Get your ass out there and start dragging some sleds! It’s not as much of a drag as you think it is. With 22 variations to get you started, the possibilities are truly endless.
Running around and practicing soccer skills while wearing a weighted vest, attaching a band to a hockey stick or a baseball bat, and a myriad of other ridiculous activities in the weight room do not count as sport-specific activities.
You may be between weight classes or on the far end of the spectrum. Find out if your future should include Big Macs and candy bars or chicken and rice.
Darden takes on a question that many lifters shy away from: what are the real consequences of performance enhancing substances?
Technology on the forefront of strength & conditioning
A lot of internet trainers write a lot of articles about strength training, but really have no personal success in the strength world.
Looking back, I think it was a highly successful summer of training.
Setting the stage for sport success when it counts- begins when it doesn’t.
When position coaches do film breakdowns and pages upon pages of scouting reports, they’re being virulently unproductive.
It has come to my attention that many high schools are underserved in the strength and conditioning department.
Recently, I received a call from the head basketball coach of a team I’m strength training.
The long-term approach to youth fitness and sport training is an essential ingredient and critical component of understanding how to work with clients in this very sensitive demographic
Strength coaches need to assess a few things in regards to basketball players and the implementation of plyometric training.
I will give you five very good reasons why powerlifting exercises and repetition schemes should be used in your athletic conditioning programs.
The nerves didn’t hit until I walked into the Las Vegas Sports Center for Friday night weigh-ins.
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.
Hockey is a sport of intensity, physical contact, stamina, strength, and speed.
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.
The title of this article is a little misleading. It’s not about the balance that most trainers think about such as standing on one foot on a Bosu ball. It’s about building a physically and structurally balanced athlete. These ideas and qualities are what form the exercise selection of our strength program. Our staff has five major goals in mind for our strength program—increasing power/explosiveness, increasing speed, increasing strength, increasing lean muscle tissue (size), and preventing injury.
When it comes to strength and sports—and how to increase strength for those sports—most of the information out there is about sports such as football, powerlifting, basketball, and hockey. But what about the lesser known sports such as cheerleading, figure skating, and dance?
I have employed the conjugate system of training with my throwers’ lifting program for four years with tremendous success. One highlight in the weight room was taking a male thrower with a 385-lb squat freshman year to a 615-lb squat/500-lb front squat as a junior. We also had a thrower make a 60-lb PR in the hang clean after not attempting a single training rep in that lift for six months.
Rites of passage that involve impressive feats of strength have been around for thousands of years. They exist in many different forms and many of them originated in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Tests like the Husafell stone carry, which originated in Iceland, have now become objects of desire for many would-be Strongmen throughout the world.
I’m always amazed and amused at how many guys are in and then suddenly out of competitive powerlifting and bodybuilding. Many of these guys have almost unlimited God-given potential to become national or even world champions.
It’s extremely important that athletes perform Olympic lifts correctly. This means teaching lifts through a progression designed to implement proper form. Doing the lifts incorrectly, which is the case with the vast majority of young athletes, reduces the effect of the lift and creates a much higher likelihood of injury.
In any sport, athletes need to be able to accelerate as quickly as possible to get to the ball or opponent first. As a coach, you must put your athletes in the best possible position to succeed.
If you’re reading this, you probably have a good understanding of why strength and conditioning is important. However, I’d like to reach the coaches, athletic directors, and lazy athletes who will never reach their potential because of a lack of education.
“Real deference doesn’t come based on size and intimidation but on monster work capacities and real street toughness.”
Sports, physical training, and coaching have been my life for the last three decades. From the time I started playing soccer when I was five years old until today, many of the life lessons I’ve learned have either been found on the field, in the dojo, or in the gym.
The title says it all, which is a quote from Tom Myslinski, currently the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania. Every youth sports related newspaper or magazine article you read these days has children as young as 7-8 years-old playing organized year-round sports.
I’ve been working with athletes for quite some time. Even though I haven’t overhauled the way I do things, I definitely make changes on a continual basis. One thing that has seen many changes is the way I warm up athletes. I’ve always used some type of movement-based stretching, and I’ve tried to stay away from any pre-workout static stretching. My belief has always been in the actual workout, not so much in what we did before the workout. I’ve always believed in getting a sweat going before moving on to the actual workout.
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 get bombarded with emails on a daily bases ranging from business issues, training questions, product opportunities, spam and a number of other issues. While I personally answer most of my emails there are times when I forward them onto people I feel can do a better job answering the questions than I could.
The study of the science of strength and conditioning for sports is a huge endeavor. There are many differing opinions and many things that work. The key is to find out what works for your athlete based on his or her individual differences, strengths, weaknesses, and of course, sport.
Many articles out there deal with enhancing acceleration but pay little attention to deceleration or force absorption. However, in most cases, you must be able to absorb force before you can create force.
It has been over fifty years since the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction was first proposed.
The way that athletes are taught in our sport expert education system is a problem for me. I feel this isn’t just a problem of the sport expert education system but is also common to other educational systems as well.
One of my favorite things to do is to sit back and observe people. Sometimes I feel like I am a scientist looking at some weird experiment gone wrong.
Coming up with new articles each month can be a challenging task and coming up with quality information can be even harder. After a couple hundred articles I find myself repeating myself time and time again.
This article was inspired by Alwyn Cosgrove and something that he mentioned to me in passing.
In many instances team weight training consists of athletes of varying levels of strength preparedness- all performing the same training parameters.
Field day at elementary school means dunk tanks, water balloons, Italian ice, hanging with your friends, cool games and a bunch of other cool stuff.
I get calls just about every day asking for help integrating strongman training and Westside style training and I see a lot of confusion with this.
Unfortunately the unmaking of an athlete begins long before college.
As the sport of MMA progresses so must the specific means and methods of fighter training.