The purpose of this article is to provide personal trainers reading the strength and conditioning research the knowledge necessary to better understand the statistical data commonly reported in research manuscripts.

This article highlights the scientific evidence on exercises like the seated leg extension, leg curl, and adduction machines to highlight their potential benefits on enhanced performance and potentially reducing injury risk.

This article discusses training strategies for law enforcement officers, including strength training, fitness scaling, and readiness programs that improve performance and career-long operational effectiveness. Visit NSCA online to read more on strength training and law enforcement officer fitness

The purpose of this article is to review various gravitational running (GR) techniques from an evidence-based approach, then recommend whether to include GR techniques in the training of tactical athletes.

This article sets out to address and dispel these myths, offering evidence-based insights into the significance, safety, and multifaceted benefits of strength training for youth.

This article provides an understanding of the role the core plays during execution of athletic movements, as well as provides evidence-based concepts that help to strengthen the core and maximize movement performance.

This Personal Training Quarterly article presents time-efficient fitness strategies to maintain physical and mental health during early parenthood. Visit NSCA online to read more on nutrition, health science, and fitness news.

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.

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.

This infographic outlines a two-step approach to resistance training for endurance athletes.