 And welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and my third episode of Movement Matters. I am Christine Linders and I'm a licensed physical therapist. I've been practicing physical therapy for over 23 years in California, New York, Connecticut and now in Hawaii in a variety of settings, including sports, orthopedics, neuro, and even on-site corporate wellness platforms. I'm a board-certified orthopedic clinical specialist. I'm certified in applied functional science and I have my manual therapy certification. This is my show, Movement Matters, designed to bring you the most cutting edge and effective treatment strategies so you can help your body perform better, decrease pain, and get back to doing the things that you love. Today's topic is beach volleyball. Learn the perfect cut shot without hurting your shoulder. I am delighted to have a very special guest today, beach volleyball coach, Danny Alvarez, who just finished coaching at the AVP Hawaii Open this past weekend. In today's episode, Danny and I will be discussing how to elevate your game by learning the perfect cut shot and how to decrease the risk of injury to your shoulder while you learn this tournament-winning shot. We also want to teach you how a proper dynamic warm-up and pre-game exercise plan can improve your performance and prevent injury. Before we meet Danny, we're going to talk with Jessica, who was on four weeks ago learning what to do with her ankle sprain. Jessica? How are you doing? Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for having me back on to talk. I'm so glad to see you. I am doing so much better. I'm actually able to go to work now and not wear my brace. That's fantastic. I know there for a while I was reporting back to you that every day after work I was achy, not really painful, but just achy, and now I can work, you know, full days, day after day and not have that achy feeling. So, oh my gosh, I'm so thankful for that. That is so good. So now I want to know the one thing because I want to get back out there with you. Have you tried or are you ready to hike Diamond Head yet? Oh my gosh, so it's somebody that you asked, so my husband had some family that came in town and they had actually just come back from Peru hiking Machu Picchu, and so they came here and they're like, let's do a hike, and they wanted to hike Diamond Head. So I did hike Diamond Head with them. How'd you feel? I also felt great. I didn't wear my brace. I didn't have any pain. I didn't have any rolling of my ankle with all the unlevel surfaces, so that was great. I felt very much of winded and fatigued because I haven't been doing cardio and I haven't been working out since I sprained my ankle. Yeah, oh my gosh, of course, that's that losing your endurance thing, right? So I totally was losing my endurance in that cardio aspect of my workout. So I actually stepped back in, just started that this week after we chatted about, you know, get back to it, start building that endurance backup. That's great. So I think then what our next step will be that you and I need to meet again and show you another few exercises to help get the endurance in your ankle as well as your body back. And then I think we'll have you back on the show in the next month or so. How's that sound? That sounds awesome. That would be fantastic. And then we'll set up that Diamond Head date, too. Oh, yes. We can do Diamond Head again, and I'll just make sure and we'll see how it compare it. That sounds good. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day, Jessica, to come back on. Thank you so much for calling and checking on me. I appreciate it, Chris. Yeah, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Okay, bye-bye. Okay, so Jessica's doing great. We'll follow up with her in another month. We'll have her back on and give her the next step for how to do her ankle sprain. And now I'm delighted to meet Danny. So, Danny, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and Movement Matters. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I understand that you have been coaching and playing volleyball for more than half your life. Can you tell me about that? Well, obviously, I started in grade school. Not really just kind of bumping over the net, play pretty competitively in high school, and then went to college. At that point, there wasn't really a liberal. I was a smaller guy. How tall are you? I'm five-nine. Okay. And people think I'm taller. You're taller. Maybe I'm short. I project. And so, from that time, my high school coach was a great beach volleyball player. Yeah. So when I went to UH, instead of playing for UH, I went straight to the beach, and it's kind of offered me a great kind of career coaching beach volleyball to at UH professionals and a lot of youth in Hawaii. Wow. So you've made quite the impact. Yeah, it's been fun. I mean, I enjoy it. I like the technical aspect. I'm a very competitive person, so I like the competition aspect. And I really like watching somebody progress from where they are to where they get to. I tell most people I'm not a zero to three person. There's somebody that's really good at teaching somebody how to pass. I'm usually a better getting people from five to eight or from eight to ten, really perfecting something that they've learned. But I think with my high and really being discerning and being able to technically do passing or hitting or setting from one level to the next level. I think that's great because I play beach volleyball and I've had my ups and downs with injuries and things and time away from the sport, not because I wanted to be. And the thing that I noticed when I come back is that the foundation is there, but I've lost all that technical stuff, that thing that when you're training and when you have a coach putting it in your ear about which foot needs to be forward on, which side to pass, what foot you have to have forward for setting, which way you need to aim when you're running to get a ball that's maybe not in the perfect spot. Those are the things that I keep saying now that I'm back are I forgot all those little things, those little things that made the set where I wanted it to be versus just a little bit off from where I wanted where I meant to put it. That's funny. I mean, I've coached, you know, I've coached forever and all kinds of age groups, all kind of skill levels. And I tell everybody, even like, you know, maybe some of the 11 and 12 year olds, we try to make it as fun as possible for the younger kids. But, you know, I tell them when we bring in the UH kids or I'm bringing in the professionals, we work on skills and they want to play and which is a big part of it, you know, you want to play, you want to be able to apply the skill in a competitive environment. But the competitive environment becomes more fun when you've perfected the skill. So when we get the UH girls and when I used to coach at UH is we used to have them for three months. We used to just do skill work. Yeah. And when I used to coach high school, I always use nervous because there was never enough time and you kind of jumped into the season and you're like, ah, we didn't get this now. In college, I never felt like that because we had so much time to kind of get them there. By the time we got to the regular season or to nationals, which was in May, it was eight months later. I always really felt that we have as close to perfected what I wanted to be done on a bump, on blocking, on footwork. And so I felt like, hey, if the other team beat us, they were better. It was not because we hadn't practiced the skill enough or the strategies enough. We had enough time to do it. So I always, always felt better about the college season than some of these other seasons because it's shorter and you kind of skip some steps. But you want to get them playing. So you have to kind of make a compromise there. I see that. I played in college when I didn't blow out an arm here. There wasn't having surgery. And I remember I tell Diane that the only reason why I used to be a good passer, everybody says, you're such a great passer is because we had the skill drill of pass 100. And so we would be getting jump served, float served on the back line. And there was one garbage can sitting up in the middle because at the time, you know, they wanted us to pass the middle set or could set wherever they wanted to set back in the day. It's a change now. But pass 100. I can't tell you how many times two and a half hours later, we'd get to 99 for like the sixth time and someone would get stressed or panicked that it's the 99 thing. But the skill that you're talking about is in a big clutch game when you're at a high level, you can't have that nervousness or that what if end of your mind. You have to do it so many reps till it becomes you could sneeze a still pass of all in that. Is that kind of what the skill drills you're talking about? You perfect the skill. What I tell most of the kids or most of the pros or whatever, we want to get to the point. I want you to think about it while we're practicing it. Think about it. And maybe in the next week, not think about it as much. And then at some point, I don't want you to think about it. I want you to have been drilled so much that it's just natural that your arms come out in the right place, your feet go the right place. You have to be reminded sometimes. So no matter how good you get, you know, I'm like, hey, move your feet, you know, move back. You know, get that right foot out, get the butt down, you know, something as a reminder. But you want the kids or the pros or anybody to be able to be relaxed and be able to do it. The only way is to wrap it out. And when you wrap it out, you feel comfortable and then you gain that confidence. That's a big thing is, you know, the confidence. If you watch Taylor Crab or Karissa Cook or two of my favorites, I mean, Taylor I grew up with and Karissa I coached is they have the most volleyball confidence I've ever seen. They miss a play. It doesn't matter. They just have unbelievable confidence. And the reason is Taylor and Karissa, and they talk about those 10,000 times. 10,000 reps. Whatever. But Taylor was playing on the baby court at Outrigger. Karissa was playing with her dad in San Diego from, you know, the time they were little. And so when they're out there, there's no stress at all. They just are able to do it because they've done it over and over and over. So if you start at 11 or 12, maybe not at three or four like them, you might have to do a few more. You might have to think about it a little bit more. Think about it. Then what you're going to be able to do is in the game time, like you said, when the pressure is on, you want your body to be able to do it without like like, what do I have to do? This is my right half done. My butt have to be here. You just know how to do it. It makes me relax just hearing you talk about that because when I was for four days watching this weekend, I kept saying they're so calm. Taylor and Jake were down 2015 in the second game. They lost the first game. And they were not tense. They were just relaxed. No big deal. And they came back and won that match with Game Point on their head for like half an hour. And then they won the final. I mean unbelievable. And I think. Calm and confident. And Taylor. I mean Taylor is just possibly, and then Jake's 41 or 42 or something. So he has this kind of wealth of experience. And Taylor, I mean he's young like in his mid 20s. But he's been playing from the time he's three or four. I know it was born to Chris. Chris and I are good friends. His dad. And we play a lot of volleyball. Chris is exactly the same way. He has no stress in the world. He believes he should win every game. He should never miss a pass. He'll never miss a good shot or a cut shot like we're going to talk about. He'll hit it. He knows it in. Stay with Carissa. I watched her and we played them on Saturday morning. And she'll hit a cut shot where most people are hoping it goes in. Carissa just hits it and knows. She knows it's going in. She knows it's going in because the body mechanics and the practice and just that kind of confidence of her doing it with her dad and her brother then in college and now professionally. It's just built into her system and that's why we wrap it out. That's why body mechanics are so important. That's why where your feet are to the ball are so important. As I kind of got older, I realized how important my feet were. When I was younger and never because I always got to the ball. I didn't get to the ball. I was a very good setter. Not that I'm not a great setter now, but at 50, I'm not as good as I was or maybe don't have as much confidence. Is that what you are now? I thought maybe I helped you beat. 49. 49. But what I noticed is my setting got worse. I'm like, how is my saving? My hands are still the same. I'm still the same strength. But my feet weren't to the ball because my feet weren't to the ball. I wasn't set up correct. The ball wouldn't have landed on my forehead because it would have been a little over here just because I don't have that kind of dexterity, the ability to move, and my setting got worse. And it was my feet. So a lot of what I talked to the kids about or the pros about is like why is that breaking down? It's like because your feet, you're being lazy or you're trying to move, you might not be there or too much confidence. They have their hands way out here and once in a while you still have to pass with your hands out here but I'd rather you pass here. So how do you do that? You move your feet over there. So I have to remind them of that and then there's more success. And then with that success then they trust you more and then you can teach them more because then they go, oh what coach is telling me works? And that's you know whenever like Gina came this weekend with Emily, I've coached Emily a lot but Gina I've you know haven't coached in the past. So you know if you teach them a few things or you talk to them and it works and they go okay even though Emily trusts you then now I can buy into you and that helps. That's great. I want you to be my coach and we're going to take a brief break right now. I'm Christine Linders. This is Movement Matters. I'm here with Danny Alvarez about beach volleyball and how not to hurt your shoulder while you're learning these cut shots. We'll be right back. Hi I'm Rusty Kamori host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha y'all. My name is Mitch Ewen. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I'm the host of Hawaii The State of Clean Energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen close to my heart electric buses and electric vehicles. So please dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii The State of Clean Energy. Aloha. Okay, we're back. Think Tech Hawaii. This is Movement Matters and I'm here with special guest Danny Alvarez who's a beach volleyball coach. So Danny, the AVPs in town this past weekend, right? The Hawaii Open. I understand you did some coaching. Yeah. One of my old players, Emily Hartong, who played at the University of Hawaii and also played beach volleyball for me at UH, she texted me. I've trained her over the years and her coach right now with Gina Arango couldn't come and so asked if I could coach them for the week and so there we are we coached. And so that's fantastic and so I think we just saw a picture of you speaking with Emily and Gina in their game against Ross and Kleinman and I remember I took a picture of the score at that time they had lost the first set they were down 15-10 in the second and I wanted to know what do you say to your team in the huddle when you know they're a great team I watch them play those two girls Hartong and Arango are fantastic so it's hard to imagine them almost losing to many teams but what do you say to keep their confidence up or what tips do you give them? It just depends on the situation really depends sometimes it's technical like there's a technical situation sometimes you need motivation sometimes you need confidence so in that case you know I'm really telling you I mean Kleinman and Ross I mean Ross is an Olympian Kleinman is 6-4, 6-5 just you know an unbelievable international player so great player so I'm telling them to be aggressive you know Gina was getting some serves so it was Emily and it's a little bit different hit against a block that big so I'm trying to explain how Emily should be hitting the ball off of the block not trying to angle too far down trying to hit the ball off the hands and start trying to hit the ball into the court and then with Gina trying to have her be more aggressive she was shooting the ball a little bit but it's tough with a really big block and a girl that can run around April can run so you really you have to talk to them about being confident and then I think at the point where you're showing is I think you're always talking to them about the first contact absolutely so we're talking there about getting set up correctly making sure that ball is hitting their arms correctly making sure they're in the right knee flex making sure their angles are correct and so I'm talking a lot but it's usually about 15-20 seconds really simple trying to get them motivated something technical or maybe a strategic thing like hey let's get the ball to that girl and let's get her high line it might be something as small as that but in that case I think we're talking about passing and then being aggressive so is there a secret to hitting the perfect cut shot because if so please tell me well so there's a lot to it so it's not as simple as that so Taylor hit a certain kind of cut shot I have like four or five different cut shots so he hit the wrist away that's on the net which he can hit because he's at a higher peak and he can kind of get the ball away from his body and down so that would be a cut shot once I well let's back up a little bit the first day I get everybody we do a little passing setting and the first thing I teach is cut shot I tell people you can't play beach volleyball with a cut shot you cannot the reason being is when they're set up in base defense that means blocker in front and defender in the angle there's a puka right there in front there's a little hole there and if they're in two back defense there's still a little hole in the cross court for you to be hit the ball with touch in the front side of the court so anyway what I do is most people and again there's a cut shot that's different for both sides too because the right hander on the right side is extremely different from the right hander on the left side so let's go back to because Taylor hit one from the left you should in your chest should be into the cross court you shouldn't be straight on most times that's when you hurt your shoulder yes and you can and the high level guys can do that pretty well is where they can do that most people are not going to be as high as Taylor and are not as coordinated as Taylor and typically the set is not as good as from an AVP player so it's not something that I teach right away the first so what I tell people from the left side is get your elbow your wrist and your hand in one direction because your chest is going to be into that corner your shoulder is going to be into the middle back and all you do is go from six o'clock to twelve o'clock six o'clock to twelve o'clock so this is the basic so there's no way you can hurt your shoulder absolutely look at that alignment this is it now that is very simple and so what we do is we do a lot of that and another piece of that is I tell them it's a touch shot so there's touch on that ball so you don't want to hit it hard where he hits himself on top of the net and Taylor is actually hitting it down he did again he's a different animal he's jumping he's doing that but most people are not there the kids that I'm teaching are not hitting it so they have to hit the ball up and then down and I always tell them to pick kind of one of the symbols on the net for the ball to go over the ball crosses right where we're at Taylor can do it because then he can get it but most of us have to look at an ABP that's about halfway down the net or three quarters down the net for that ball to go over so that's the first way you're going to learn how to hit a cut shot is so it's your elbow wrist hand and just like this 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock we know it because we've seen clocks the little kids you have to tell them they know what 6 to 12 is they're using digital so we'll do that I'll say 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock but anytime you hit the ball with any touch typically it goes up and then down so you're trying to hit somewhere on the bottom of the ball first so that ball goes up with a lot of rotation into the area high line I need to be taking notes right now this is a proprietary stuff so I might have to can we cut this stuff yeah yeah we'll cut all this out after we and then I'll get them I'll get them over to the right side and sometimes I'll have some left handers but most of them are right and we'll get their chest to the net and this foot a little bit back until we wrap and then we hit all the ball and then we end with our thumb up the reason we don't face is because again if you're facing the angle hit the cut it's easier but you're not going to be able to hit line and you want to be able to hit line and cut from the same area you don't want to give it away part of hitting a great shot is being a good hitter and then selling it what I mean by selling is you have to look like you're hitting you have to look like you're hitting so if you're facing that area it's not going to work from the right side from the left side it's going to work because it's more natural for a left side to be coming in at a 45 degree angle so we're always thinking about approach how you hit the ball but so the basic part of it is you're hitting all the ball it's called a cut shot doesn't mean you're cutting the ball in half you're actually getting more of the ball with your hand and then you're getting the ball to the area in front of the right side defender it's a lethal shot I remember back in San Diego over 10 years ago my friend Peter was hitting cut shots at me right from the start we didn't warm up we're going to get to the warm up in a second we didn't warm up and so I tore my hand strength on the cut shot that's why I always call it this tournament winning shot because you got to be ready to pull the trigger and run for the thing if you're on the other side so I think what I want to talk about next too is what's so important it's something that I've done for my I guess since I was around 19 because I started having shoulder surgeries around then was the pre-game warm up and it just so happened that I saw all the AVP players before they went on on Saturday doing a little pre-game warm up so here's one of the exercises I like I usually work on my rotator cuff I just had surgery in November so you're going to be hitting the ball you have to work on the muscles that not only accelerate the ball but decelerate the ball and so this is working on your external rotators now this exercise is a great one if you want to get proprioception or shoulder stability while you're contacting the ball your arms up high and you just oscillate the band little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit because those proprioceptors that support the shoulder joint I don't have a labrum so I need those proprioceptors in my in my tendons and everything to give my brain information that's how I prevent hurting my shoulder while I'm learning to perfect my cut shot but also in the next image your scapula is the area your shoulder blade where your rotator cuff lives I call the scapula the quarterback of the shoulder your rotator cuff lives on your shoulder blade and then reaches out and attaches to the ball of your shoulder bone and so this is a great exercise to make sure that your scapular muscles are working and keeping that shoulder blade coordinated so when you move your arm up or up overhead your shoulder blade is stable on your rib cage so you don't tear your supraspinatus or tear your infraspinatus all these rotator cuff muscles that are stabilizing the ball of your shoulder on the socket and I think the last exercise is something that I like to say undo the sport afterwards so in volleyball you're reaching forward to pass the ball you're reaching forward to set the ball you're reaching forward and you're diving you're pushing it off the sand you're reaching up and forward to hit the ball so guess what you need to do afterwards so that your whole front body doesn't get tight pulling your shoulder forward is undo the sport pull your hands out exercise it 10 afterward I was so busy watching the games I didn't see anybody doing that afterward although I'm sure they did because they're playing at such a high level so is there anything that you do for injury prevention or any tips those are just mine I've been doing them forever but any tips that you have that you can share with me or the audience yeah sure I mean I think those are great at UH we have a trainer so every day they'd be on the bands for 10 minutes before we did anything I love it and just all of them we're just you know working and you know working and then obviously some of the some of the exercise and then you want to warm the arms whether it being throwing in the right motion this is not a natural motion for the body that's why we have so many shoulder injuries that's why you know a softball pitcher can go day after day but I think a baseball pitcher has to wait 5 days before they pitch again because it's overhead so for us that's very important and I would get out there and what I tell most people you know you are stressing out your shoulder but it shouldn't really be your shoulder that's doing a lot of the work it should be timing snap momentum core timing snap momentum core it shouldn't be but we do you don't use your shoulder but if you're able to kind of do it I think you have a lot more chance to kind of save that shoulder that's fantastic so Danny Alvarez thank you so much for that timing rotation reach snap and core this is movement matters thank you so much for tuning in today and remember life is better when you listen to your physical therapist thank you so much thank Taekawae for having us on and thank you so much Danny for coming out that's fun I can't wait to have you on again