The High School Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year Award is awarded to a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist® (CSCS) who has demonstrated excellence the field of high school strength and conditioning.

The Sports Medicine/Return to Performance Specialist Award is given to a sports medicine professional whose work and contributions have significantly impacted the field of sports medicine or rehabilitation for athletes.

Velocity-based training (VBT) is an increasingly popular programming strategy used by strength and conditioning professionals to develop their athlete’s ability to express force rapidly. To implement the varying forms of VBT effectively within their training regimes, strength and conditioning professionals need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of strategies, such as predicting 1 repetition maximum using the load-velocity profile, modulating training loads using the load-velocity profile, and controlling training volume using the magnitude of velocity-loss. The aim of this review was to highlight these strengths and weaknesses and then provide practical examples of when each programming strategy may be most effectively implemented.

Since traditional sport-specific training or exercise programs do not create enough stimulus to improve the function of the respiratory muscles, the rationale to introduce respiratory muscle training (RMT) emerged. RMT is associated with improved endurance performance and pulmonary function, and it reduced respiratory fatigue, perceived exertion, or breathlessness. The purpose of this article is to provide coaches with tools to select the appropriate form of RMT in the context of the athletes’ needs, using appropriate methods, techniques, devices, and testing protocols. The video abstract is presented in Supplemental Digital Content as SDC 1

Congratulations to the 2021 NSCA Award Winners!

This excerpt from NSCA’s Essentials of Sport Science briefly explains the force-velocity-power profile and how it can give strength and conditioning coaches a more holistic view of athletes.

This excerpt explains the importance of optimal nutritional strategies in conjunction with good sleep hygiene and how that can help mitigate damaging effects of deployment and shift work on performance.

Fitness testing uses a battery of protocols recognized by the scientific community as both reliable and valid, and it measures important fitness constructs such as aerobic endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, power, agility, flexibility, and balance.

The daily energy requirements of tactical personnel are highly variable, depending on gender, body composition, activities performed, age, and environmental conditions.