This article is part of 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.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently recognized the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) as one of the first organizations to join the National Youth Sports Strategy (NYSS) Champion℠ program. HHS released the NYSS in September 2019 in response to Presidential Executive Order 13824, which called for a national strategy to increase youth sports participation. The NYSS is the first Federal roadmap with actionable strategies to increase participation in youth sports, increase awareness of the benefits of youth sports participation, monitor and evaluate youth sports participation, and recruit and engage volunteers in youth sports programming.

This excerpt explains the role that lactate plays in exercise metabolism and how that information is useful for athletes to predict things like pacing, fitness, and efficacy of training programs.

The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the difficulties that can arise when performing physiological-based research with firefighters.

Rhodri S. Lloyd, lead author of the LTAD Position Statement, provides an abbreviated look at what long-term athletic development is and how strength and conditioning professionals can implement effective training strategies into programming to improve health, well-being, and growth.

Find educational articles and videos, learn more about programs offered by the NSCA, find information on CEUs and continuing education, prepare for exams, online exam preparation and more.

Rob Orr, co-lead of Bond University’s Tactical Research Unit, explains the differences in load carriage requirements and contexts between different tactical forces, and how to prepare tactical personnel for load-carriage tasks. This session from the NSCA’s 2018 Tactical Annual Training also looks at how to employ fitness assessments to determine future load carriage requirements.

Learn how to individualize a group training session to ensure that all athletes are training at the same intensity. In this session from the NSCA’s 2017 Coaches Conference, Mick Stierli explains how to prescribe individual training for athletes at differing levels of fitness, and the importance of prescribing individual training intensity during conditioning sessions.

In the first of a two part series, this article will briefly highlight the main components of a needs analysis and apply it to the context of soccer.