and stair climber) was all set in the sagittal plane.

“Well how is anyone suppose to design a machine that can exercise in multiple planes? – it’s just not possible!”

That’s my point (well, not this point, but another point – go run around outside, play tag, racketball, sprint, whatever – just do it in multiple planes, multiple speeds and multiple directions.

Opposite: I think I covered that in the above – but for this day it was simply finishing off with a lunge series in all directions (Gary Gray made this famous with his lunge matrix)

9. Commercial Gym Choice: Only Bench for upper body strength.

I know that bench is king when it comes to developing upper body strength but it certainly doesn't have to be the only exercise.  There is nothing worse (besides bicep curls in the squat rack) then watching a group of guys standing around another group of guys waiting for them to finish their bench routine so they can start theirs. 

Opposite: Push-ups and push-up variations.  I'm a huge push-up fan so this was easy for me to incorporate into my workout (not to mention there wasn't an available bench in site anyways).  Push-ups only require gravity, and well, that can be found pretty much everywhere.  Put your hands in various positions - close together, far apart, one ahead of the other, feet up, on a buso-ball - just start pushing.
Read a great article on push-ups by Ray Eady, Strength and Conditioning Coach from University of Wisconsin by clicking HERE.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Some people don’t do what they’re told, and others only do what they are told.

Both are problems.

Too good not to share....

This article originally appeared on ESPN.com - TrueHoop by Henry Abbott on 1/3/11

So, it's a new year, and thanks to the power of resolutions, the gym is crowded again.

All these people who have not worked out in a long time are back at it, for now.

Doesn't that picture worry you just a little? All that sedentary living, followed by a frenzy of playing hoops again, or running, or spinning or whatever ... that's like an injury waiting to happen. Muscles and tendons and joints that have been aging without conditioning, now tested once more.

It's no wonder that every advertisement pushing workouts includes the line about consulting a physician before beginning an exercise regimen.

But this is what strikes me: Really? You need a doctor's note to exercise?

Isn't that entirely backwards? Shouldn't you need a doctor's note to sit on the couch instead?

In other words, if you don't exercise for six months, then sprain your ankle playing hoops one time, it's the sitting that needs to stop, not the hooping. Right?

These days, we spend the vast majority of our lives sitting still in the dim light, or lying down, watching screens. And you can make a pretty strong case it's killing us.

We're descended from people who moved their bodies just about all day every day to stay alive. They got tons of sunlight. If you believe Christopher McDougall's thesis in "Born to Run," at a key stage in human evolution, our ancestors literally chased animals all day -- until the deer dropped from exhaustion. Imagine whole families together, including the children and the old people -- running one ultramarathon after another, for survival.

Now imagine getting those people, or their descendants, to sit in the car, at the desk, or on the couch all day. They'd go nuts! They'd have obesity, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and all the other leading killers in modern society.

So hell yeah, let's get out there. Let's honor those New Year's resolutions. Let's move these bodies that were meant to move. And when you find yourself slipping, a month or two from now, and thinking about spending less time in the gym and more time on the couch ... cal

I ran into an old friend a few weeks ago and asked him what he did for screening at the end of his soccer season as I was looking to improve on our year end procedure.

“What do you mean?” he asked, “once the fall season is done I don’t really think about them until next fall again – maybe a few post-season surgery follow ups but that’s it.”

Puzzled, I asked,

-    How do you know what specific weaknesses each athlete should work on individually during the spring and summer to avoid injury next fall?
-    How do you know if your rehabilitation programming was successful? Did the athlete with the ankle sprain ever regain their single leg hop test distance (oh, I guess you have to measure that to be able to compare)
-    How do you know if your strength program lowered the team’s injury rate from previous years? Did it maintain lower extremity strength and power over the course of the season?

How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are to begin with?

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

How closely are you looking at your athletes?

"Loss of mobility is sometimes the only way the body can achieve a point of stability, but that stability is not authentic. It is often seen or observed as stiffness or inflexibility, but on a sensory motor level, it is part of a system with no other available choice. It is basically engineered dysfunction at a local level to allow continued physical performance at a global level."

Pg. 27. Movement by Gray Cook.