This excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness aims to provide a snapshot of programming volleyball-specific agility and quickness sessions.

Jim Davis, Director of the Good Athlete Project, talks to the NSCA Head Strength and Conditioning Coach, Scott Caulfield, about developments in high school coaching, options for how to structure and fund a high school position, coaching for kindness, and the application of cognitive neuroscience to fitness and exercise.

This article reviews the day-to-day operations of a strength and conditioning coach in the collegiate setting and identifies key factors that affect common coaching practices and athletic performance. Development of a dominant coaching style in controlling time, space, flow, and efficiency is examined to avoid problems and unintended negative consequences.

Coaches can also benefit from understanding the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment as they relate to motivation. Although coaches use a mixture of both reward and punishment, using rewards and a positive approach is arguably the best approach because it focuses on what athletes should do and what they did right.

Chris Morris, Director or Performance Science at the University of Kentucky, talks to the NSCA Coaching Program Manager, Eric McMahon, about the importance of capturing athlete readiness through data and technology. Topics under discussion include Dr. Morris’s time as a University of Kentucky football player turned PhD student, how sports science is critical to understanding athlete’s capacities on a much deeper view, and developing interpersonal relationships with athletes to create trust and buy-in. Find Dr. Morris on Twitter: @CMorrisPhD | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs or Twitter: @ericmcmahoncscs

In this session from the NSCA’s 2017 TSAC Annual Training, Mick Stierli discusses the new 12-week structured exercise program for law enforcement that was recently implemented in New South Wales, Australia. Stierli explains how to integrate a similar program into an organization and how to gain buy-in from tactical athletes.

In this video from the NSCA’s 2018 Coaches Conference, sports performance coordinator from Salisbury University, Matt Nein, describes what mental toughness is, skills associated with mental toughness, and how to develop this attribute in athletes.

Learn about the effects of recovery in neuroscience to sustain performance. In this session from the NSCA’s 2017 TSAC Annual Training, Mark Stephenson explains the neurophysiological effects of various recovery modalities in sustaining high performance.

Joel Raether, Director of Sport Performance at Authentic Performance Center, uses this session to take a closer look at how all variables within a program must be addressed to account for cumulative fatigue, density of variables within, and how to manage stressors for the tactical athlete with high demands for physical, mental, physiological, and emotional stress.

Various aspects of resistance training, such as specific exercises chosen, workout structure, resistance used, volume (repetitions and sets), rest intervals between sets, and training frequency, can be manipulated to mold the strength training program to best meet an endurance athlete’s goals.