NATCON 2022

Purchase the 2024 RSCC renewal course. - Achieve a minimum of 70% to renew your RSCC designation and earn 0.6 CEUs towards your certification.

In the second of this two part series, this article will discuss program design with an emphasis on integrating lower limb plyometric training into soccer training to enhance power actions, as well as, consider high school athletes’ biological characteristics and long-term athletic development (LTAD).

Given their ability to discern physiological and technical aspects of a job task, TSAC-Fs may be able to collect some vital information that will assist with the underlying evidence to build the foundation of a physical abilities test.

Athletes in field and court sports require reactive agility—they must accelerate, decelerate, and change direction in a constantly changing environment. These requirements result in technical differences between sprinting in a field or court sport and sprinting the 100-m.

Typically, a coach may follow a process in which they first identify the key performance indicators of their sport, determine the physical attributes that map back to them, and then distribute the development of those capacities over the allocated timeframe. Furthermore, effective training plans are based on a theoretical or biological basis for how we move and adapt to exercise stimuli, coupled with an understanding of how these are best sequenced, such that one stimulus and subsequent adaptation can potentiate the next. Thus, reverse or backward engineering, when appropriately converged with the plans of those devised around nutrition, conditioning, technical, and tactical training, for example, likely gives athletes the best chance of attaining their performance goals. The aim of this article is to describe the application of reverse engineering, exampling it within the context of developing an athlete who can demonstrate a high level of agility.

Explore predeployment training periodization mesocycle samples for tactical athletes from NSCA’s Essentials of Tactical Strength and Conditioning, 2nd Edition.

This NSCA Coach article provides a proposes a framework for standardizing SEB resistance training based on principles of kinetic and potential energy. Visit NSCA online to read more on exercise science and sport performance.

For many athletes, being agile is the end goal of physical performance training. It represents their capacity to change velocity and direction in response to the actions of their opponent and the opportunities and constraints of their environment. The aim of this article was to describe the pitch-based development of agility, focusing on 60–1808 turns. This ensures all turns have the demand of deceleration, turning, and reacceleration, requiring both outside leg turns (608) and inside leg turns (1808). To enable the effective coaching of these, coaches must understand movement mechanics and thus the fundamental principles that underpin good technique. Within agility training, a detailed appreciation of how the center of mass and base of support interact to affect the direction of force is fundamental to this. This understanding and the ensuing technical models ensure athletes have the best chance of executing the task optimally and ensure coaches can effectively instruct athletes and adapt drills accordingly.

The purpose of this article is to make the case for implementing non-traditional sports into training programs that prepare youth for participation in traditional American sports and bridge the gap between pedagogy of physical education and strength and conditioning youth coaching.