This article discusses how first responder organizations can optimize their training programs through scientific techniques, including the measurement of training load.

This excerpt from NSCA’s Essentials of Sport Science briefly explains workload and injury risk factors.

Some research has found that static stretching can have detrimental effects on subsequent performance. This is not to say that static stretching should be eliminated from an athlete’s program, but it should be sensibly incorporated into the daily training regimen since chronic stretching can enhance the range of motion around a joint and potentially improve strength and power performance.

This consensus statement provides specific conditioning recommendations with the intent of ending conditioning-related morbidity and deaths of secondary school athletes. Most deaths in sports are preventable; our charge is to meet this expectation.

In this session from the 2015 NSCA TSAC Conference, Matt Wenning explains the sumo deadlift, a foundational exercise for maximal strength development and a tool that is essential to the tactical population due to its movement pattern. The ability to learn proper technique and progressions with this exercise can help to improve a tactical athlete’s performance and decrease the likelihood of injury because it trains major muscle groups and multiple joints at the same time.

This excerpt from Developing Power discusses neuromuscular training for youth athletes.

Learn about cluster sets, and how they can be used in program design for optimal athletic development. Greg Haff, President of the NSCA, shares examples of various set structures in this session from the NSCA 2016 National Conference.

The purpose of this article is to review the physiological determinants of police work, provide the strength and conditioning professional with an overview of comm on constraints associated with training police officers, discuss the role of autoregulated training, and provide programming recommendations for training police officers around their patrol shifts.

This article serves as a guide for current and future strength and conditioning professionals who oversee program design for fire academy recruits. This includes a summarized needs analysis and a sample training program that considers the unique challenges of the fire academy.