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.

Incorporating land-based strength and conditioning into a training regimen can give a swimmer a competitive edge. As with every sport, there are sport-specific exercises the athlete should perform in order to mimic the specific sport movement they are trying to improve.

In this video from the NSCA's 2014 National Conference, Brad Schoenfeld and Alan Aragon discuss the evidence behind nutrient timing and exercise, focusing specifically on protein, amino acids and carbohydrate.

This article provides a brief overview of the physical demands of table tennis, plus recommendations of specific strength and conditioning exercises to improve table tennis performance.

Just as any athletic team can benefit from sport-specific training, tactical professionals can benefit from occupational task-specific training as well. Combining pushing, pulling, pressing, and total body movements into complexes may help mimic the demands and movements of job tasks that tactical personnel may encounter.

This article will focus on three common areas of injuries that occur with ice hockey players and some recommended strategies for the strength and conditioning professional.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to “pump iron” to build muscle. In this session from the NSCA’s 2015 Personal Trainers Conference, Nick Tumminello explains that to build muscle you need to create a training stimulus that elicits the three mechanisms for muscle growth. In other words, building muscle is not about the specific exercises you do, it is about the specific stimulus you create.

On-field success in sports requires the ability to solve sport-specific problems and utilize speed and agility within the specific context of the game. In this session from the 2015 NSCA National Conference, Ian Jeffreys explains how adding a task-based approach to an athlete’s speed and agility training can help ensure optimal transfer from training to game performance.

The focus of this article is to describe the physiological needs of soccer athletes and then provide assessments for testing endurance of athletes of various ages, abilities, and genders.

Professional standards can differ from gym-to-gym, studio-to-studio, and personal trainer-to-personal trainer, but all professional personal trainers can benefit from focusing on specific goals.