The Center of Excellence has a large team of graduate students and faculty involved with the development of hundreds of college athletes. With the wide variety of sports, performance levels, competitive time frames, and academic schedules involved in our program, sound and effective communication is of utmost importance to ensure excellent service is provided to ensure our athletes perform their best. Bridge Athletics helps to provide a means to communicate between coaching staffs. Having all the information stored on a shared network allows our whole program access to each other’s work. This ..read more

 In a previous blog post, Andrew Nelson discussed why accurate tracking of volume load is crucial when conducting sport science research. If you haven’t read this post yet - check it out here (insert link). This post will expand on how our program accomplishes this research, provides evidence-based training to our athletes, and how Bridge Athletics helps us accomplish both of these tasks. As a brief summary: for a sport scientist or coach working in high-level sport, quantifying training loads helps us understand why changes in performance occurred. This information provides a window into ..read more

​Bridging the gap between technology and Strength and Conditioning   One of the biggest obstacles facing collegiate strength and conditioning coaches is effective and timely program implementation. Coaches are competing with class schedules, practice times and NCAA hour regulations to get the time to work with their athletes in the weight room. Beyond limitations with scheduling, strength and conditioning coaches have to program for multiple positions, injured athletes, and scale appropriately for athletes with vastly different abilities and training ages. Bridge Athletic provides solutio ..read more

​Training in sport, as defined by German sport scientist Dietrich Harre, is “the physical, technical, intellectual, psychological and moral preparation of an athlete by means of physical exercises, i.e., by applying workloads.” (Harre, 1982).  Managing these workloads, or training stressors is of principal importance to the sport preparatory coach or scientist for effectively designing, implementing, and/or monitoring a training program (Haff, 2010).  In the sporting context, this is primarily done through the systematic manipulation of volume and intensity across the yearly training ..read more

These data were collected from the 2018 Youth National Championships in Michigan and permission for sharing results was granted by USAW. The file below contains data from countermovement jumps (CMJ) performed on a jump mat.  Study Description: The CMJ testing was conducted with a jump mat (Probotics Inc., Huntsville, AL USA). Each weightlifter provided two trials with maximum effort while holding a PVC pipe on the back of the shoulders. Countermovement jump heights (CMJH) from the two trials were then averaged as a performance score for each weightlifter. *Addendum: 8 ..read more

by Alex Wetmore, CSCS Learning to coach is a difficult process with many twists and turns along the way. It’s hard to gain the knowledge and skill necessary to be a great coach and the most difficult piece of the puzzle is gaining the trust of your team. There is no set right and wrong way to gain their trust and every team is different. However, my experiences as a student-athlete have helped me to build that relationship and grow as a coach. Being a college athlete is something that not everyone gets to experience. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to play college football and to ..read more

By Mike McCullough BS, USAW-1, ACSM-CPT ​​This past summer I experienced a taste of my dream job working in the NFL as a temporary employee in the strength and conditioning department for the Oakland Raiders. I had several roles for the staff and the team, as the Raiders strength and conditioning staff are fully committed to facilitating a high performance environment. My roles were emphasized and deemphasized according to the changing training periods. We were in organized team activities in the early summer, which was the height of off-season training. I started off with the typical in ..read more

By Mark Swartz, BS, CSCS I completed my internship at the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, FL this past summer. I assisted in leading dynamic warm-ups and fitness sessions. The full-time tennis students trained in the weightroom, including plyometric exercises, lower/upper body lifts during the time when the camp students completed basic strength and movement training on court. I learned not only how to structure workouts to include mobility and injury prevention exercises, but also how to train younger students that are pre-pubescent. For those athletes ..read more