Strength and conditioning and sports performance coaches earn a living by training their athletes generally with progressive overload, but some already-overloaded athletes need the recovery bucket filled more than they need more training stresses added. I have seen this problem occurring firsthand, training overworked athletes at the middle and high school levels, as well as in the private sector, and consulting with various high school teams that have overworked players and are looking for ways to improve their current strength and conditioning programs. [bctt tweet="Some already-overloaded ..read more

Did you know that your diet can impact the way you move? When academics talk about sports nutrition, it’s typically with regard to recovery, muscle growth, and a vague bigger-picture concept of general health. But what if there are more nuanced layers to the discussion? I’ve previously covered the role of nutrition spanning performance, health, rehabilitation, and more; however, one notable branch of the conversation that tends to be universally skipped is the potential impact of nutrition on biomechanics. I should first acknowledge that this concept—like many others in health and performance ..read more

New developments in technology have resulted in more testing tools that enable strength and conditioning coaches to gather large amounts of data. Along with the emerging field of sports science, the data management market has developed a specific need: digesting and interpreting these newfound metrics to convert them into actionable information. This has produced the need for AMS systems. The hardware involved in testing technology improved by leaps over the past decade, but the software portion lagged. However, with the current emergence of software upgrades, it is getting easier to process ..read more

In the field of sports performance, most practitioners can agree that high-velocity sprinting is the most potent stimulus our athletes can be exposed to. However, practitioners rarely lean on speed data as a guiding principle for their weight room operations. I believe this is largely due to the complexity of speed development, the varying contexts in which speed development exists, and the lack of prioritization within the continuing strength and conditioning educational framework. This became very apparent to me during several consultation experiences at Power 5 institutions: I witnessed pr ..read more

Stan Luttrell is the Strength & Conditioning Coach at Colquitt County High School in Moultrie, Georgia. Coach Luttrell is an L5 Senior International coach with USA Weightlifting and a lead instructor. He also coaches football for the Packers, a perennial powerhouse in Georgia high school football. In addition to being a head football coach for 16 years, Coach Luttrell partnered with CJ Stockel to form Team Georgia Weightlifting, which has produced numerous national championships and Olympic competitors. Coach Luttrell implemented his Olympic lifting progressions with his children, which w ..read more

“Some of the biggest impacts that were made on me as a young person were through my coaches and my teachers.” Sitting down with Coach Crochran for Episode 4 of the Croc Show, Coach Javi Almanza of New Braunfels High School discusses his inspiration to become a coach, which was sparked by his own experiences playing high school and college football and being the first in his immediate family to pursue a university education. That background also informs his advice to younger performance coaches looking to find a foothold at a larger school, as he suggests that taking a special interest in work ..read more

Let me set the stage for you: A 6-foot, 200-pound Division I athlete walks into the gym. Their body is chiseled from granite, like Michelangelo’s David. They exude confidence as they walk across the turf to introduce themselves to you with a soul-crushing handshake. And then this elite athlete—we’ll say they’re an ice hockey player—gets to their speed work and sprints 15 yards. To your disbelief, their elbows are askew, their knee drive is minimal, and their pelvis is tilted so far anterior it’s as if they’re defying gravity to just stay on their feet. In other words, this future NHL draft pi ..read more

Small-sided games may be the best training modality a team can progress into during the off-season. Coaches train specific athletic biomotor abilities in the hope of transfer to the sport, and most coaches are on the right path but don’t deliver the athletes to the final destination because of the lack of open agility drills in the build-up to the competitive season. Speed and power training are popular subjects among the strength and conditioning crowds, and rightly so. Having general abilities, such as linear speed and power capabilities, will definitely give athletes a leg up over those wi ..read more

I met Scott Leech a couple of years ago at a speed and performance conference in Massachusetts, where the dynamic duo of Tony Holler and Chris Korfist was giving a two-day presentation on Reflexive Performance Reset, maximum speed development, and training modalities. I was a little starstruck at first because I had followed Scott on social media for a while. From his work, I’d long been impressed with the unique training Scott was doing with his athletes at the University of Rhode Island—he was on the cutting edge of collegiate strength and conditioning. Specifically, I loved that he had ath ..read more

If it were possible to decrease the risk of ACL tears through training, would you do it? What if it were possible to decrease the risk of something more sinister—like suicide—with performance training? While having a bond is certainly powerful, there’s more to the puzzle than social impact. Our brain is our most sensitive organ, standing distinct amongst its peers. Kidney damage doesn’t change who we are. You can remove a lung and although there are consequences, you don’t fundamentally change. Yet if any part of your brain is damaged, the shockwave can be felt in every ripple of your existen ..read more