Mark Burik (00:01.122)
Hey everybody and welcome to the Better at Beach podcast. My name is Mark Burik and today we're doing a solo episode on the most underrated exercises for volleyball players. So you're doing box jumps, you're hitting the weight room, but you're still not jumping higher. And today we're to break down the exercises that nobody talks about, the ones that actually move the needle in your vertical and keep you healthy and strong all season long.
But before we get to that, I just want to make a few announcements on camps and our cohort where we are currently going through 10 weeks of vertical jump training live together as a group, as a community. So if you don't know what that is, we are actually running a special right now. And if you are interested, flip over to your email app and email support at better at beach.com. We are giving all of our volleyball courses and.
our vertical jump training program and we're doing it live for anybody who signs up for this special deal. So that means that we're going to have weekly meetings, weekly check-ins. We're going to assess your vertical jump. We're going to teach you everything there is to know about training, conditioning, strength training, nutrition, and we're going to help you fix your vertical jump mechanics. And we're doing that live and it's actually starting.
In an hour of filming from this podcast, but if you join a few days behind, that's okay. Cause all you're going to miss is the testing week, which you can catch up on quickly. So if you want a 10 week live vertical jump training program, or I'm going to lead you through every exercise and every rep set and workout day, please immediately download or go to your email app and.
Email support at better at beach.com and just let us know, Hey, I'm interested in the live 10 week vertical jump training program. Aside from that, we have camps coming up November 14th. We're in Dallas, Texas, December 12th. We're in Houston, Texas, December 19th. We have a private court. that's one court women's intermediate camp. And that's in St. Pete, Florida at my Airbnb. So you can live and train on the same property.
Mark Burik (02:23.96)
with a nice big swim spa. Just so you know, if you're ever interested in a volleyball vacation where you, friends, family want to go to St. Pete or Clearwater and there's a tournament there or you're just looking to hang out with some buddies in one big house. I've got Airbnbs there. There's actually two properties. One of them has the volleyball house. The other one has a pickleball court and a basketball court, but they're a block away. So if you want to plan a little vacation getaway,
bachelor, bachelorette party, that has to do with volleyball. Just get in touch with me, DM me at Mark Baric on Instagram and we'll book your volleyball vacation. Now, January 23rd, we're going to be in Loveland, Ohio. February 6th, we're going to the Phil Dalhouser Academy in Orlando, Florida for another three day camp. February 13th, we're going to be at Sandbar's new location in South Blufftail, just outside Salt Lake City.
And May 29th, we have already scheduled with East End volleyball for our huge camp in Long Beach, New York. And if you've never been to that one, it's absolutely massive. All right. So today's focus is the underrated exercises that elite players use, but a lot of recreational players ignore. And why does this matter? It's because most players over train the wrong movements.
and they under train the game changers, right? And a lot of people don't actually know the science behind what produces the maximum amount of force and athleticism. So we're gonna talk about jump volume today and we're gonna talk about some unique exercises where you could get a bang for your buck. This weekend, I had a few people actually come to my house for a three hour workout seminar and it kind of rang my bell with
common questions and things that people don't think about. And it reminded me that this is a good source of education and this is a good platform to teach. So for those people who came to the three hour workout seminar, we gave them a full workout program, trained and looked at their squat and their deadlift technique and kind of rang a lot of bells. You know those light bulb moments where you see somebody turn on and go,
Mark Burik (04:52.98)
Okay. And we actually made their lifts stronger with just a couple of quick technical cues. And that's also what we do online. when we take a look at our players who are doing different lifts, whether it's Olympic lifts or whether it's just like your base squat, even your bench press, we take a look at what you're doing and how you can actually maximize that and get stronger.
before you even start increasing your weight or increasing your volume because if you use the right technique and you apply certain cues, you're going to be lifting stronger, better, faster. Okay. Now here's some problems that most people face. You're doing too many box jumps or maybe you're not doing any. A lot of people are suffering from knee pain.
From maybe from overtraining, but usually it's not from overtraining. It's Because something's going wrong. Your knees are designed to bend right? They're designed to bend run and jump and if you're suffering from knee pain there's something going on with your motor patterns and That's something that we can help with but we're going to make sure that we tackle a few those issues today Okay, if your vertical jump is plateaued despite
You doing a lot of training, something's going wrong. Okay. If you are just copying blank pro style workouts without actually understanding the science and why each person is doing certain exercises and where they are in their path. You can't just follow a blank template. There has to be customizations built in. Okay. Blank templates are great for.
Probably 80 % of people, but just like in our camps and why we keep a really small coach to player ratio, you have to coach to the athlete because every body is different and every mind is different and every schedule is different. So you can train for volleyball, doing weightlifting only twice a week. You can also train for volleyball, doing weightlifting and plyometrics five times a week. What we have to discover is what are you going to commit to?
Mark Burik (07:13.556)
Long term. Okay. How much can you do if you're going to do twice a week? You're going to have to really dive into those workouts and get a lot done in those workouts. Some people do not like hour and a half, two hour workouts. If you're that type of person where you know, you're not going to sit in a gym for 90 minutes. Can you promise yourself that you'll sit in the gym?
for an hour, maybe 50 minutes, three times a week. If that's too long for you, can we get you into the gym for 30 to 40 minutes, five times a week? Okay. All of those work. Cause when we talk about rep and set volume, we're talking about weekly and monthly volumes. The key really what's something that you want to focus on is monthly volume and recovery. So people like my wife, we have a garage gym.
And she goes guerrilla warfare on her training. That means that she'll do something in the house, entertain our daughter, pop into the gym, do two sets of squats, go and do whatever else she is doing. You know, read, recover the household and get things done. Then an hour later, she'll go in and do two more squats. Why is this so effective for her? And why does my wife have a rockin body? Well,
The reason is because her monthly volume stays high and she's recovering efficiently. So you don't have to get every single thing done in 45 minutes or an hour, an hour and a half. You just need to hit some monthly volume goals. And if that means that you have a schedule or a mental nature that doesn't want you to stay in the gym for a prolonged period of time.
Well, then you can still hit your monthly volumes if your environment is set up right. If you've got some interchangeable dumbbells in your living room or you have a garage gym like we do, so long as you get those monthly volumes and recovering well, then you're going to get ahead. So that's a key thing. And that's something that we went over this weekend in the seminar is it really doesn't matter if you get everything in one workout or one session.
Mark Burik (09:38.094)
We're talking total time under tension and total volume over a month. Can you sustain that? And are you using proper recovery protocols? Okay. So if there's one thing you could take from this, know that if you're going to train twice a week, it should be, if you're training for sports, it should be at least, uh, in hour and 15, maybe an hour and 30 minutes per workout. If you're trying to go shorter workouts,
Then you're going to have to add a day. So if you only want to work out an hour, all right, then we're going to add three times. If you think that you can only sustain your attention span for 30 to 40 minutes, then we're going to find workouts that you can do every day. Okay. Or five days a week and the total monthly volume will add up. And then it just comes down to how you split up your body parts and, how much each exercise is taxing your total system.
And that's exactly what we talk about and design for everybody who's going to be in our live 10 week training program. So again, if you want to get all of this information catered to you, we're going to have weekly check-ins. means group meetings every Tuesday. Please just flip on over to your email and email support at better beach to get in that program. Cause we're running through it 10 weeks starting now. And we're going to do another 10 weeks right after the new year, but I don't want you to wait because.
Results are compounding, right? If you start now, then in 10 weeks, you're going to compound on top of those results. Okay, now what are some underrated exercises? Number one, I think single leg Romanian deadlifts are absolutely underrated. Beach volleyball is asymmetrical. You're always loading one leg more. And this is one exercise that actually builds posterior chain.
strength that can directly translate to jump height. It also helps prevent knee injuries by strengthening the hamstrings, glutes, and low back. If you're doing one legged Romanian deadlifts, which means straight leg deadlifts or one leg comes off of the ground. The most glute activation you can get, which is pretty important for jumping, sprinting, and building that booty. You're going to have to hold that.
Mark Burik (12:05.216)
In the opposite hand, so if you're doing the one-legged Romanian deadlifts on your right leg, you should hold the weight in your opposite hand, and one key cue for that is to turn your toe in towards the middle of your body. So the foot that's behind you, turning that toe in towards the middle of your body, is a cue that helps you level out your glutes. So instead of rocking and leaning all the way to one side, you actually keep your hips,
neutral or perpendicular to the floor. And when you do that, your work hip and your work glutes have to work harder to stabilize and keep you in that position. And they're under tension the entire time. So it's one of the highest glute activation exercises that you can do is the one legged Romanian deadlift using a dumbbell or a kettlebell. Basically the same thing.
Okay. And putting it in your opposite hand. Okay. And you want to use a moderate rate. This isn't something where you're in going to, going to increase your max strength quick or explosiveness, but it is going to help you activate those glutes, which will help you in the other exercises. Another underrated exercise is isometric split squats. Okay. Building single leg strength in the exact position that you would load to before jumping.
You get a little ankle stability and you get time under tension, which will help you build explosive power. But what isometrics do is they actually help you work on your weak points. So some people are really good at the bottom of a squat. Some people are good in the mid range and almost everybody's good at the top. But when you do an entire range of motion, you can develop momentum that allows you to carry through.
your weak points. And when we do really slow reps or isometric, which means not moving, you actually work on those weak points, right? You're, forcing your body to stay in a place that it hasn't typically wanted, or that you've just kind of dusted over with momentum. So I really like putting in some isometric work into your workouts.
Mark Burik (14:30.578)
And also it's gonna start queuing you in to do you have a weakness or an instability in one leg or the other, right? And that's important. If you've never sat with a a glute band where you put a band around your knees or your shins or your thighs and you just sat in a quarter squat until one leg gave out and you actually started quivering.
I recommend you try it and you're going to find that, well, some people will find that one side gives out way sooner than the other. And then you've discovered a little weakness and you've discovered which side you can strengthen and that you should train it more, right? Or get to the point where they at least last in close proximity to each other under time. Because if one glute,
Our one leg is always giving out consistently and earlier and is weaker than the other. That's going to translate through the whole chain. We're one-sided athletes. So we've got to remember that we're one-sided athletes. hit with one arm. We usually have our last step with the same leg. So there's going to be natural imbalance, but we'd like to make sure that when we're lifting, we're getting equal strength from both legs. So isometrics and single leg exercises.
assist in that and will make you stronger and more athletic overall and should help in injury prevention. Lateral band walks. This is exercise number three. That's one of the most underrated lateral band walks just for lateral movement, your ability to push off of your outside leg. If you wrap one of those small glute bands around your
around your thighs or around your knees or like I said, your upper shins. And then you just do little crab walks. This is going to prevent your knee valgus position, which means when your knees cave in. Okay. If I were to have you, and we did this this weekend, if I were to have you just stand and you turned, and your feet are about shoulder width and you turned your, you put your, sorry, let me start from the beginning. If you were to stand with your feet just outside your shoulders. Okay.
Mark Burik (16:52.302)
And then I asked you to put your hands or your fingers on your glutes, right? Just outside or just above and outside your hip bone. And then you turned your knees in. And then you turned your knees out and you acted like you were trying to rip a piece of paper in half underneath your foot. You would feel that when you're ripping that piece of paper, your glutes turn on, you'll feel your fingers get tension in your glutes.
And when you turned your knees in, you would feel that slack happen in your glutes. And when that happens, when those shut off or they don't know how to turn on, or they're just not optimally strong, you're going to be slower in your lateral movement and your, your knees won't be able to be stabilized because a lot of knee stabilization comes from your glutes and your hips. Right. So lateral band walks, just add it. If you watch any AVP or FIVB tournament,
I mean, nine players out of 10 at some point are doing these lateral band walks with their hip glute activation, or they're just lying on their sides and raising a leg here and there. But getting those glutes to activate, to protect your knees and help with your explosiveness so that your glutes know how to turn on. That's going to help you and your, then you'll be able to squat more weight.
because you're learning how to turn your glutes on and then you're putting your legs under a heavier tension, which means that your strength capacity and your jump capacity both go up. Exercise number four is going to be eccentric calf raises. Okay. I'm not a huge component of calf raises. Proponent. I'm not a huge proponent of
calf raises and the only reason that I say that is because if you're trying to get the absolute most at a vertical, your calves would probably be the last thing that you should think about, although you should think about them. They would just come last because the amount of force that they produce is so minimal compared to your hamstrings, quads and glutes. But we can't ignore them and we also need good ankle mobility.
Mark Burik (19:10.958)
So that we can be stable strong and explosive. So how do you do an eccentric calf raise? Well, if you get one of those angled boards or You just go to a curb like go outside to a curb that's on a street get as high as you can on your toes and then slowly piece by piece Drop your heels under control number one. You're going to help lengthen and stretch
your Achilles and your gastroc, gastrocnemius, which is calf muscle, you're gonna help stretch that and get it to a new range under tension, which is very different than just a static stretch. We like to do things under tension because you're teaching your muscles to be strong and mobile at the same time. Static stretching has some benefits, but if you can get into deeper ranges under tension,
you're gonna get more benefits from that overall. Okay, so I would rather you sit into super deep squats with light weight and maybe do a rocking motion than I would have you lay down and just do a hamstring stretch for three minutes. Like teaching your muscles to be under tension in deeper ranges is what we want for athletes. Now,
Lastly, I wanna talk about dead hangs for shoulder health. We've talked about this in a few other exercises, but I just did this with my mother-in-law and she shocked herself. I think she's 67 and she looks at 10 pound dumbbells and she goes, there's no way that I could hold 15 pound dumbbells. So she looks at dumbbells in a weird way, but then I brought our box over to our pull-up rack and I go, I just wanna see something.
Do you think you can hang? So I asked her to just hang on our pull-up bar and she did it and she did it easily. And I was like, Cindy, this is so key for your posture, your shoulder health. And she's got like hand problems and a little bit of arthritis where they're starting to weaken. And she does these little tiny banded exercises with her hands and her fingers. And she says that she can't pick things up, but she's kind of blinding herself.
Mark Burik (21:39.058)
with dumbbell weights where she looks at 10 pound weights and goes, that's the max that I could ever hold. And then she goes and she picks up our 30 pound daughter lifts her from the ground, throws her over her shoulder, you know, gets her dress and everything. So she's looking at weights as this mental block. And I had her hang from a pull-up bar, which means she's putting about 60 pounds of tension on each.
arm and in each hand. And when I did that math for her, she's like, my gosh, I guess I can handle that. I guess I'm stronger. So now for her shoulder health, her back health, being able to reach high things, being able to hold your grandkids over your head and maybe throw them around a couple of times. Dead hangs for shoulder health, posture, and overall posterior chain with your back.
Incredible exercise because they put you into a full straight overhead position and most of us won't force ourselves into standing and just holding your arm straight and having above your head and having tension there. Okay. But that's exactly if you're a volleyball player, that's exactly where you need the most power. Where your hand is, your bicep is barely in front of your ear when you're contacting a ball.
You have to be ultra comfortable in that high hand, high arm position. And one of the simple ways to stretch yourself out, get overhead mobility, and increase your lat and shoulder strength is just. Hanging. So grab a pull-up bar, go on a tree limb, see if you can hang for 30 seconds. See if you can hang for a minute, you'll get a hand and forearm strength.
You're going to get a postural increase and benefit. Your shoulders will get stronger. Your lats will get stronger. And then if you want, you can build your way to doing pull-ups and chin-ups, but you don't have to, you should just be embracing those dead hangs. Okay. Now let's just talk about a little bit about, you know, we're going to jump topics here and talk a little bit about a jump volume data. Okay.
Mark Burik (24:06.538)
If you're in season and we're talking about getting a lot of jumps, your body has to learn how to jump. if you are in a strength and conditioning program and there are not jumps included. And you're training for volleyball, please start tracking your jumps. Feel what it's like. Okay. Because hops and jumps are different when you play in the beginning, when you're a B and a level player.
A lot of times you end up hopping on certain hits, certain spikes, if the set's not in the right location, you're just gonna end up in this kind of hop pattern instead of a full close to max jump. Okay, and what we're going to aim for, let's just go blanket statements. In season, you're looking for 40 to 60 jumps.
per training session, and these are jumps, real jumps, not like hop and hit, not I got an offset, I'm still going. This is like real big jumps, okay? If you're doing two to three jump training sessions per week, you're trying to hit 40 to 60 jumps per training session, or total weekly volume, somewhere between 120 and 180 jumps. If you're playing at a higher level,
then you're going to be able to max jump or get close to your max jump more often. But at the BA AA level, sometimes you're really just hopping to hit instead of fully loading. So those are ones that we can't really count those little hops. Okay. If you're in off season, right? Then we're going to try to increase that. We're going to go maybe three to four sessions a week.
and 60 to 100 jumps per session. And the total weekly volume there is 180 to 300 jumps. That might sound kind of crazy, but we need to be jumping because you need to teach your body how to do it. If you look at runners, if you look at swimmers, how often are they doing?
Mark Burik (26:21.762)
their base movement pattern. And for volleyball players, a lot of our base movement pattern has to do with jumps. And if you're not training your body to do that over time, over hundreds of reps, the body's just not going to get better at it. Okay. Now, once you get to that level, and by the way, can, different people have jumped capacities. So some people might be absolutely fried by getting 60 max or close to max jumps per week.
But as you increase your strength and as your body learns how to convert and deal with these explosive movements, your jump capacity is going to grow, which means your body will be less shocked and require less recovery when you increase your number of jumps. But here are some warning signs that you might be over training. One of them is knee pain that hasn't quite resolved.
Right, if you're continuing to jump, continuing to have knee pain, either you're pushing it too hard, but more than likely you're doing it with incorrect movement patterns or there's a muscle inhibition that needs to be looked at and you need a trainer, somebody who's knowledgeable in movement patterns to take a look at it. Yours truly, again, 10 week live training if you wanna join.
jump in so that I can help you. If you're suffering from knee pain or shoulder pain, let me take a look, okay? Just email support at better at Beach. But another warning sign that you might be over training is you should be testing your jump height on a regular basis. So if your jump height is consistently decreasing, despite the fact that you're consistently training.
that can be an indicator that you're working too hard too often, you're not getting the right recovery. Okay. Uh, another warning sign that you might be over training or putting too much into each session is are your legs super heavy after more than 48 hours, right? You should be recovering quicker than that. And if you're not recovered after 48 hours where you feel fresh and good and strong again,
Mark Burik (28:40.706)
then you're probably doing too much capacity within that workout. And so we can lower that jump count or lower your weight training volume, or you're just training too much over time and maybe not sleeping, maybe not recovering, maybe it has to do with your nutrition. Again, every person is different, but take a look at your jump height and take a look at your recovery. And if you're still.
heavy or really sore after 48 hours, you've pushed too hard. If you are not seeing a steady increase in your jump height, you're pushing too hard. If it's decreasing, you're pushing way too hard and something's going wrong and you need someone to look at it. so that 48 hour rule, if you're going for max effort jumps, make sure that you are
giving yourself at least 48 hours between heavy lifting sessions or heavy explosive sessions. Low intensity skills is fine. So if you're hopping and you're chipping some high lines and you're chipping some cut shots or you're passing and you're playing or you're just playing or competing at a B or an A level where it's not a ton of sprinting and max jumping, you should be good to go.
Okay, so low intensity skill work is absolutely fine between those sessions. And if you're to design an elite program, okay, then you would take a look at how you're structuring your practice. What are your attacking blocking and like sprint defense days, and then you have to line them up with your conditioning and strength training days, right? That's how the elite ones work is
you have your strength and conditioning coach talk to your practice coach and they have to work together. And the ideal thing of course is if one person is knowledgeable enough and expert enough to design the entire thing for you so that they go, okay, we're heavy lifting on Monday with a lot of jumps. I'm not going to put my guy through 200, you know, max, max velocity spike approaches, right? On Tuesday, we're going to
Mark Burik (31:03.22)
ease up on him a little bit. We're going to go through pass and set and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday, we're talking about another big time explosive session.
Now.
All these exercises, okay. Being able to track your jump volume, being able to train in the right way and tackling all, all of the minor issues. It's not difficult. you just have to know what you're doing and you have to get a properly designed program. Okay. So just make sure at some point you're including.
a little bit of isometrics. You're including getting to deeper ranges under tension. I really love dead hangs for a variety of reasons. You don't have to immediately turn them into pull-ups and chin-ups, but if your program, if it's blanketed for you or you've got this like just kind of randomly app designed program and it calls for pull-ups or lat pulls and you don't think that you can do it.
find a tree to hang from and that's something that you can do every day is just hang. Okay, you're not doing a ton of muscle tearing, you're not breaking down your muscles, you're actually just increasing your posture, your shoulder health, your lats. All right, if you guys want to join or you want to take part in our training programs,
Mark Burik (32:42.146)
You can find them at better beach.com forward slash workout. We've got a three levels of kettlebell training. have a 60 day max and we have our 21 day mobility and strength foundations, which is fantastic for coming back from injury or conquering injury. And all those programs are available there at better beach.com forward slash workout. But if you join right now, then you get to go through it.
live with us and I'll take you every step of the way. All right, I hope that was informative. If you do have any questions and you wanna talk about them, just DM me at Mark Burrick on Instagram and I will be happy to talk to you. If not, I hope to see you at a camp. If not, thanks for listening and I hope that you liked it. Maybe give this episode a rating, subscribe to our podcast.
and share it with a friend. Cool. Have a good one and we'll see you on the sand.
