This excerpt from NSCA’s Guide to Sport and Exercise Nutrition discusses carbohydrate loading strategies for athletes to achieve optimal athletic performance.

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.

This article provides practical guidelines for limiting high-reward foods and demonstrates why minimizing high-reward foods is a simple and well-supported strategy for long-term adherence to a nutritional approach that emphasizes high-quality, nutrient-dense, lower calorie foods.

Social Media and High School Athletes

This article suggests how high school strength and conditioning coaches can not only prepare high school athletes for sports and fitness, but also help with the process of improving fitness and athleticism of all youth.

The purpose of this article is to describe the content and format of a collegiate introductory strength and conditioning course to induce behavioral changes in college students for lifelong physical activity and fitness.

One area that can have great impact on the success of a high school athletic department is the strength and conditioning program. This session from the 2015 NSCA National Conference provides insights from Coach Kevin Vanderbush’s personal experience as the strength and conditioning coach at Ben Davis High School for 31 years. This session covers the most important components of strength and conditioning at the high school level and provides both the rationale behind certain practices as well as practical tips.

In this session from the 2016 NSCA Coaches Conference, the Sports Science and Performance Manager for the Seattle Sounders Major League Soccer (MLS) team, David Tenney, discusses the “high performance model” in the American elite sports environment. Tenney delves into how this model impacts hierarchy and daily decision making, as well as the obstructions that many organizations face, how this model can help to drive decision making and optimize training strategies, and the different strategies that can help make this happen.

In this career series article, Coach McHenry provides a path for education, certification, knowledge, and networking essential to excelling as a successful high school strength and conditioning coach

Potentiation Warmups for Lifting at the High School Level and Beyond