Each year, schools and parents spend thousands of dollars to send children to the top sports camps, coaches, and programs. However, there isn’t any camp or coach that can replace the athlete’s own strength.

I used to be an athlete. Not a great one but an athlete all the same.

There are many self-proclaimed “experts” today who quote research on how to get lean, build muscle mass, and other physique enhancing programs.

In 1998, the American Journal of Sports Medicine featured an article titled, “The Association Between the Menstrual Cycle and Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries in Female Athletes.”

“I tell ya. His legs are as strong as an ox, but he throws a punch like a 7-year old girl!”

For those not familiar with the sport, rugby union is a professional, widespread sport in Europe and countries in the southern hemisphere (Australia).

Team DOS just received the new Econo Prowler a couple months ago with the intent of using the hell out of it.

The other day in the gym, the topic of ab training for strength came up. I figured there was nobody better to ask than 1100 pound squatter Matt Wenning.

This article isn’t going to make me any friends, but hopefully it will open the eyes of some people and help them look outside their fields of thought and expand their thinking. During the last seventeen years, I’ve been exposed to several concepts and ideas as they pertain to strength and conditioning, including Olympic lifting, powerlifting, core training, assessment based training, Western periodization, Westside methods, tempo and volume based workout regimens, and others.

The deadlift is the lift that a new powerlifter initially moves the biggest weights with and makes the most immediate progress.

Where the hell did we go so wrong when it comes to football speed training? When did it become acceptable to pass off the hard work that entails training for football speed and replace it with fairly easy cone drills and gadgets?

Let’s be very clear—I don’t know shit. Not about constructing the ultimate training paradigm, not about recovery, and certainly not about conditioning. But what I do know is that I love physical training, and I have a great passion for learning about the strength and conditioning field.

I love interval training, but one of the problems we commonly run into—particularly if someone isn’t prepared physically to sprint or doesn’t have a place to do it because of weather restrictions—is that repetitive, low amplitude motions are our only options.

I don’t care for the term “sport-specific.” To me, this buzzword is a clever way to market strength and conditioning programs to parents who don’t know any better.

Many people consider sports such as golf, tennis, and martial arts to be some of the top sports that are most reluctant to buy into modern strength and conditioning techniques.

Rugby is a fast-paced game that requires athletes to pass, kick, tackle, and run. All 15 players on the field need to be competent in these very different areas.

No matter who or what your goal is, I feel some form of cardio will help you reach that goal faster.

I’m still not quit sure how it happened, but over the course of the past twelve months, we have attracted a group of competitive powerlifters into our gym. It was not that long ago that I retired from the sport and spent my weekends training with one or two other guys, and that was it.

Coaches on various levels are trying to find the latest workouts to improve strength and speed in their athletes.

As an athlete, you’re taught many things—work hard, compete until the end, work together with your teammates, push yourself to the limit, and have fun.

“Heredity only deals the cards; environment and training plays the hand”(1). It’s possible for an athlete to improve in every phase of playing speed, whether it be maximum miles per hour, stopping and starting, feinting, faking and cutting, or multi-directional high speed acceleration with a complete “holistic” speed development plan (1). Genetically gifted athletes may be fast with little work or preparation, but they are nowhere near their genetic limitations with regards to maximum speed.

We believe the initial year in our program is the most critical to an athletes’ over all development. During this period, the strength and conditioning staff must implement the foundation for development.

I’ve been to a ton of seminars in the past year, and every single time I came away confused on the most effective way to design a strength and conditioning program for high school athletes. One of the most conflicting methods used when talking about speed training is overspeed.

For every sport, there are certain key lifts that when performed by the athlete will tell you how well he or she will do in the sport. Once a predictor lift is improved, it will correlate with an improvement in performance.

If we all simply followed this one, there’d be better results and more time for real training. Jogging has no place in a football training program. None. Not as a warm up, not as a cool down, and definitely not as punishment

In recent years, strength and conditioning has became more and more popular among the soccer populations. The benefits have been seen in many other sports, and it’s finally showing up in soccer.

National high school signing day was February 4, 2009. After listening to all the “gurus” discuss recruiting, one thing stood out—speed.

When you watch the world’s strongest man contests on television, it should be obvious that these athletes are not only aggressive, fast, explosive, athletic, and flexible, but they have a great anaerobic threshold.

“Sport-specific” is the new marketing buzzword when it comes to strength and conditioning programs for youth. Uneducated masses of parents and coaches herd their sports teams at a young age into “athletic performance” programs that supposedly address the strength, movement, and speed demands of one specific sport.

As opposed to the first part of this series, which could benefit anyone who trains seriously, this part is more targeted to an elite audience. Peaking isn’t of much interest to someone who doesn’t compete. Although deloading can be beneficial for any athlete, peaking goes way beyond deloading, and its temporary nature makes it irrelevant for non-competing athletes.

Hamstring injuries are common among sprinters. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a strength coach is helping an athlete overcome a hamstring injury and at the same time improving performance.

Hamstring injuries are common among sprinters. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a strength coach is helping an athlete overcome a hamstring injury and at the same time improving performance.

Why is it that whenever I’m in a gym I see people benching the same weight at each workout? It usually goes like this—a person performs a few reps at 185 lbs, then at 205 lbs, and maybe at 225 lbs.

Here are the top 11 movements for athletes. Add them to your rotation and work them hard.

EliteFTS Spotlight is a weekly feature here on EliteFTS.com where Q&A member The Angry Coach interviews athletes and strength and sport coaches from various disciplines in order to find out more about what they do, how they train and how they do business.

I’ve trained many high school athletes. They all come to me wanting to perform better, look bigger, be stronger, and run faster. I’ve seen athletes put on 30 lbs of lean muscle, increase their vertical jump by six inches or more, and slash time off of their 40 all while increasing their
agility and flexibility.

Hockey is a sport of intensity, physical contact, stamina, strength, and speed.

In part one of this series on Strongman training for athletes, I made the argument that Strongman training may be a great option for building strong and explosive athletes and a viable substitute for Olympic lifting.