Erik Hernandez, Associate Director for Strength and Conditioning-Olympic Sports at the University of North Carolina, helps coaches simplify the rehabilitation process and shares ideas for return-to-play at the 2023 NSCA Coaches Conference.

Gain a deeper understanding of how to safely train and program for the shoulder joint with Lee Boyce

The physiological response to breath holding includes bradycardia and peripheral vasoconstriction, which contrasts with that of exercise which includes tachycardia and peripheral vasodilation. This raises the question as to what the physiological response is to breath holding during exercise. During low-intensity exercise, the breath holding response of bradycardia and peripheral vasoconstriction prevails over the exercise response of tachycardia and peripheral vasodilation, but nevertheless the exercise may be sustained. Due to the lack of availability of extrinsic oxygen (O 2 ) from the atmosphere during breath holding, the energy demands can be met by increased reliance on intrinsic O 2 stores (i.e., O 2 that was in the body before the breath hold) via increased O 2 extraction at the muscle compared with exercise while breathing, or increased contributions from anaerobic energy systems. During high intensity exercise of short duration, the exercise response may prevail over the breath holding response due to the increased parasympathetic withdrawal and sympathetic drive of higher intensity exercise. If breath holding during high-intensity exercise was sustained for long enough, the breath holding response may eventually overcome the exercise response, although this may be difficult due to the inverse relationship between exercise intensity and breath hold duration.

Erica Suter provides insights that help drive optimal performance in female athletes though research behind the menstrual cycle, the functions of female hormones, and application to the female athlete at the 2024 NSCA’s Coaches Conference.

From the 2023 NSCA Tactical Annual Training, Ian Bonder and Andrew Shim review micro-dosing programming strategies and benefits for the tactical population.

The NSCA’s Podcasts are a great way to keep informed about strength and conditioning professions.

From the 2022 NSCA’s Coaches Conference, Head of Combat Sports at the Star, Matt Crawley, discusses the importance of sleep in athletes, examines some high performance case studies involving sleep tracking, and provides sleep health resources for strength and conditioning coaches.

Eccentric resistance training has been shown to elicit beneficial effects on performance and injury prevention in sports because of its specific muscular and neural adaptations. Within the different methods used to generate eccentric overload, flywheel eccentric training has gained interest in recent years because of its advantages over other methods such as its portability, the ample exercise variety it allows and its accommodated resistance. Only a limited number of studies that use flywheel devices provide enough evidence to support the presence of eccentric overload. There is limited guidance on the practical implementation of flywheel eccentric training in the current literature. In this article, we provide literature to support the use of flywheel eccentric training and present practical guidelines to develop exercises that allow eccentric overload.

Learn about the various categories of CEU opportunities the NSCA will accept. The categories exist to ensure individuals gain knowledge in a variety of ways.