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December 23, 2017
I’m not going to lie, I’m going to annoy some people with this post. This is a “food for thought” post. That means that I’m going to point some things out, but I’m not going to solve them with this post. If you’ve been in the strength and conditioning field for more than a few months, you’ve heard of the principle of specificity. This principle says that you adapt to training according to the way in which you train....
December 3, 2017
Prioritize for Program Success Today a strength and conditioning coach has way to many things that they have to develop. The internet and equipment companies don’t make this any easier because both things muddy the waters and distort what our athletes need. Today a strength and conditioning coach is expected to increase strength, improve power, develop speed and agility, work on core strength/endurance, develop mobility, increase muscle size (if necessary), educate athletes on nutrition, warm the athlete up for...
November 12, 2017
Speed is critical to sports performance. One of the side effects of the systematic incorporation of strength and conditioning into sports is that athletes are becoming bigger, stronger and they are a lot faster than they used to be. This means that if we have prospective athletes, speed training is something they are going to have to incorporate into their programs. Nowadays, lifting weights and practicing the sport are not enough! In a previous post ( http://www.cissik.com/blog/2017/10/speed-running-fast-is-a-skill/ ), we...
October 26, 2017
You have to practice running fast to get better at running fast. Variations of this statement are some of my favorite social media posts, it’s amazing how often people need to hear this. In this article I’m going to cover some of the more popular exercises that “replace” sprinting and talk about why I feel we have to keep them in perspective. First, a few things to keep in mind. Running fast is a skill. There are techniques, rhythms,...
September 13, 2017
Over the years I’ve seen a lot about training for sprinting on the internet. There are a lot of gurus and keyboard coaches. Slawinski et al, in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, had a really interesting article looking at about 30 years of elite sprinting. In this study the authors analyzed the power, force, and velocity outputs of men and women 100 meter sprinters at the 1987, 1988, 1991, 1997, 1999, 2007, 2009, and 2011...