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

In this session from the 2015 NSCA National Conference, Nelson Ayotte—the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the St. Louis Blues National Hockey League (NHL) team—explains how to design and implement a specific energy systems program at the elite level. Ayotte demonstrates the characteristics of each of the three energy systems and their trainability, and explores how to understand the energy demands of a sport by analysis of its characteristics, competition intensity, and duration of efforts and recovery periods.

This excerpt briefly describes the different energy systems used by structural and wildland firefighters.

This article is intended to provide an understanding of the demands of football from a bioenergetic perspective and provides a framework in which strength and conditioning professionals can design conditioning plans that focus on preparing athletes for competition.

In order to effectively prepare an ice hockey player for the season, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the specific demands of the sport.

The extent to which a special operator’s training schedule can be planned in advance is often limited due to their unpredictable operational demands. However, there may be opportunities to plan for specific training during certain periods.

This article will highlight recent key dietary practices and provide practical applications for implementing these practices for firefighters.

This article explains the connections between the upper and lower body and their influence on performance and recovery strategies in sprinting.

All sports nutrition professionals should be able to answer basic nutrition questions. However, athletes with complex nutrition issues should be referred to the appropriate resource as explained in this book excerpt.

Concurrent training (CT), which combines resistance exercise and energy systems conditioning, is the default approach to preparation in high-intensity intermittent (“stop and go”) team sports. This review provides an overview of CT, emphasizing its complexities and challenges in managing fatigue and optimizing performance. These complexities are specifically compounded by the variability in game demands across the season, where the presence of intensified and nonintensified competition periods necessitates a flexible and adaptive training approach. In this context, there are essential training variables to consider, including intensity, volume, session order, and recovery intervals between sessions. In addition, nontraining variables such as travel, sleep, and nutrition play a role in the fatigue experienced while training and competing. These variables interact to influence acute performance and training adaptations and can be strategically adjusted by strength and conditioning practitioners. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive understanding of fatigue management for practitioners in team sports, emphasizing the complexities and challenges of CT and offering simplified practical recommendations for adjusting training variables within any given microcycle.