As an athletic development coach I watch a game or a competition quite differently. I am not a spectator or a fan, nor am I a sport coach who is concerned with tactics and strategy. Frankly my concern is the conditioning implications of tactics and strategy. I cannot afford to be a fan because that would detract from objectivity. I feel that watching a game of a team that I am working with as a conditioning coach makes…

It has always amazed me that so many coaches neglect or de-emphasize strength training during the season. The whole reason athletes train in the off season is so they can perform during the competitive season. What is the point of being  strong, powerful and fast as the season approaches only to lose all of those characteristics becasue of the detraining that often takes place once the games start? The major goal of the off season is to prepare athletes for the specific competitive stress of…

I have long believed that you level of expectation determines your level of achievement. Set the bar high and do everything possible to prepare yourself to clear that bar. Prepare to clear it not once, but continually because once you break through you can do it again. Raise the bar and raise the level of expectation. As a coach, don’t coach to the least common denominator; bring everyone up to the standard…

Via BleacherReport.com:

Larry Burton (Panama City Beach, Fl) On the few times that visitors are allowed to watch the University of Alabama football team practice, one person inevitably gets their attention quickly, and many scratch their heads, not recognizing the man leading the opening drills, clearly in charge and clearly commanding the…

Despite all the fancy color-coded charts that coaches use to indicate the various energy systems it is virtually impossible to train and isolate an energy system. It is important to remember that the energy systems are intensity dependent, not time dependent. The body must produce ATP for muscle action to occur and ATP can be manufactured both through aerobic and anaerobic means. All the energy systems work together…

In order to improve distance running performance it is necessary to think beyond the heart and lungs. There is more to it than that. It is a given to be a successful distance runner it is necessary to have a highly developed and efficient cardiovascular system as evidenced by a high max…

My powerlifting team had a great weekend winning our first meet in school history.  Super proud of my guys.  Lots of momentum going into our district meet in 2 weeks.

Via BucyrusTelegraphForum.com:

COLUMBUS -- All the buzz a few weeks ago about whether Urban Meyer was or wasn't banning his Ohio State football team from Twitter was much ado about nothing.

And here's why.

Meyer and strength coach Mickey Marotti are plotting to make it so tough on the Buckeyes, they'll be too tired to tweet.…

I was raised in the practice makes perfect school of thought. Not long into my coaching career it became quite clear that practice did not make perfect, it made permanent. I quickly realized that whatever I practiced must be “right” or I would just be repeating errors. My train of thought evolved to the point where the goal became perfect practice so that what I made permanent would have a direct transfer to the…

Via GoPSUsports.com:

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Penn State head football coach Bill O'Brienhas announced the appointment of Craig Fitzgerald as Director of Strength and Conditioning for Football.

Fitzgerald joins the Penn State staff following three seasons as Director of Football Strength…

I was rereading some parts of the book Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath last night and it made me think about applying those concepts to training athletes. So often in evaluating our athletes and subsequently designing the training programs we focus on the weakness, what they can’t do and ignore the strengths, what they can do. We work so hard on the weaknesses that the strengths erode, in…

One of the hardest movements that most athletes take to grasp, in my opinion, is hip hinging, but more specifically, hinging on one leg.  It is for that specific reason that I feel that everyone should be able to do it with technical proficiency and why we include it in our dynamic warm-up for everyone.  Most of the errors that I see with 1-leg SLDL are……

Sport is not isolated from society; it is a microcosm of the society in which we live. So it is naïve to think that the discipline problems that exist in society will not exist on our teams. We can bemoan the lack of discipline or we can do something about it.

For the young athlete to learn discipline demands guidance. We as coaches…

From time to time, parents and/or kids at my school will opt to see a personal trainer instead of participate in our school's strength & conditioning program. We know this is a decision made at all levels of scholastic sponsored and even professional level sports. There are a lot of reasons athletes and/or their parents choose to go outside of the particular organization they are affiliated with: the most popular probably being that said parents and/or athletes think an outside source…

The following are some lessons that have learned in my years of coaching. I was going through some files yesterday and I found this list that I wrote in 2005 after two particularly negative professional experiences in the previous year. I thought it would be worth sharing. Some these were hard lessons to learn and some were quite apparent from the day I started coaching.…

Having Worked with athletes from D1-D3, many times you get athletes that need to get back in shape. Often you get some whom have not been in summer workouts and want magic to happen before the start of camp! Not going to happen!!! The approach has to be fast but safe. This Swedish Interval Training is what I often use to address this. (mostly at D3 many athletes are back home in summer,school does not pay for any housing or food). I do this 1-2 weeks with them and then smoothly get them back…

The difficulty of having dialogue about the "sport science" area is perplexing.  Open discussions about issues in the field are not only discouraged but can just disappear without any explanations.  True sport science that involves interaction between sport scientists, conditioning coaches, and sport coaches seems to be virtually non-existent in the U.S. as a former mentor of mine Dr. Mike Stone has pointed out in articles and presentations. 

In the U.S., we have universities that use…

Anyone can make things complicated; the genius lies in making things simple. In designing and implementing a training program nothing could be truer. I have said many times in this blog – simplicity yields complexity. The body is smart. It has the ability to take simple basic movements and turn them into magical patterns of coordinated skills. Master the basics; the simple and the complex will follow. Put the body into…

In an age when sport specialization is becoming more prevalent, and at younger and younger ages, you might say that the result of this culture shift has led to the creation of all the workout programs, program philosophies, and personal "trainers", we now see. Each with some sort of an endorsement that they will create the next blue chip athlete. When it comes to high school athletes, can we consider training every boy and girl from…

1 Winning Drive takes viewers inside the Ravens' locker room after their loss in the AFC Championship game.  Listen to Ray Lewis' postgame speech: