Strength and Conditioning Knowledge Center

Sport has many positive aspects for kids and teens, as well as for adults. However, when it’s elevated to a high level, the psychological state of people, especially teenagers, must be very well controlled. If it is already difficult to manage stress, fatigue, pressure, training and all the other situations of daily life for an …

There Are as Many Performance Tests as Athletes Performance testing should be part of sports planning to obtain information about the athlete’s condition and the effectiveness of training. Recreational athletes train a few days a week because it is not their real way of life. Elite athletes train almost every day but cannot afford to …

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 …