Strength and Agility
As strength and conditioning coaches, we often make the claim that strength is important for athletes. Sometimes this is to overcome external objects (like another player or a shot put), sometimes...
View ArticlePredicting Injuries in Elite Female Soccer Players
Nilstad et al in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine have an article that examines 1731 elite Norwegian female soccer players and follows them for the 2009 season. Players were...
View ArticleReturning to Play After Hamstring Injuries
Mendiguchia et al, in the latest issue of the International Journal of Sports Medicine, conducted a study examining sprinting performance at the point that rehabbing players were allowed to return to...
View ArticleSmall Sided Games For Conditioning
Small sided games (SSGs) are used in soccer, basketball, rugby, and cricket to develop conditioning, repeated sprint ability, technical skills, and tactical abilities. Basically these involve games...
View ArticleAgility Can Be Trained Generally And Specifically
Agility is often a difficult physical ability to train. I often view it as the summation of the athlete’s physical abilities (strength, speed, mobility, etc.) that is applied to the sport’s movement...
View ArticleSpeed Training And Soccer
Background Soccer has always been a challenging sport for the strength and conditioning professional, especially when it comes to speed training. Over the years I’ve seen everything from having the...
View ArticleKettlebells And Aerobic Fitness
Kettlebells broke onto the strength and conditioning scene a few years ago. They have been touted as developing everything from strength, power, mobility, hypertrophy, metabolic conditioning, and even...
View ArticleIt’s Challenging To Study Athletes
One of the challenges with strength and conditioning research is applying it to real athletes. Much of strength and conditioning research is done on college students and involves investigating an...
View ArticleConditioning Needs To Address The Athlete’s Needs
Metabolic conditioning can be a tricky quality to develop with athletes. Too often we look at this as either long, slow distance aerobic training or we look at it as thrashing the athletes for a gut...
View ArticleThe Squat And Sprinting
In a previous post ( http://www.cissik.com/blog/2016/05/athletes-need-to-squat/ ), I touched on the importance of the squat exercise for athletes. Continuing with this thought, Styles et al, in the...
View ArticleHamstring Muscles Are Different After Injury
Hamstring strains are a fact of life for athletes who sprint in their sport. There are a lot of factors behind this, but one of the biggest is possible a lack of strength in the lengthened position –...
View ArticleDo We Even Need To Train Agility?
Are speed, power, and agility different physical abilities? If they are, do they need to be tested and trained with different exercises? Does this change with different levels of athletes? In other...
View ArticleHamstring Training: Sometimes Old Favorites are Better
Hamstring injuries are an issue with athletes that have to sprint, which is most of them. With that in mind, strength and conditioning professionals are always searching for better ways to train these...
View ArticleSoccer Speed: Small Sided Games May Not Be Enough
Soccer is a sport that involves a lot of repeated sprints at various intensities during a match. With that in mind, coaches are very interested in the most effective ways to train soccer players. In...
View ArticleIt May Not Matter What You Train First
Is there a best way to organize an athlete’s training? In other words, should we do plyometrics first because they involve speed and technique? Then, should we follow that with slower strength moves...
View ArticleRun Fast to be Fast
I put out a tweet about speed training a while ago, to the effect that using sprints as punishment or sprinting until one is sick is not a good way to develop speed. As usual the social media...
View ArticleThere Are No Magic Exercises or Workout Programs!
Despite everything that we know about the hamstrings, hamstring injuries, sprinting, and the sport of soccer, this is still a big problem in soccer. Researchers in the Netherlands published a study...
View ArticleIf Willpower Is Lacking Gains Will Suffer
Hamstring strains are a common injury for athletes in sports that have to sprint. One of the interventions to help prevent these injuries is the Nordic hamstring exercise. With this exercise, the...
View ArticleControversial Speed Training Thoughts
Speed training can often be a controversial topic and I frequently add fuel to this fire on Twitter. Clearly it’s important for athletes to be able to run fast, but we often forget to consider that...
View Article
