The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) is proud to announce the recipients of the organization’s 2024 Career and Service Awards. Given annually, the distinguished Career Awards honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the strength and conditioning community throughout their careers. Additionally, the Service Awards recognize those who have provided exceptional dedication and support to the NSCA’s journals or State and Provincial Director Program. Each winner will be formally recognized at the 2024 NSCA National Conference in Baltimore, MD, this July 10-13.

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to contrast training, including how it is defined, what variables are utilized, and examples of how to use it in training.

This article provides essential guidelines for athletes beginning a strength and conditioning program that ensures safety and productivity of the training sessions.

This excerpt from NSCA’s Essentials of Personal Training discusses the importance of education on proper running surfaces, appropriate footwear, and the benefits of cross-training in addressing overuse of the knee.

Beyond the programming, exercise technique, and human physiology, it is also important to create a customized system for sales success. Re-framing the purpose of the sales presentation in the proper light and creating a customized system that will allow a fitness professional to sell their services with integrity can allow them to help more clients.

This is my story of how a strength and conditioning coach influenced not only one of Pakistan’s up and coming cricket team’s approach to fitness and lifestyle, but also that of the wider community.

The “coach’s dozen” is a collection of 12 principles that will help youth coaches, physical education teachers, and pediatric exercise specialists maintain inclusive, sustainable, and enjoyable participation in exercise and sport.

In this lecture from the NSCA's 2014 Coaches Conference, Mike Robertson talks about corrective exercise and its application. Invoking Gray Cook, Mike defines corrective exercise as "a holistic approach where an assessment is used to determine specific weaknesses and/or limitations of the athlete" - be it aerobic, strength, or agility.

Knowledge of metabolic rate can help athletes as well as health-conscious people improve their exercise performance or obtain the fat-to-lean-mass ratio optimal for their personal situations. Two examples of how this works follow.

This article is a personal perspective that focuses on methods that can be used to establish confidence in the performance program in non-traditional environments.