This is the NSCA’s Coaching Podcast, where strength and conditioning coaches share their experience, lessons learned, and advice about how to thrive in a highly competitive profession.

Read the NSCA’s commitment to safer youth sports as we endorse Project Play’s ACL Pledge, advancing evidence-based education and training to reduce injury risk.

Athletes engage in training programs that develop physical and physiological attributes to improve performance over time. However, ensuring athletes are optimally prepared just before competition is also of utmost importance. Indeed, such approaches may often adopt 1 or more strategies in the days, hours, and minutes preceding competition, including exercise priming, active warmup, and/or postactivation performance enhancing (PAPE) activities. Despite a plethora of discrete research, such information seems poorly synthesized, making it difficult for coaches and athletes to implement optimal evidence based physical preparation approaches in many sporting contexts. This article aims to provide a scoping overview of evidence, facilitate discussion, and where possible, propose practical exercise based recommendations that may be useful leading up to (~48 hours–~1 minute) tasks with a short or prolonged endurance component or requiring repeated intermittent efforts (e.g., team based field sports). Well-timed and –designed activities can facilitate several aspects of physical performance, potentially improve athletes’ psychological state(s) and mental preparedness. The benefits of a warm-up are most well documented, but priming and PAPE strategies also warrant consideration. It is intended that the evidence and suggestions presented will be useful for strength and conditioning professionals preparing athletes for competition.

The CEU Provider Program is a service designed to provide continuing education opportunities to those certified by the NSCA Certification and to offer promotional assistance to those who provide the educational events or resources.

The NSCA is offering a new book that contains a holistic overview of the knowledge and skills required to support athlete and team performance as a modern-day sport scientist. Learn more here about this new resource.

Coach Jay Spearman’s mission is to have a positive, lifelong impact on his students.

Acclaimed Wisconsin-area high school strength and conditioning coach advises parents to ask these 10 important questions.

The purpose of this article is to introduce strength and conditioning specialists to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and to identify the many benefits of delivering exercise programs to children with ASD. In addition, the article aims to inform strength and conditioning specialists on how to minimize some of the inherent challenges associated with the delivery of such programs by highlighting critical issues for practitioners to consider when designing and implementing exercise programs for children with ASD.