Nicky Polanco's Lacrosse Clinic

Athlete Ambassador: Nicky Polanco, professional lacrosse player

As I said in my first blog, One thing I love to do in the off-season is promote the sport by doing camps and clinics. This year I ran a clinic at Farmingdale State College on Long Island for a group of about 50 kids ranging in age from 8-17. My clinics are a little different than most of the ones you’ll see because of the emphasis I put on off-field training. I try to emphasize to kids at a young age that developing speed, strength and stamina are all just as important as your stick skills. You can catch and throw and dodge like a pro, but if you’re weak and slow, it’s not going to matter on the field.

At our clinics, we break the kids up into stations and show them exactly what I do to get myself ready to play. The Perfect Pushup was one of the stations and the kids loved it. It was a really cold and windy Saturday morning, and there was definitely a hardcore aspect to throwing down a Perfect Pushup in the mud and having the kids compete with each other to see who could do the most. That’s really what lacrosse and other sports are about, and the Perfect Pushup was a tool that the kids loved using.

Who can do more? Get some kids together and ask them that question, and you’ll have a big-time competition on your hands like we did with our group.

It also helped that the Perfect Pushup was getting them in the right positions, biomechanically, to develop the strength they need. You can go deeper than you can with regular pushups, and like I said before, it gets your elbows and shoulders in the right positions to make you stronger without risking overuse injuries. I trust my trainer with my career, and he was sold on the Perfect Pushup before I even asked him how we could add it to my workouts.

Anyway, my MLL season starts today! Thanks for reading.