When developing the strength and explosiveness program for the University of Pittsburgh men’s hockey team, there were several factors I had to take into consideration as a coach. Hopefully my experience thus far will help you in similar situations.

The solutions to these problems are as multi-faceted as the nature of the problems themselves

The current climate of club sport, in combination with school sport, in Southern California is one in which the majority of athletes are being placed under a degree of physical stress that their bodies are unsuited to handle.

Have pride in your workouts, only you can get it done!

Whether your sport is powerlifting, strongman, football or any other “strength” sport, the power clean should be part of your workout plan.

We expect to be pushed.

We have come to love but also hate the Prowler, but none of us can deny the benefits of this equipment in terms of building strength, endurance, speed, and also mental toughness in our athletes.

This article will hopefully serve as a guide to you whether you’re a player, coach or strength coach.

In order to provide some “spice” to our workouts, we have implemented a game day every two weeks.

I’ll outline a workout that I’ve employed to build physical strength, endurance, and, most importantly, mental toughness.

I’ve uploaded three videos of our plate rotation series that can be implemented with large groups of athletes and are great for teaching rotational movement patterns to beginners.

“Speed training” is the latest fad to squeeze money out of misinformed coaches, parents, and athletes.

As I said earlier, I think all of these can be applied to your training and everyday life.

Too many times, I see athletes make some nice strength gains in the off-season only to lose them all during the competitive season because of their lack of training.

Detric shares some random thoughts on nutrition and training with readers.

Are your athletes getting faster or are they just getting better at your drills?

Usually on EliteFTS, you hear about training those in the “power” sports, but rarely do you read about training a potential champion swimmer.

If your athlete is running with his arms swinging from side to side, he is suffering from teenage kid syndrome.

Parents don’t hesitate to hire a trainer or buy the latest supplement, yet they barely pay attention to what their own child is eating.

Corey St. Clair submitted this question.

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

The most glaring issue I’ve seen is the lack of athletic movement in all kids in all sports of all ages.

“What happens when they’re too weak to squat?”

“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.

It was Friday night. I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. This was nothing new, but when I woke up in five hours, I would be starting my trek to one of the strongest gyms in the Midwest—the EliteFTS compound.

SLAM!!! The empty Mountain Dew can hit the table.

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.

I know that the EliteFTS.com website and article listings that I look forward to each and every Friday are usually reserved for strength and lifting as well as articles of an informative nature. However, I’m writing one myself from a different perspective.

“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.

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.

My career as a strength and conditioning coach essentially began at the University of Washington when I interned under a great coach named Bill Gillespie back in the late 1990s.

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.

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.

This week’s EliteFTS Spotlight features University of Pennsylvania strength and conditioning coach Jim Steel. Coach Steel is a former college football player with an extensive powerlifting background.

Succeed academically: It’s crucial for young athletes to start developing solid study habits as they get older.

Thud! Snap! Pop, pop! These were the first sounds I heard before I felt the searing pain of two dislocated ribs.

EliteFTS Spotlight is a new 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.

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.

This article applies to three different types of lifters. If you’ve never squatted in a monolift, don’t train consistently in a monolift, or do squat in a monolift but don’t feel solid taking weights out of the monolift, keep reading.

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?”

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.