Getting In Shape For Sports
Strength and conditioning coaches have a number of areas they are concerned with when it comes to an athlete’s physical preparation for sports. Increasing strength, power, hypertrophy, speed, and...
View ArticleIt’s Better To Be Strong
As strength and conditioning coaches, we spend a lot of time stressing the importance of strength for athletic performance. In some of my writing I have stressed the importance of strength for power...
View ArticleWhat If Hypertrophy Has Nothing To Do With Strength
Traditionally we have taught that when an athlete begins strength training they will get stronger. This increase in strength comes before the athlete undergoes hypertrophy. The thinking is that these...
View ArticleLeadership is a Privilege
Coaches spend a lot of time talking about culture and the intangibles that athletes receive from participation in sports. The following is a non-exhaustive list of qualities that we’d all like for our...
View ArticleCompetitiveness Has To Be Trained
A thing that coaches emphasize with athletes, write about it, recruit for it, and prize is having athletes who are competitive. This is also something that is difficult because it is an intrinsic...
View ArticleBe Strong And Learn To Use It
Strength is an important quality for athletes. Strength has the potential to improve performance and to prevent injuries. It improves performance because it underpins many sports skills. This blog...
View ArticleDeveloping Speed
Speed. Regardless of the sport, speed is essential to success. It is so important that coaches recruit speed, prize and reward it, and spend a lot of time training for it. This blog is going to...
View ArticleJump Rope: An Essential Tool For Athletes
Strength and conditioning coaches talk a lot about the concept of “fast feet.” We want this quality because if an athlete has it then they should be able to stop, start, and change directions very...
View ArticleTrain Strength Like a Skill
As coaches we are taught from school that there are several components of fitness. These are muscular strength, muscular endurance, cardio-vascular endurance, flexibility, and body composition. While...
View ArticleWhy Sports Matter
Why Sports Matter We hear a lot about the darker side of sports, the side where money confuses priorities. Coaches that jump ship for other schools before their contracts are up. Scandals involving...
View ArticlePre Season Baseball Preparation
As I write this on November 11, my youngest sons are finishing up fall baseball this week. The first day of real winter weather hit today, plunging the temperatures in North Texas to the 20’s. All...
View ArticleApplying The Weight Room To The Sport
A few days ago I put out a Tweet about relating strength and conditioning coaching cues to the cues that sport coaches used. The idea behind this Tweet was that this helps athletes relate what they...
View ArticleTeaching the Clean, Part 1
The power clean is a major lift in an athletic strength and conditioning program. It is also a lift that can be challenging to teach and coach with a large group of athletes at one time. This article...
View ArticleTeaching the Clean, Part 2
In my last post I covered teaching the power clean to large groups of athletes. There are times where we want to teach the competition version of the lift. We often say that this version is too...
View ArticleVariations of the Clean, Part 1
In two previous posts I spent a lot of time covering different ways to teach the clean. Olympic lifters use a wide range of assistance exercises to improve their cleans. Many of these have made their...
View ArticleVariations of the Clean, Part 2
In a previous blog we covered hang and block cleans as assistance exercises for the clean and we discussed the place these exercise had in the strength and conditioning of the non-weightlifting...
View ArticleVariations of the Clean, Part 3
Up to this point we’ve covered how to teach the clean, variations of the clean using hang cleans and block cleans, and variations of the clean using different types of pulls. This post is going to...
View ArticleThe Aerobic Exercise Dilemma
Should athletes do aerobic training? This has been a pretty good debate for a number of years. One side of the debate is going to say that of course aerobic fitness is important and there are several...
View ArticleStrength and Conditioning During Quarantine
A lot of athletes are home right now and don’t have access to their normal strength and conditioning facilities. Many athletes don’t have access to a commercial gym, or worse their commercial gyms are...
View ArticlePower Training During Quarantine
In last week’s post, I presented some ideas about staying in shape during the quarantine. Today we’re going to cover how to do power training during the quarantine. Our assumption here is that you’re...
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