☕️ S&C Daily — Do Your Breathing Technique

October 15, 2026

Notre Dame plays at BYU on Saturday in Provo, roughly 4,650 feet above sea level. South Bend sits at 732. The Irish added altitude prep to their routine this week, starting Sunday, and it builds on something they’ve worked on all offseason: breathing techniques to help players recover between plays.

Captain Drayk Bowen said the plan comes from Loren Landow, who spent a long time in Denver. Landow’s message is that the teams that struggle at elevation are the ones without a breath focus. “If you do your process, do your breathing technique, he said it’s not that much different,” Bowen said.

The other two pieces are fueling and hydration. Landow told the players that’s where altitude catches up with teams that skip them, and Bowen said the nutrition staff, Landow and the coaches are all on the players about it. Based on what they’ve been told to work on, Bowen doesn’t expect it to be much of a challenge.

A new review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition pooled 51 studies and more than 1,100 people. Each study measured the muscle-building response in the hours after a single lifting session followed by one dose of protein. It compared 19 sources, including whey, casein, whole eggs, beef, salmon, soy, pea and mealworm.

Two plant proteins, pea and mycoprotein, ranked right alongside native whey, whole egg and whey. The difference was the dose. The animal proteins showed their best predicted response at about 18-20 g, while pea and mycoprotein needed about 25 g. Regular whey was the only source whose effect was statistically significant on its own. Fava bean and mealworm protein ranked lowest.

Purdue soccer players wear WHOOP bands every day to track sleep, stress and readiness. Head coach Richard Moodie only sees a traffic-light readiness view, so the numbers don’t sway his decisions. Strength coach Wally Becker and athletic trainer Kirstin Lueken monitor each player and flag Moodie when the team is training too much or too little. GPS tracks every player’s mileage at practice, something Moodie has used since 2013, when he says only the Seattle Seahawks were.

Players say the staff are “really extra on loads,” aiming for the most work without too much. The program also added a recovery room this offseason with saunas, red light therapy and ice baths. Purdue is 12-1-2 and beat No. 2 Michigan State last week.

A new systematic review in Sports Medicine - Open looked at how to close left-right strength gaps. It covered 11 studies and 297 athletes aged 12 to 30. Some programs tested athletes first to find the weaker leg. Then they gave that leg more work, either by starting every single-leg set on that side or by adding volume. Other programs trained both legs the same.

The targeted programs closed the gap more consistently. Single-leg training also beat bilateral training for shrinking the gap and for single-leg performance. Bilateral training did better on bilateral tasks. The authors call the weaker-side approach practical and safe.

This week’s Science for Sport bulletin highlighted a study of 129 professional rugby players from Ireland’s four provinces, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Ulster, across three seasons. Researchers used more than 141,000 player-day records, including over 47,000 training exposures and 5,700 match exposures, to see whether AI could predict non-contact lower-limb injuries in a player’s next session or match.

Over a nine-month test period, the best model caught 8 of 54 injuries. It also raised 636 high-risk alerts, roughly 77 false alarms for every correct prediction. Predicting whether a player will get hurt in his next session “remains extraordinarily difficult,” the bulletin says.

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