Strength and conditioning

S&C coach or sports scientist: Who does what in youth development pathways?

A little while ago, I was asked to assist a school that was looking to employ a sports scientist by writing a job description for them. I provided a short list of the the roles and responsibilities that I think a sport scientist should be fulfilling when working in the schools space.

Determining athlete maturity to inform coaching practice

This article discusses how to estimate levels og maturation in youth athletes

How strong is strong enough?

Strength is an important quality for sports, but it is subject to diminishing returns - as you get stronger, it requires progressively more work to continue improving. This article discusses at which point athletes would benefit more from focusing on other fitness qualities.

Strength Training for Coaching Success

This talk explores a robust process for prioritising training goals for athletes participating at a semi-professional, university level. The process described advocates for first developing movement proficiency, before developing, strength, power and energy system capacities. The second half of this talk explores the use of various technologies to inform the training process.

GPS comparison of training activities and game demands of professional rugby union

An investigation into how well training activities simulate the running demands of rugby union match play

Modelling Training to Prevent Injury

Modeling training to prevent injury. Athletes walk on a tight rope - if they don't train exceptionally hard, they won't be competitive. If they train too hard they start suffering from fatigue and maladaptation. This talk explores contemporary methods of assessing and reporting athletes response to training to guide them through this process.

Aspire How’s and Why’s of Training Load Monitoring

Take home messages from Aspire Academy conference 2016 - Managing Training Loads – The How’s and Why’s

Interval training sessions derived from maximal aerobic speed

Its February, and all around the country, that means that teams are putting in the hard yards in preparation for the winter sports season that is rapidly approaching. The theme of this post therefore, is hopefully to provide some assistance in getting your team fit in the most efficient way possible.

Data driven decisions you can rely on

This article examines the impact of variability in athletic performance tests and how to quantify and interpret this

Dynamic oscillatory stretching efficacy on hamstring extensibility and stretch tolerance; a randomized controlled trial

This paper invesitiges the physical qualities that underpin performance in a high-intensity repeat sprint task