In an age when armchair quarterbacking has reached a fevered pitch, thanks especially to social media, professional sports medical-performance teams are under ever-increasing scrutiny. Couple that with professional athletes who have a roster of personal experts looking after them and you have a recipe for conflict. But it doesn’t have to be that way: Here, Coach Derek Hansen looks at the impacts of both private sector and team-based care, and ways that they can work together.

For coaches continually searching for ways to strengthen their relationship with athletes, Coach Cody Roberts explains how velocity-based training can jumpstart the motivation and effort needed to boost athletes’ psychological readiness and breathe life into a stale and mundane training program.

When an athlete lacks range of motion in an anatomical region, it compromises their movement quality, potentially leading to compensations that increase injury risk. In the first of a two-part series, Coach Louis Howe teaches S&C coaches how to identify relevant anatomical landmarks and then use their smartphone to help perform lower extremity assessments.

The main challenge with neck strength is monitoring change and improvement. Coaches Wayland and Coughlan have devised a reliable neck testing procedure to measure peak force for general neck strength, and used the data to create an effective neck training protocol.

Every year, we hear the same misguided arguments about the limits of strength and conditioning training on performance and injuries. Ignorance and false logic often dictate how training should be done, casting aside science and reason in favor of bias and tradition. Coach Carl Valle suggests ways to defeat arguments based on bad logic.

The end of season review is crucial to Coach McConnell’s development process. By analyzing what occurred over the past year without the hustle and bustle of the in-season day-to-day routine, he and his staff begin to paint a picture of where they truly are and where they need to go.

When Coach Doug Gle started working at his current school, it had an embarrassingly small weight room and very little funding. Eighteen years later, they’ve got an upgraded facility with high-quality equipment. How did they do it? Read this piece to discover real, actionable ways to get money for your strength and conditioning program.

As coaches, sometimes we’re in a hurry to have our athletes lifting heavy and doing advanced movements. I urge you to avoid this path and instead “slow cook” your athletes. The better prepared they are from a young training age, the more strength and power they’ll be able to put out when they reach the upper levels of your program.