With various sports finding ways to play and practice year-round, volleyball continues to drive up practice and tournament demands every year. For a high school volleyball athlete, school season leads right into club after a short break, with club leading into a break of 1–2 months before summer training for school season starts back up again. Add in sand volleyball, which takes place throughout various times of the year, and you get an athlete who is susceptible to overuse injuries and overall burnout. If you’re looking to plan a traditional “off-season,” you’ll find minimal time to reap the ..read more

The pursuit of speed, strength, and all things athletic places intense, repeated physical demands on the human body. With this highly intense demand being a prerequisite for peak athletic performance, athletes are all too familiar with incurring the various musculoskeletal injuries and disorders that can arise—the effective treatment and resolution of the underlying condition impeding performance is then of paramount importance for any serious athlete. With the world of rehabilitative technology evolving at an ever-quickening rate and athletes looking for the quickest path back to full health ..read more

“I learned a long time ago, you have to be able to give them what they want while also putting in what they need.” Carlos Cueller, Strength & Conditioning Coordinator and football Offensive Coordinator from San Benito High School in the Rio Grande Valley, joins Coach Crochran for Episode 5 of The Croc Show. Given the size of the weight room at San Benito, there may be up to 130 athletes from a range of teams lifting at the same time, with those teams’ sport coaches on the floor to help supervise. With all of those moving parts, Coach Cueller discusses the importance of being open to the f ..read more

“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.” – Nassim Taleb We are blessed to live in the information age, with virtually any bit of information at our fingertips. From countless CEU courses to hard drives filled with e-books, no coach is lacking in information. You can find numerous articles across the internet with Top 10 book lists, and these are all great resources—I have used many of them to fill my own bookshelf and CEU requirements. But I fear they may be incomple ..read more

Being a coach, athlete, and human being means being creative. Creativity is a given in the arts: music, film, dance, painting. Coaching has several “artistic” aspects, but the creative application of training means is rarely emphasized. Perhaps part of this is because so much of what we would call athletic performance is typically “prescriptive” in nature. Strength coaches often tell you about what protocol they run, whether Triphasic, Tier, 1x20, or 5/3/1. Even in speed training, there is often a popular sequence, perhaps with a mechanical sprint device that is prescribed to athletes, and in ..read more

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