Providing a safe and effective youth strength and conditioning program is only the foundation of their long-term athletic development.

The ability of strength and conditioning professionals to bridge the gap between sports medicine and coaching is the focus of this session from the NSCA’s 2016 Coaches Conference. Coach Ted Perlak explains why coaches should take into account the “why” and the “how” more so than the “what.”

To address and combat neurocognitive decline in tactical personnel, this article will detail the mechanistic underpinnings of, and describe how to apply, attention regulation strategies to facilitate greater skill acquisition, retention, and performance transfer.

This excerpt from Developing Speed aims to develop athletes’ ability to accelerate quickly through stride modification.

This article provides a personal perspective on the art of coaching that stems from acquired knowledge, education, and real-world application through professional sports experience from working in human performance.

Understand why the strength and conditioning basics work, how they work, and how they elicit the desired performance outcomes. In this session from the 2016 TSAC Annual Training, Brandon Stone identifies buzzwords like mental toughness, work capacity, and regeneration, as well as how those are integrated into training the program at the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

The strength and conditioning profession involves combined competencies for the application of sport/exercise science, administration, management, teaching, and coaching. Its professionals must also comply with various laws and regulations while responding to instances of potential injury, and related claims and suits. This creates remarkable challenges, and requires substantial experience, expertise, and other resources to effectively address them, especially in multi-sport (e.g., collegiate and scholastic) settings.

This brief excerpt from NSCA’s Essentials of Sport Science discusses skill-based key performance indicators (KPIs).

Taking Your Personal Training Career to the Next Level

This article encompasses some of the necessary experience, education, certifications, and personal development needed to become a strength and conditioning coach.