What assessments did you perform when the players first arrived for preseason? The players underwent medical examinations as well as strength, power, and holistic conditioning tests. As part of their fitness assessment, we conducted an incremental treadmill test to determine maximum oxygen consumption and anaerobic capacity. The neuromuscular testing battery included countermovement jump and squat…
Unlike the professional game, the women’s collegiate soccer season compresses preseason, conference play, and the post-season tournament into 19 weeks. This results in dramatic and unpredictable changes in physical demands. Following a team’s schedule and programming across a full season illustrates a core lesson: the best periodization model is the one that adapts weekly, sometimes…
Swimming presents some unique challenges to the strength & conditioning coach. Swim programmes regularly cater to athletes who compete in events that range from 21 seconds (50m freestyle) to 15 minutes (1500m freestyle). Athletes in high performing programmes will typically train in the pool for 12-24 hours a week, depending on the stage of the…
Velocity based training (VBT) is a well established part of S&C. While it may seem like we may know all there is to know, there are still many areas yet to be explored and implemented. VBT’s most common use is developing athletes’ ability to express force rapidly. But this is just the start, and as…
Off seasons seem to be getting shorter no matter what level we’re talking about. What is your overall philosophy when it comes to off season programming for football players? First, it means addressing the physical needs and requirements based on the previous season. For example, if a player had high availability and was involved in…
Summer training for the men’s basketball team at Furman University consists of eight weeks of on court practices plus resistance training in the weight room. The sport coach and the strength & conditioning coach each gets four hours a week to work with the team. The summer is the second longest uninterrupted block of training…
Anyone with experience in a team environment knows that the neatly formed sequences of periodisation theory rarely fit naturally into the real world. There are too many ever changing variables that render even the best designed plan functionally useless. This kickstarts a constant cycle of modifying the plan throughout the season, to the point where…
Cold water immersion (CWI) is much what it sounds like: placing part of the body – from a single limb up through the whole body – into water that’s held at the same temperature for a given duration.[9] To qualify as “cold” water, it typically needs to be below 20 ºC. Below that, the temperatures…
As the role of the strength & conditioning coach evolves, practitioners demonstrate increasingly impressive levels of knowledge and intellect in developing athleticism, while cultivating innovative abilities to handle and organise data, amongst a range of other outstanding qualities. However, an often neglected area is the ability to coach, specifically, the ability to identify when an…
“Micro-dosing” has become a very popular programming method used during heavy fixture congestion. But is what we think of as micro-dosing – where total weekly volume is divided into shorter, more frequent sessions – really micro-dosing, or is it just using a fancy word for distributed practice? An opinion piece recently described this, suggesting micro-dosing…
More and more athletes are competing at the highest level well into that 30’s, some into their 40’s. Longevity has become a huge consideration for athlete’s as they decide what training they do, what supplements they take or how they recovery from games. So what specifically can coaches do to help athlete longevity? We asked…
John Harry recently published a paper which spoke about an alternative way to programme for ballistic exercises. Those familiar with velocity based training may have used velocity loss to manage volume but this could be leading to inappropriate loads for a up to 25% of athletes. We asked John six questions to explain more. What…
Training terminology
How many times have you been reading a strength & conditioning textbook and come across one of those classic rep scheme tables, the kind with “Muscular Endurance : 15+ reps” or something similar tacked on to the last row or column, with no real explanation of the mechanisms or adaptations that underpin such a statement?…