High knee drills help develop coordinated front-side mechanics and are often used as part of a warm-up. This article details several high knee drills that you can use with your athletes.
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.
This Personal Trainers Quarterly article examines a client's ability to maintain pelvic and trunk stability during a dynamic fitness screening. Visit NSCA online to read more on corrective exercises, health, and fitness.
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In this session from the 2017 NSCA National Conference, Mike Stone explains what rate of force development (RFD) is, how it is derived, and the underlying mechanisms affecting RFD.
Developing safe and effective exercise training programs requires the application of abundant training variables and the implementation of appropriate progression for each variable. Importantly, the outcomes of each training program are the product of these variables and their progression, so practitioners are keen to select methodologies and overload strategies that effectively support their target training outcomes. One such training variable is mechanical loading, which describes the forces of gravity, resistance, and muscle contraction and how these forces affect musculoskeletal adaptations. Numerous research articles and texts have been published regarding mechanical loading and its effects on exercise adaptations; however, these findings can be arduous to organize, which requires additional time investment by professionals. Developing a succinct system is critical because practitioners face clients and patients with a wide range of physical skills and challenges, and having an easily referenced loading guide may assist them in designing appropriate strength and conditioning or rehabilitation programs. Thus, the purpose of this review is to define and describe the mechanical loading continuum and its individual components to better assist the practitioner in identifying appropriate exercise modes and progression strategies.
In this session from the 2017 NSCA Personal Trainers Conference, Kamal Patel explains the main mechanisms involved in the development of pain, and identifies the nutrients and supplements that play a role in pain and recovery.