Carson discusses the two core competencies—breathing and rolling—that he believes are most important when developing athletes in any discipline.

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is here to stay.

About two years ago, I developed an unhealthy relationship.

Now that football season is coming to an end, many kids are looking to get stronger and faster for next season.

It was during the conditioning portion of my son’s football practice that I heard one of the greatest motivational lines I’ve heard in my 34 years of playing sports and coaching.

Here are six ways to easily implement sandbags into your football strength and conditioning program.

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

I first started lifting when I was about 11-years-old. I started doing little things before this time, but I entered a weight room when I was about 11-years-old.

“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.

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

About 7 years ago, I managed to free myself from the commercial gym mess and train at home, but I used this as an excuse to neglect my cardio training since I didn’t have any pieces of cardio equipment. Working in the medical field, you would think I’d know better.

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.

It may be due to my recent bout of carbophobia, but whenever I was asked about carbohydrate use for strength athletes, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “eat more protein.”

Up to a point, every strength athlete is better off leaner. Depending on the sport, there is a level of being too lean, but few reach this unfamiliar territory, especially powerlifters.

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.

At this point, we’ve discovered how Strongman training can be a viable substitute for Olympic weightlifting to develop brutally strong football players who not only display explosive physical capacities but have explosive attitudes as well. If you’re anything like me, you’ve become excited at the prospect of training your athletes with the fun and highly effective exercises like tractor tire flipping or stone loading discussed in the Part Two of this series.

There’s no question that strength is a huge asset in any sport. In “Making the Switch from Powerlifting to Fighting, Part I,” we established the carryover of strength developed specifically for the platform. It can relate to fighting in a big way. Clearly, there are changes that need to be made to harness this strength and make it useful on the mat, in the ring, or in the cage.

It might seem like I’ve been doing many interviews lately. There’s good reason for this. A few weeks ago, I did an interview for EliteFTS, and I was asked the question, “Who do you feel is getting it done in strength and conditioning?”

As a college strength and conditioning coach for nine years, I’ve come across many different types of training programs, and I’ve used many different types of training when working with my athletes. The one thing I’ve learned is that most programs and coaches usually try and put the cart before the horse, doing too much too early and forgetting the basics.

It’s been a while since I’ve contributed an article to this site and so much has changed.

For years, coaches have been failing to attain maximum results when putting their hockey players on an off-ice conditioning program. Much of this comes from misunderstandings. Typically, an unknowing coach will put far too much emphasis on aerobic training despite its near uselessness in hockey specific conditioning. For example, timed miles, which I have performed as a player and have seen many head coaches require that their players perform, have very little transition to a hockey player’s game related physical preparation. There is a better way—high intensity interval training.

You might puke. But you’ll definitely get better.

Todd Hamer is the head strength and conditioning coach at Robert Morris University.

I wake up at the crack of dawn, put on my sweats, suck down a shake, and I’m out the door. Time to hit the road. It’s early. It’s dark. It’s cold. But I can feel only one thing—my adrenaline pumping as “Eye of the Tiger” pumps through my headphones.

As MMA fighters, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our game. We sharpen our skills, improve our conditioning, and increase our strength, all with the goal of being better warriors. However, many of us fail to take advantage of a very important key to success in the ring (or cage)—optimal nutrition.

Bands are nothing new to most coaches and trainers. They have quickly become one of the most versatile and effective training tools in a coach’s toolbox. Initially, many thought of them only as rehabilitation tools. However, Westside Barbell changed the perception of bands with its innovative techniques for using them for accommodating resistance.

Have you ever grabbed one of those muscle magazines while waiting to check out at the supermarket and skimmed through it? They are filled with pictures and workouts of bodybuilders with awesome genetics who train with the primary purpose of looking good in a Speedo.

…with Jim Wendler, Mike Ruggiera, Tom Deebel, Julia Ladewski, Mark McLaughlin, Alwyn Cosgrove, Lance Mosely, James Smith, Brian Schwab, and Travis Mash

The concept of metabolic conditioning has to be without a doubt one of the most misunderstood topics in strength and conditioning today. It seems that every fitness guru has some different method for improving your “conditioning” with the aim of burning fat or improving performance for a specific sport. However, none of them really get to the heart of how energy production really works.

As a strength and conditioning coach, I feel there’s a duty not only to educate and learn from fellow sport-specific coaches on proper implementation of strength and conditioning programs but to educate and learn from the athletes as well.

Weight training over long periods of time can burn out athletes from all different sports. Whether he or she is a world class MMA fighter or your average Joe who wants to stay in shape, athletes can get bored with not only their current regimen but with lifting weights period. Most will just take some time off from the gym and come back ready to hit it hard again.

We all know that you can spend all day lifting, conditioning, and running agility drills. There just isn’t enough time in the day whether we’re talking about a student athlete who has NCAA regulations on time spent strength training and conditioning or maybe even a professional athlete who has a hectic travel schedule mixed in with a personal life and family.

When I competed in track in 1988–1992, we did what we were told. I don’t know anything about “block training” or “CNS.” So I can’t give any educated advice on where these workouts fit into a training cycle. All I know is that they killed me, and I can’t imagine one or more of these workouts not being beneficial to a large number of athletes.

It was mid-October of 2007. Fear set in as I read my email…

With the beginning of football season, the long anticipated excitement for the early powerhouse match ups has finally arrived.

No idea’s original, there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s never what you do, but how it’s done.

—the wise words of Nas

Although there are several different reasons for this, lack of time in the day is a large one (especially for the collegiate strength coach). Here at Northwestern State University (NSU), we developed a method for classifying our athletes to make their programs/training more individualized.

I’m a fat man at heart. I eat a lot. Five reps is “high-rep” work for me.

How many times have I read about lifters, ball players, and ex-athletes dying too soon?