Soldiers must be physically prepared to meet a broad range of challenges. This article is designed to help identify risks and discuss recommended strategies to implement in order to minimize those injury risks at the company, commander, and soldier level.

The third and final article in this series will introduce the practical and technical elements of heart rate variability (HRV) monitoring in greater depth and detail.

The aim of this article is to provide those working with tactical populations an introduction into tracking training load to mitigate injury risk while concurrently optimizing fitness.

HRV is thought to provide objective insight into understanding fatigue, “trainability,” and “readiness” to perform in athletic populations. Evolving access to HRV data may enhance the understanding of individualized fitness and training responses in tactical athletes.

From the 2021 NSCA’s Coaches Conference, Guy Hornsby, Teaching Assistant Professor in Athletic Coaching Education at West Virginia University, and John Wagle, the Director of Performance Science and Player Development for the Kansas City Royals Major League Baseball (MLB) team, discuss applied sports science and athlete monitoring for both intercollegiate student-athletes and professional athletes.

Learn how the use of force plates can provide daily insights in the training process, and how to adapt these principles for other methods that do not involve force plates. In this session from the NSCA’s 2018 Coaches Conference, Cory Kennedy also discusses the prerequisites for developing a coaching “intuition.”

Triathlons are unique compared to other sports as athletes are required to master three distinct disciplines: swimming, cycling, and running. This article lays out a training program that focuses on a balance between strength training and sport training to avoid overtraining and overuse injuries and to maximize performance in a multi-sport athlete.

This article will detail example resistance training and aerobic conditioning sessions that could be used by a female recruit in the lead-up to their academy program.

The NSCA is offering a new book that contains a holistic overview of the knowledge and skills required to support athlete and team performance as a modern-day sport scientist. Learn more here about this new resource.

This article aims to provide a good understanding of sleep health and the way it affects high performance populations.