Strength and Conditioning Knowledge Center

How Interesting it is to Change Your Athletes’ Muscular Fibers? Skeletal muscle contains a heterogeneous composition of different fiber types on a continuum from slow to fast, which causes them to have different performances. Within each bundle of fiber types there are also structural and functional differences (Plotkin, Roberts, Roberts, Haun, & Schoenfeld, 2021). In …

VBT to Improve Strength and Conditioning (S&C) Velocity-based training (VBT) is one of the most exciting strategies for strength and conditioning (S&C) training. The use of increasing technology to measure the speed at which we move the load has made the association between VBT and S&C training a clear winning combination (Balsalobre-Fernandez & Torres-Ronda, 2021). …

What’s Undulating Strength Periodization?  Strength training results in numerous performance and health-related benefits in youth and adults. These benefits include improvements in athletic performance, musculoskeletal health, muscular strength, power and endurance, motor performance including jumping ability, balance and coordination, and cardiovascular and metabolic health (Faigenbaum et al., 2009). To obtain maximum benefits from strength training …

Muscle strength is a physical capacity that has proven to have great health and performance benefits. Several years ago, cardiovascular training was the goal of every athlete and every person when talking about physical exercise. In fact, “fads” such as jogging, running or spinning emerged. All of them aimed at improving cardiopulmonary capacity. The increase …

The world of personal and sports training has grown enormously in recent years. The practice of physical exercise and physical activity is intrinsic to human being. In fact, our ancestors used to make great physical efforts to hunt, plant, or move around, and the practice of physical exercise was common in human beings. So much …

There are many tips for strength and conditioning (S&C) training that I wish I had known about when I started my career in sports science. When you attend a university course or a weekend course, you receive theoretical and practical information about training, but nobody usually comments that you are going to spend many hours …

What Does Transfer Training Means? The concept of “training transfer” is a hot topic in discussions among strength and conditioning coaches. This term refers to the degree to which a workout affects a particular performance or task (Issurin, 2013). For example, is performing power loads in the gym going to improve our 100m sprint performance? …

What are the training phases that field sports athletes go through? The National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) developed an evidence-based fitness training system based on scientific principles more than 20 years ago (NASM, n.d.). Dr. Mike Clark, its creator, established five distinct but complementary training phases to improve the physical performance of field sports …

History of oscillatory training Oscillatory training is a method that emerged based on Sherrington’s law of reciprocal inhibition which states that for one muscle to contract, another must relax (Johnson, 1960). Several decades ago, Matveyev, one of the most influential Russian scientists in the field of training, found that one of the main differences between …

The Olympic lifting or Olympic lifts are exercises increasingly known by the population. The development of Crossfit or weightlifting has made people who had no idea what a “jerk” was know how to perform a squat, a pull-up or know the “overhead” squat. As we have said, the advancement of Crossfit, a discipline that uses …

The preparation for a new sports season begins with the end of the previous season. Athletes need rest, but we must keep in mind that the sooner a season ends, the sooner the next one begins. This period in which the coach and physical trainer meet to set up the next season is complex because …

For both amateur and competitive sport, it’s important to maintain a good general physical condition. Each sport requires some special characteristics; being an Ironman distance triathlon athlete, where the training volume is very high, is not the same as training for the long jump. However, even though both training sessions are far from each other …