Discovery Canyon High School’s Sam Melendrez explains how experts in his profession are having a profound impact on youth in sports.

Position statements are official statements of the NSCA on topics related to strength and conditioning and exercise science. All NSCA Position Statements are published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research® and free to the public.

The purpose of this article is to help disseminate information on the thermal environment during track meets, risk management, and thermal reducing approaches coaches, athletes, and sports medicine personnel can employ for improved athletic performance in a hot environment.

This article discusses the background, statistics, mechanisms, timing, dosing, influences, and practical applications for the use of caffeine as an ergogenic aid.

This article seeks to provide insight on a training method based around prescribing small amounts of training to achieve a large amount of physical improvements.

This NSCA Coach article offers a brief description on the various methods for setting resistance training loads. Visit NSCA online to read more on strength training and program development.

This article will focus on three common areas of injuries that occur with ice hockey players and some recommended strategies for the strength and conditioning professional.

This article examines how training the core and performance are connected. This article seeks to help propose how to best use the literature to maximize understanding and use of the current concepts.

The purpose of this article is to review the related literature that has explored the influence of resistance training programs on the onset of fatigue and muscular power as it relates to non-contact high-intensity intermittent sports, in order to provide suggestions for creating same-day training programs.

Early sport specialization involves physically immature children participating in intensive year-round training and/or competition for a single sport. The lack of sport exposure and diversification during the developmental years may underlie the increased risk of overuse injuries, blunting of motor skill development, psychosocial issues, overtraining syndrome, burnout, and potential dropout from sport. With increasing number of youth choosing, or being encouraged, to specialize at an early age, we aim to provide evidence based recommendations for the integration of strength and conditioning into the development programs of young athletes who participate in sports with a culture of early specialization. In addition to the principles of programming, strategies are provided relative to monitoring of growth, maturation, and training load to illustrate the potential complexities of attempting to optimize long-term athletic development in early specializing athletes.