Dr. William Kraemer | Legacy and Innovation in Strength and Conditioning

When William Kraemer first entered the field, strength and conditioning was, as he puts it, “primordial.” There were few standards, limited research, and little shared understanding. As one of the most influential figures in strength and conditioning, Kraemer recounts how the profession grew from humble beginnings into a science-driven discipline. That history still holds weight for coaches today. He explains why coaches are often drawn to new ideas, but progress comes from building on proven principles. Workout logs are central to his approach, and he notes how analyzing training over time can improve decision-making. He also emphasizes alignment across the performance ladder to support innovation and athlete development. As the Senior Advisor for Sports Performance and Sports Science at The Ohio State University, he shares his perspective on where the field is headed next. Apply his wisdom to stay grounded in solid principles, evaluate training with greater precision, and better serve your athletes.

Reach out to Dr. Kraemer by email: Kraemer.44@osu.edu | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs and LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs

“I think that search for knowledge, that understanding, that even today I well, we don't know where there's so much, we don't know. I mean, it just gets more complex as you pick up the paper. But if you have the search and the creativity that you want to really understand things and you really, well discovery, and you realize you don't know it all, then you basically build on what we know and the principles and you try to do what's best.” 13:45

“The most important thing you do is your workout logs, and I had a whole chapter on that. If you basically don't understand your workout logs and don't analyze them and look at them and then prepare your athletes to do what their next sequence workout is going to be, you got you really have to be an analytical, you know, monitor, an analytical, forensic person on the athlete's workout logs.” 29:35

“The biggest thing we have to do right now is educate sport coaches, because many of our sport coaches don't have the background that really evolved in into the present day, strength and conditioning and sports performance people or sport science people.” 35:37

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Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast season nine, episode 22. The most important thing you do is your workout logs, and I had a whole chapter on that. If you basically don't understand your workout logs and don't analyze them and look at them and then prepare your athletes to do what their next sequence workout is going to be, you get you really have to be an analytical, you know, monitor an analytical, forensic person on the athlete's workout logs.

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This is the NSCAs coaching podcast, where we talk to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know, but probably didn't learn in school. Their strength and conditioning. And then there's everything else. Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Eric McMahon. Today, we're honored to be joined by Doctor William Kraemer, a foundational figure in the NSCA.

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Former editor in chief of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, and one of the most cited researchers in our field, Doctor Kraemer, has shaped how we understand resistance training, periodization, and athlete development. Let's dive into his journey and the future of strength and conditioning. Doctor Kraemer, thanks for coming on. Hey, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the NSCA podcast and hopefully, some of the listeners will get a few nuggets that will inspire them one way or another.

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Absolutely. That's what we're here to do. And to begin, you were part of the NSCA from its earliest days. Can you share what the landscape looked like when you first got involved? Well, first of all, I started, you know, in strength and conditioning as a young athlete when information wasn't really available. Basically from grade school on up through high school and even college.

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Very similar to thousands of other individuals. But when you grow up in Wisconsin, in a small town, there weren't the gyms, there weren't the people that knew about weight training. So a lot of what my good friend and I learned from was from the York Barbell magazines of strength and health. We learned from Joe Peters, you know, muscular development in the All American Athlete, which came out in the, in the 60s.

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And you use magazines and then you look for books. There really wasn't a lot even I got to college in the early 70s, and I realized that, I, there wasn't a lot of information, you know, you had a, you had Pat O'Shay, you had, Dick Berger did research, some research. You had, Ben Massie, you had a few people that were doing sorts of research like that.

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Jack Willmore they had a study way back in 74. Jerry Mayhew did one of the one of the early studies in 74 on on athletes and resistance training included women. And so I, I was really inspired at that time that, hey, there's really a need to understand resistance training. And so during my whole, undergraduate career as an athlete, football player for four years there at UW-Lacrosse, started off as a Lacrosse State University.

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My whole goal was to become a better athlete. So what I really relied upon was being inspired as I was in grad school when I was early on, knowing that Jimmy Taylor lifted weights and he was a green Bay Packer. And I grew up in Wisconsin and been part of a few years in green Bay, and that was what inspired me to, hey, I want to get some, get some weight.

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So drag my dad down to Sears and we bought weights. And my my uncle had showed me what a York barbell looks like. But this was just all we had. And it was just inspiring to, understand, the, you know, the evolution of so many of the individual athletes like me. I, I'm not, it was the same type of thing for a lot of young men, depending upon if you had the advantage of having some, lifters and gyms in the area and the bigger cities, etc..

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But the NSCA, my first exposure to the NSCA was really a visit down to Lincoln, Nebraska, to meet with Boyd Eppley in about 77. And he and Ken Kantor were talking about the concept that we're going to develop this, strength coaches association. Well, that right away caught my ear. You know, I said, wow, that's going to be cool.

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And I was typically doing by 78 when the first conference came about, I was actually coaching summer camps because to make extra money as a football coach, you know, the salary, you know, you were a small college football coach. Camps were, were making, pretty you could make about, you know, at 12th or 10th, you can make a couple months salary just coaching one camp for a week.

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So it was sort of interesting. But the the landscape back then was pretty primordial on all levels. There, there wasn't a lot of understanding outside of, again, what we knew from Yard Barbell and from Joe Wieder and that type of information on how to construct workouts, how to analyze workouts, what to do with them, etc..

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I always, I always tell the joke that early on, in college, my, my, my roommate and I found out that, you know, boxcar, you know, on a train weighed about 90,000 pounds. So we got it in our idea that maybe we were going to list 90,000 pounds of weight for a workout. So that's times rep's time intensity.

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So anyway, the landscape at the time and talking to Boyd back then, you know, was, was really I tried to gather people who were doing that as a job. You know, how many people are out there doing being a strength coach as a real job in the collegiate or professional areas? And I think what we know now is, if you look at the original strength coaching handbook that was published in 1978, you know, I got my little picture in there and everybody had what they had for weights.

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And we had a universal weight machine, which was popular in the 60s. And, you know, it was really kind of primordial. The, the weight rooms were, were, you know, until Boyd really kind of set the stage with, with the first larger weight rooms. They were just little holes in the wall. I mean, first high school weight in my head in Marshfield was in a men's locker room.

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I had to put a cover over so that we could actually bring women into train. And it was just, you know, that, you know, very simplistic goal. A universal weight machine. One power rack and a platform that was that for old school. But anyway, that that kind of sets the stage for, for really the, the real primordial evolutionary start of, of, of a, profession.

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And, and I can go on with a lot of the other history, but that's kind of where all was for many individuals. I happened to get more interested to use weight training again with Jimmy Taylor's, profiling as a way to become a better football player. And, and and I didn't, you know, we didn't have competitive lifting or powerlifting or weightlifting in the area.

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So you weren't really exposed to that type of sport or those type of things during my kind of upbringing, even into college, it was just. It was just peripheral. A little powerlifting, that's about it. So it's really an interesting, primordial scenario. And for women, it was even worse. I don't think I ever saw a woman, in a in a weight room during my whole evolution as a young, as a young athlete, all through college.

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It was just not something, that was thought taught to happen. And we just finished a big paper, on the, you know, the history mechanisms of resistance training in women that just came out and, you know, at two of my former, students, doctor Nick Rodimus and Doctor Marion for dollar, who was part of also, I think the women's position stand, which will really be upgrading a lot of things as well.

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So I can go on and on. But that's kind of the beginning. History. Primordial is inspirational, and it was so exciting to think that Boyd was going to actually put people together that could talk the same language. And then my other comment was, I'd been a member of American Football Coaches Association, so I used to use I was used to coaches talking, you know, and and communicating and networking and all that stuff.

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But here was a chance, because of my interest in the science of it at the time, was maybe we'd start to learn something about it beyond just sets and reps. And kind of it started from there. You mentioned York Barbell Strength magazine, The Early days, but you went above and beyond. You published over 500 papers, 12 books, mentored countless students.

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Now a lot of them are professors at major universities. What was it that really pushed you over the edge to dedicate your life to this field? Well, I think first of all, I don't know if anything pushed me over the edge. I think the bottom line was I was, sometimes the good things happen from the worst things.

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When I was in high school, I had made a pretty good mark, as a player and even, you know, and even from that standpoint, not I'm not. I wasn't a superstar. I know what those were. But when people had scholarships available, I got hurt my senior year. And, in high school, and my rest of my senior year was just basically, kind of brought down because of a knee injury, that, you know, it they didn't have the surgical techniques they did back then, and then they didn't do any surgery.

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And now you got medial lateral collateral, instability. And you have a knee that doesn't work. It's hard to do things. And, and, I was at a game where I was supposed to be playing a, you know, a defensive position that I had done really well, people were looking at for defensive, aspects and also played both ways with center.

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And what happened is the scholarships got pulled. So I ended up getting recruited by, Roger Harring, who's a Hall of Fame small college coach, and he went on to great fame. And I was at the beginning of that with a number of players. Doctor Fleck was also on the team a couple of years ahead of me, but I got recruited by by by coach Herring and, and then that I had to work my way through school.

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So they said, you got a choice. You can either work in this new thing called the Human Performance Lab that they're setting up or you can do maintenance. Well, I was really interested, and I was a pretty good student, by the way, and I said, well, I think I'll take this idea of working in the Human Performance Laboratory in the cardiac rehab program.

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So at 18, I started work study, doing doing lab work. So, I mean, I wonder, you know, the one gentleman that hired me, Doctor Phil Wilson, just passed away. My mentors are kind of passing on now. And, what was interesting, the first thing I looked at, he said, here, figure out this instrument. It's a hemo cytometer how to measure hemoglobin.

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So I was sitting in there going, wow, here I go. I guess I redirect sense and try to figure this out as a young, young, young man. But there were a lot of, a lot of, challenges. We've had treadmills, environmental and the whole thing. But everything was cardiovascular, obviously. And I tried to bring the strength aspect to it.

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And I was fortunate enough to have my long term friend of over 50 years, Doctor Carl Maris, who was the young man, just got his master's degree from Cal Fullerton, and basically was working as a research assistant. And we struck up a friendship in my junior year in college that lasted has lasted now over 50 years. And we've worked together and we've inter.

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But, he asked me and I wrote a paper in my junior year and it's, you know, about strength training and, and, you know, strength training. And it's amazing. As I said before, there wasn't a lot of references. And then the teachers didn't want you to put in references from muscular development or anything like that. So when you actually looked at actual papers and in the, you know, in 1973, there wasn't that much out there in some of the real classic papers weren't out.

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But anyway, I started to say, hey, we need to learn more. And I needed to learn more because we did a lot of crazy training back then. We didn't know about overreaching, overtraining. We did these crazy, like I told you, boxcar workouts. I mean, that's got to be not good. You can't do 90,000 pounds. And then we did the million pound, but 67,000 pounds a day, you know, this type of thing.

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But I think what happens was, is that that search for information was really what really stimulated me. And then I got into after I graduated, got into the, you know, the junior high, high school coaching. And then I went back, graduate, got a master's degree, with, you know, the University of Wyoming at the time because Carl was going out there for a doctoral degree, and he got me an assistantship.

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And that's a whole other story, kind of another, sideline to that whole thing was, I, I interviewed, you know, I wanted to go to at Penn State and Ohio State and I kind of got put kind of on reserve roles. And I was pretty good student, by the way. And the bottom line is the two student, the two places that ended up kind of putting me aside or putting me on a on a waiting list or pushed me back, actually became full professors that so there was a degree of, ironic, phenomenon there.

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But I think that search for knowledge that understanding that even today I well, we don't know where there's so much we don't know. I mean, it just it just gets more and more complex as you pick up the paper. But if you have the search and the and the and the creativity that you want to really understand things and you really well discovery and you and and you realize you don't know it all, then you basically build on what we know and the principles and you try to do what's best.

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Ultimately, my experience as a coach and then I carried over as a teacher. I wanted to make sure I trained the kids, did the best for the people that worked with me so that they wouldn't suffer, not getting to their optimum, you know, potential of whatever that was, whether it be on the athletic field court or whether it be in the classroom or whether it be in their career.

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So over the years, what really inspired me was the I've got to be as good as I can be to help the people around me, and especially the ones that I was in charge of and responsible for them. So that that's really kind of what inspired me in this. And that came out of this search for more understanding and more understanding and more understanding.

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And then you realize it's kind of like, what? Vince Lombardi told Jerry Kramer that there is no end. It's not a destination. It's it's really a journey of of how you, live your life and what, what really inspires you. So that's kind of the, the kind of the, the, the core principle, the core idea that kind of went along with it.

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And I'm still interested, today to learn more, to do more. But then the key thing too, is today, you want to build it on solid principles, so you don't want to discard the work that people have done for their whole careers just to make a name for yourself. And I think that's one of the things that we deal with today, is that you want to make sure that, hey, you know, this really works.

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If you're going to evolve a principle, well, then evolve it and build. Yeah. Just like we done that in many fields. Obviously in physics you build on, theory, relativity, you don't throw it out the door unless you got a good example of where it may no longer exist. And then why it doesn't exist in maybe subatomic particles, etc., etc..

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So I think the key thing is that we've got a lot of major principles, such as the size principle. You know, we now know, for example, with regard to muscular function, it's dramatically changed. And the new exercise physiology book I just finished with, Doctor Flack and Doctor Shane's in our in the fourth edition, we found out that the muscle structure, for example, is no longer the little accordion, thing we all learned about for years.

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It's now got bifurcating sarcomeres. You know, it has a lot of extracellular matrix. Titan is now a much more it's not a non-contract a protein anymore. It's related to the the spring-like roles that it plays with with regard to, eccentric, you know, centric, puzzle actions. So we build on what's before we, we, we do that with our knowledge base and our understanding and our evidence based practices.

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We don't just throw out something without understanding how it builds and interfaces with what we already know. So that's the exciting thing about discovery. It's not very few of us are going to have the discoveries in the field of exercise science, in the field of exercise physiology or biomechanics, we're going to be building on, on on things that have come before with lower amounts of technology.

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And the reason we know a lot more about the muscle, for example, is that we have imaging capabilities. We didn't have, 25 years ago or 50 years ago. So as and you think about what people did have technologically and how brilliant their minds were to really extrapolate, you know, what might be going on and being pretty close to what was what is.

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Right. But now a lot of stuff is validated now by the, by the new technologies that, that we have. So there's kind of a good thing about technology and a bad thing about technology, especially in our field today, we talk a little bit more. Yeah. Well, because technology is just flooding the field of, exercise and recovery and, and all the type of performance aspects that are going on.

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Innovation is a huge term in the field these days. It's probably carried of some different mean meaning at various points in your career, what's been the biggest innovation that you've experienced within strength and conditioning in sport science? Well, you know, I was I was part of the interesting question because I was part of a, when I was a doctoral fellow in 1983, the NSCA, myself, Doctor Garhammer, and, and a few of other medical members gave talks at the White House Sports Medicine conference, a very common, intimidating platform for, a young doctoral student to be presenting at.

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I've been very fortunate, at that time with the role I did have play it with the NSCA, but I was always impressed that that ultimately, you know, we had one of the types of machines that were computerized machines that were being presented. And then the next talk was by Doctor John Graham. And and I still remember this to this day.

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He had a picture of his, 440 pound, Olympic set on a platform in his bedroom, if I remember it. Right. And he said, well, this is the Garhammer for 40 because people were naming these new devices. So I think fundamentally, you know, it's hard to if people have tried to do that with just tremendous amounts of machines, you know, this type of thing.

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But the barbell in strength training still is that core principle of of of what it as a tool. And then you you have many different things. My other good friend, late friend, coach Jerry Martin, who I worked with at UConn for over 13 years and very innovative ways. I, I miss his passing. We've lost too many great, people in our, in our field.

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But what we you used, what I used to say is to to Jerry. And I said it to all the students over the years as we developed our undergraduate and master's programs and, strength conditioning is that it's a toolbox. And your toolbox is what you work with. When you put programs together, whether it be for for the workouts, whether it be for recovery, whatever it is, you got a big giant toolbox.

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And now a technology. New things are coming up every day. You know, there's just so many different aspects of recovery technologies. And then there's assessment technology is, you know, the big innovation we that I thought was out of biomechanics. I mean, I thought force plates were just unbelievable when I started to use them back when I was at Penn State in conjunction with the Biomechanics Laboratory.

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With doctor, Richard Nelson there. And and the bottom line was, is that, you know, understanding the whole phenomenon of, of force plates became really a core, capability that, to me was a big innovation in strength training because you could analyze things, very differently. And you could also get a feel for, a lot of different capabilities of the kinetic chain that you were dealing with and trying to improve.

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You know, then many innovations came out, you know, surrounding, the ability for GPS came out, although I don't think it was as much of an innovation, because basically, sometimes you can only learn so much unless you track it with more advanced type of, aspects relative to decelerations, etc.. So now you have a whole host of tools out there, variety of companies, variety of products that allow you to look at a workout in almost great detail.

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But we had a thing that developed by Robert Newton and his group in Australia, the plyometric power system, which we could it's a computerized Smith machine back in the old days, and we could analyze all the things of what happened to the barbell and to the lost city of movement. You know, things like, you know, now you got everything that can do that, you got all technologies.

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And that's led to people thinking about velocity, liking, about power. But, you know, for the most part, the innovation to me that was most striking was the use of force plates for assessments and also for recovery, looking at recovery and and looking at, profiles of athletes relative to their ability and, and the strength shortening cycle, blah, blah, blah.

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So yeah, it's about. Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say that force plates, GPS, I feel like today were a lot more connected to the biomechanics elements of our field, where going back to at least when I was in school and some of the things I've heard you present in the in the past, our origins really were in physiology, but more specifically, maybe endocrinology in a lot of ways.

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And would you would you say that maybe we're getting away from some of those foundational principles of creating, anabolic environment within the body through consistent training as we get deeper into athlete tracking, GPS, day to day testing, some of the different areas we're looking at today. Yeah. Well, I think I think for the most part, it's always an integration.

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Everything is there and, and integrated. And in the book athlete Development that I wrote with, Nick Ratassmus and Tom Newman, I mean, we, I, I want to had a lot to say in that book. We have the athlete complex, and the athlete complex is made up of many different features to make them ready to compete at a given point in time.

00;24;20;17 - 00;24;40;18

And what you what you find out is that you you have two major areas. You have the immutable things you can change and you have the non immutable things. You know, with the old saying it's important you picked your parents well, you know, so that becomes one of the things that we have we talk about. So you know you can it is tomorrow.

00;24;40;20 - 00;25;03;22

For your point, I think the tools in the mechanics and the biomechanics, the became much, much more advanced. I mean, when I started taking a biomechanics course, we used to have to take a 16 millimeter film of the of the bench press, put it up on a wall, do a preliminary type of analysis on the wall for every frame, and then you had to put it, integrate it.

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And then we did, you know, software company came out and it got that got a little bit easier. So as technology made things easier it got answers quicker. So really force plates you know, we're also not necessarily simple either because there was no software output. You had very primordial software outputs, just like the early ice. And kinetic dynamometer.

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They were, you know, a little, little strip and you had to measure all the talks by hand. So as software became more effective, we started to be able to utilize other technologies. Right now with regard to the enter can aspects that I spent a lot of time understanding anabolic and catabolic. We know a lot about that we can predict much better now because of all the kind of the origin type of work.

00;25;50;25 - 00;26;13;15

You know, there are aspects of it that that basically, we need to understand, but we're learning. We've learned a lot to be able to know that, hey, you cut your rest periods down to one minute versus five minutes, you're going to get a higher cortisol response. There's no doubt at all your epinephrine levels are going to be much higher when you're under greater stress.

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So and your testosterone is going to go up in relationship to the activation of the of the motor units that you are involving in that particular workout. And that means load plays a big role. But yeah, I think it's still at all in the integration of the physiological systems, the biomechanical overlays that stimulated. But if you look at the old idea that, Sherrington, the one of the great neuro, scientists historically said it, what is the role of of of of the human body?

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It's to move things. So basically movement is is fundamental and it's how we then have to work against resisted movements, you know, then you get into the recruitment size principle. We get into some of the neural aspects of, of aspects of how that occurs and how the brain interacts to be able to create the theoretical engrams and create the series of motor unit activations in the primary motor area, the send down the line to properly, you know, activate tissue.

00;27;17;03 - 00;27;51;12

But in in weight training, it comes down to the fact that we're really oftentimes not strong enough. And we now I just did a talk yesterday that, you know, we can have, you can be very twitchy. You can have all the potential. But if you don't have the strength levels, you have problems with your ability to land properly, your injury promote, your density of your tissues are less, and basically you're more prone to injury, you know, and and sometimes, you know, catastrophic with ACL type of aspects as well.

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But I think, you know, the bottom line is, is that we now have a lot of technologies to be able to visualize quicker and noninvasively. We haven't quite achieved that with regard to the, the whole and, or and, and some of the biomolecular aspects, unless you get a blood sample and, but there are there are a lot of things.

00;28;13;00 - 00;28;38;04

Look at the big advances in, in care of diabetes, you know, with insulin monitors and everything else. You can use your iPhone to get your, your, your glucose levels almost. So there's many different technologies that probably will come out. They'll give you more information about about different, area areas of metabolism and endocrinology. But it's not as simple as the, I couldn't say simple.

00;28;38;04 - 00;29;08;09

It's not as available or quick as you get from, a lot of the other noninvasive parameters. So, you know, that's part of what research will do. Research will then frame the anabolic catabolic aspects of workouts and will frame the aspects like Doctor Fry has done over his whole career with overreaching and overtraining, nonfunctional versus functional. And he did a great, you know, presentation at last year's, NSCA meeting.

00;29;08;09 - 00;29;33;19

I was unable to be there, to my chagrin, because an old football back injury. But, bottom line was, yeah, it's, biomechanics has become more capable in a lot of different levels. And now, you know, then there's and now and the what we've known before is also sits now dimensionally with that. So it's all dimensional type of integration to understand what's going on with that athlete.

00;29;33;19 - 00;30;03;10

But I'll tell you one thing, for everybody, the most important thing you do is your workout logs. And I had a whole chapter on that. If you basically don't understand your workout logs and don't analyze them and look at them and then prepare your athletes to do what their next sequence workout is going to be, you got you really have to be an analytical, you know, monitor, an analytical, forensic person on the athlete's workout logs.

00;30;03;10 - 00;30;20;07

And I've been to places where they don't even keep a workout log. I say, well, what was the last six months of workouts? So if I have problems even even out at Ohio State, and I would coach Martin and I UConn coach who did that, we used to have to do it on paper back in the day and translate it today.

00;30;20;09 - 00;30;42;29

It should all be on some type of software so you can get back to what's going on and then but software, you can even analyze it much quicker. So probably the biggest innovation, if I could as of now, are the ability of software capabilities to look at workout logs. That's, that's and that's the vital first tier of a of an athlete is what you do in your workouts.

00;30;42;29 - 00;31;09;28

And what did they do in practice, etc.. That's a huge point to make. And I felt the same way that digital programing and just systems that will keep track of your workouts as you, as you're completing them, that is a way overlooked area within the technology space where we tend to focus more on testing and prescription, which is really interesting to us.

00;31;10;00 - 00;31;34;16

I thought you made some really great points about invasive versus noninvasive testing, and maybe that comparison between the physiological versus the biomechanics that maybe just are more accessible today with the advances in recent technology? I think that's really it's a good framing for coaches to think about that end of, okay, well, this is where we're at today and we have these technologies available to us.

00;31;34;16 - 00;31;56;22

So let's make the most of these, but not forget the past of all we learned, and who knows where the future holds in terms of next technologies that might make some of those other areas just as accessible. You also mentioned integrative processes. Integrative staffing is a huge thing today. I know you're doing a role within the athletic department at Ohio State.

00;31;56;22 - 00;32;29;11

Tell us about that. Well, I think the, I think the the book I wrote again on athlete development was really one of the major things that I put in there was that you it's all about an athlete development team. You know, the days of, the single person being able to do all the different skill sets that we did early on with regard to our, our field, meaning as a strength coach, I remember when I was a strength coach at a small college at Carroll College.

00;32;29;11 - 00;32;50;28

At the time, you know, I was in charge of, you know, I had to figure out how to do, athletic training because I finally found an athletic trainer at UW Milwaukee to come over and help. We didn't have any athletic trainers and and, you know, and then I was at the University of Connecticut the first time back in the late 80s, before I went to Penn State.

00;32;50;28 - 00;33;12;16

And I was, in charge of the athletic training program, because the way we're ATC was at that time was pretty primordial. Yet you did your 1500 hours after you had to. It was just everything is is progressively, gets better. But it primordial starts were really there. But at Ohio State we you know it's been great.

00;33;12;16 - 00;33;36;23

Doctor Josh Hagan is is the you know, one of is our head of what's called the Human Performance Collaborative and then we have the performance innovation team. And then there are different members that play different roles that bridge the athlete. The sports performance coaches and the sports, strength and conditioning. And then you also have the sports analytics.

00;33;36;25 - 00;34;01;23

You also have people that do all other aspects sports psychologists and social religious. You have, people that do the biomechanics. You have this integrated team to meet and try to get the best information to the athlete in a in a timely manner, so that their performance and their recovery are optimized. And nobody has it. It's still not perfect.

00;34;01;23 - 00;34;22;09

I mean, we're just our whole area of sport science and sport performance and and the whole aspect of analytics is just coming out of the cave, so to speak. And that's because you can have, great analytics, but you don't really understand the sport, or you can have great conditioning, but you don't understand how to use the analytics.

00;34;22;09 - 00;34;46;21

So it's it's this integration of learning, as a team of professionals working with a given athlete with a given sport. And I think those type of things are trying to be done that many schools, not just Ohio State, but work there, just trying to put it together. But the big thing is you have to have alignment. And this is something I preached at Ohio State.

00;34;46;24 - 00;35;14;06

You have to have alignment up and down the ladder. I mean that that means everybody on that team, from the sport coaches to the, athletic trainers, the strength coaches, performance guys, guys like me, the analytics and the sports performance guys that provide background and input. You know, you have to have alignment of the whole thing. And if you don't have common principles, common culture and alignment, then all you do is you get little.

00;35;14;09 - 00;35;37;09

Like it happens at many universities. You have little, you know, groups across the department or across the university. You have it really becomes one of more, you know, you know, independent operators. Now, do you get everybody on board? That's the educational piece. I think Meg Richey and her one of her talks a few years ago hit it right on the head.

00;35;37;09 - 00;36;01;03

The biggest thing we have to do right now is educate sport coaches, because many of our sport coaches don't have the background that really evolved in into the present day, strength and conditioning and sports performance people, sport science people, they they came out of their sports. They, they may have had no classes in, in, in exercise science of any type.

00;36;01;05 - 00;36;24;04

So sports you have to educate coaches. And that's part of the alignment that is oftentimes difficult because their careers are hanging on it. And they got to put trust in another entity. And that's the whole thing with alignments and this type of thing. And that that's what everybody who's working in this area, you're trying to get that alignment so that you can, coordinate and do things.

00;36;24;11 - 00;36;45;06

We had it, during my years at, Connecticut. You know, we had that alignment across the board and it worked pretty well. We did a lot of innovative stuff there. I think at Ohio State, we have a very amazing big program, and there's a lot of alignment there. You know, we're still working on coaching education.

00;36;45;08 - 00;37;10;29

I taught a course at Ohio State, for a number of years that a lot of the coaches took. So every every coach that including football coaches that had to sit and listen to me for, you know, three hours or, four hours a week for a whole semester. You know, they got know they got at least introduced to the whole construct of the things we talk about in what we're doing.

00;37;11;02 - 00;37;29;24

But again, you know, it's a constant, battle as it was, when I was in the Army trying to trying to teach the important aspects, and to have one group of, officers and then you get they change over, and now you got to teach over again, you know? So it's, you know, it's a challenge.

00;37;29;24 - 00;37;52;12

Education is a constant thing for the athletes who are new, for the students who are new, and it keeps reverberating. And hopefully, if you get enough people that are, you know, really knowledgeable about what's going on and what's needed, the field as a, as a whole has risen slowly over the last 50 years that I've seen.

00;37;52;12 - 00;38;20;14

So kind of goes from there. So building on that, what is it that excites you most about where you see the field going today? Well, I think what what excites me most is the fact that we appreciate the fact that that strength and conditioning and sport performance and the whole aspect of athlete development is no longer just, haphazard, random phenomenon.

00;38;20;14 - 00;39;03;24

It's it's one that that is based in science. It's one and based in practice and, and, and commitment. And it's really based in the fact that you have to really work with athletes, but you want to have the skill sets that give them the best opportunity for success. So the, the, the thing I'm excited about is that we're seeing that integration of all these different elements to the athlete complex, that it's, not just strength training, but you can be strong, but if you don't have other aspects of your psychology and wonder aspects of your life, behavior, sleep, nutrition, if you don't have all these things integrating together, you as an athlete and in

00;39;03;24 - 00;39;27;17

today's world, in the United States, you as an athlete with, being your own corporation, so to speak, you basically aren't going to optimize your athlete complex to be ready each time you have to go out and compete so that that's one of the things we realized. There's it's integration of many different factors. And, you know, they're all important in some way.

00;39;27;18 - 00;39;58;07

So that's kind of what's exciting is this integration of of skill sets and professionals that are coming together with a common cause and trying to do the best they can for the young athletes, which I think from the high school on up, you know, like Doctor Fagan, Bob did a great job is you probably met and talked to, you know, with regard to, you know, development of of young athletes to that, it's a it's a progression all the way to the end of your athlete career.

00;39;58;09 - 00;40;21;04

So lots of topics covered today. I know there's going to be some listeners who want to reach out to you and follow up. What's the best way for them to do that? But I think you can you can always email me, you know, on my, email, which is, if you spell my last name. Right. And when I lived, when I grew up in green Bay, everybody was Jerry Kramer and Rod Kramer as Kramer.

00;40;21;04 - 00;40;47;18

Well, I stuck it in there. So, I told my dad, I said, you know, darn. But anyway, yeah, it's just that Kraemer dot 44. Osu.edu, you can email me and I'll be happy to, you know, get back to you as quickly as I can. The idea is, is that there's just a lot of different things today that that, we have questions about.

00;40;47;18 - 00;41;16;01

And I know I'm fortunate, with Coach Marotta and, and the group at Ohio State to be able to, really contribute the information and the knowledge base to, to try and work with the kids we work with and give them the best opportunity for success. And again, we didn't even cover today all the recovery technologies that are coming out faster than you can shake a stick at the maybe next time I want to talk about recovery technology sometimes.

00;41;16;03 - 00;41;39;02

Perfect. We'll have to do this again for sure. Doctor Kraemer, thank you for sharing your wisdom and everything you've done to elevate our profession for our listeners, we hope this was an inspiring episode about where the future of strength and conditioning is headed, and some history as well. As always, stay tuned for more episodes of the NSCA Coaching Podcast and thank you to Sorinex Exercise Equipment.

00;41;39;04 - 00;42;10;25

We appreciate their support. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Ian Jefferys, the NSCA president. You've just listened to an episode of the NSCA coaching podcast. Hopefully it's generated some interest in strength and conditioning and the NSCA, if it has get involved. Go on to the NSCA website, see what opportunities are available, and I hope to see you at one of our events where you can be the next leadership generation of the NSCA.

00;42;10;27 - 00;42;32;12

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