The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) is proud to announce the recipients of the organization’s 2021 Coach of the Year Awards: Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year: Paul Goodman, MS, CSCS, RSCC*E College Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year: Brian Thompson, PhD, CSCS,*D, RSCC*E Assistant College Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year: Andrew Stocks, MS, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

This article describes the long-term athletic development programming pillars and suggests practical applications for strength and conditioning practitioners.

One challenge is to critically examine your own successes and failures to find a way to attribute the outcomes to something you can control and can change for the future. This could be as small as how you deal with a single person, or it could be a more in-depth examination of how you provide feedback to athletes and how you work with your own staff.

Learn about the new NSCA Strongman Special Interest Group (SIG) from strength and conditioning coach, Heidi Campo. Campo talks with NSCA Coaching and Sport Science Program Manager, Eric McMahon, about her path in strength and conditioning that ran from bodybuilding and powerlifting to becoming a strongman competitor. Campo discusses her experiences spending the winter in Iceland at the “Nest of Giants” with four-time World’s Strongest Man, Magnus Ver Magnusson, and how camaraderie in the sport ignited an even stronger passion for her work as a coach. This episode also discusses how strongman is not just for elite competitors, and how training concepts and methods from the sport can be integrated across all levels of athleticism, multiple sports, and for clients of any age. You can reach out to Heidi on Instagram: @muscleyogi or by email at heidi@coachbta.com| Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs or Twitter: @ericmcmahoncscs Join the NSCA Strongman Special Interest Group to continue the conversation and learn more.

Most law enforcement officers are physically taxed, mentally exhausted, and emotionally overwhelmed. As such, a complexity exists with a requirement to match the need for physical fitness in a demographic that lives their lives in a potential state of general exhaustion.

The purpose of this article is to present a brief review of research on the safety and efficacy of caffeine used by athletes participating in anaerobic-dominant sports.

Musculoskeletal injuries are the primary source of disability in the United States military. With the integration of movement screens and the implementation of tactical strength and conditioning facilitators there can be success in reducing the amount of musculoskeletal injuries in the tactical populations.

Concurrent training (CT), which combines resistance exercise and energy systems conditioning, is the default approach to preparation in high-intensity intermittent (“stop and go”) team sports. This review provides an overview of CT, emphasizing its complexities and challenges in managing fatigue and optimizing performance. These complexities are specifically compounded by the variability in game demands across the season, where the presence of intensified and nonintensified competition periods necessitates a flexible and adaptive training approach. In this context, there are essential training variables to consider, including intensity, volume, session order, and recovery intervals between sessions. In addition, nontraining variables such as travel, sleep, and nutrition play a role in the fatigue experienced while training and competing. These variables interact to influence acute performance and training adaptations and can be strategically adjusted by strength and conditioning practitioners. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive understanding of fatigue management for practitioners in team sports, emphasizing the complexities and challenges of CT and offering simplified practical recommendations for adjusting training variables within any given microcycle.

This article is the sixth in a continuing series of tactical strength and conditioning (TSAC) research reviews. It is designed to bring awareness to new research findings of relevance to tactical strength and conditioning communities.