☕️ S&C Daily — Better and Different

October 8, 2026

Nets guard Egor Dëmin went 1-for-4 inside the arc in his rookie summer league. This summer he went 22-for-29. Via the New York Post, work with head strength and conditioning coach Alvin Dike has helped him get bigger and stronger, and his downhill game has benefited.

Dëmin started at point guard in Brooklyn’s 124-90 preseason-opening win over the Hornets on Tuesday and had five assists in about 18 minutes. Coach Jordi Fernández said Dëmin is stronger and now very comfortable getting to the paint.

Teammate Michael Porter Jr. said that after working with Dike in the weight room, Dëmin looks “better and different.” Porter said defenders aren’t able to crowd him or be physical with him.

A new review from Dr. Ben House, Dr. Andy Galpin and colleagues asked whether higher testosterone means more muscle from lifting. Inside the normal range, it didn’t. In six groups totaling nearly 200 young men on resistance training programs, baseline testosterone did not predict how much muscle they gained. The authors said two men at opposite ends of the normal range could start a program and gain about the same amount.

The brief rise in testosterone after a workout did not appear to produce more growth either. It lasts under an hour and adds only about 0.1% to 0.3% to a day’s total exposure. The level mattered only at the extremes: growth was blunted when drugs suppressed testosterone, and lean mass rose with the dose when testosterone was given as a drug.

Why it matters: The authors said that across a roughly 20-fold range of testosterone, whether men lifted explained far more of the change in lean mass than their testosterone level did. In one trial, men suppressed to about 32 ng/dL still gained 1.3 kg with resistance training.

In this week’s Science for Sport bulletin, Lars Johansen, a sports psychologist at Denmark’s national high-performance organization, warned that social media before exercise can cause mental fatigue and hurt physical performance. He pointed to a study of young football players who spent 30 minutes on a specially designed, cognitively demanding smartphone app before a Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test. They covered an average of 1,610 meters, compared with 1,780 meters in the control condition, a 10.56% drop.

Johansen compared that decline to smoking three to four cigarettes before training. He said a total ban on social media is unrealistic, so he advises avoiding it in the hours before training and competition.

Paudie Roche, who has worked with Munster Rugby, the IRFU and Arsenal Women across 25 years, laid out his in-season approach in a recent Setanta College webinar. “My job is to make sure players are available,” he said. He sorts players into three buckets: strainers, the experienced or injury-prone players who need careful management; maintainers, who need their qualities held where they are; and gainers, the younger players who need extra work.

He said strength, speed and power are lost after two to three weeks without training them. His guidelines: strength work in sets of five reps or fewer, power work in 10 to 15 minutes before training, and maximum speed exposure twice a week at 90% or more in a one-game week. When there’s no time for a full session, he uses short doses of strength work after games or training.

Butler announced the hiring of Josh Wilkerson as men’s basketball strength and conditioning coach. He spent the last two seasons in the same role at Middle Tennessee, where the Blue Raiders maintained 99% player availability in 2025-26, and was previously an assistant at Vanderbilt.

Clemson receiver Tyler Brown said this is the healthiest he has been and credited new strength and conditioning coach Dennis Love and his staff for priming muscles he had never focused on. Brown had a career-high 10 catches against Miami last weekend.

Lions safety Brian Branch returned to practice Wednesday after a 10-month rehab from a torn Achilles. He thanked director of player health and performance Brett Fischer and head of strength and conditioning Josh Schuler, and said his conditioning is the only hurdle left.

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