Bridge the Gap Lecture: The Art of Integration – Periodizing Speed, Power, & Strength in the Training Process

Megan Evans, Assistant Director of Strength and Conditioning for Olympic Sports at Virginia Tech, talks to the NSCA Head Strength and Conditioning Coach, Scott Caulfield, about the journey from student-athlete to assistant director.

The purpose of this article is to bring awareness and provide an overview of emerging areas within strength and conditioning and sport science.

Competence, autonomy, and relatedness are three keys to promoting a more intrinsically motivated athlete. These components can be combined in nearly limitless ways, which is especially important for the long basketball season.

Research on the benefits of using goals to increase athletic performance has shown that performance generally increases for athletes that use goals consistently. Learn how to move beyond generalities and see how a systematic goal setting approach can be paired with training athletes.

Learn about processes of data collection and presentation, and how to use the data to individualize athletes’ training. In this session from the NSCA’s 2016 National Conference, Kevin Paxton demonstrates an age-specific long-term athletic development (LTAD) syllabus for soccer players.

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.

Bo Sandoval, Director of Strength and Conditioning for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Performance Institute, shares his journey into strength and conditioning, future developments in the UFC program, and training principles around fighters.

CC 2022

Nick Savage, Director of Football Strength and Conditioning at the University of Florida, demonstrates warm-up complexes and Olympic-style lifting progressions to improve force development.