☕️ S&C Daily — Fifteen Minutes More

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Memphis opened the season on August 29 as a 4.5-point underdog, with a 1,500-mile flight to Las Vegas and a 9 p.m. Central kickoff at the end of it. Head coach Charles Huff had spent a little north of $20,000 on the part he could control.

That bought Dr. Cheri Mah, a sleep physician who has worked with the Eagles, the Seahawks and the Spurs. Her plan starts on the Tuesday of game week. Bedtime and wake time move 30 minutes later each day, walking the roster toward Pacific time before the plane ever leaves, and practice slides toward kickoff. On travel day the window shades stay up, nobody sleeps on the flight, and players walk outdoors without sunglasses when they land.

Memphis trailed 14-7 at the half, then outscored UNLV 20-7 and won 27-21. Huff said coaches at six other programs called him the next day asking what the team had done.

"I'm not asking you to go from seven hours and try to get 10 today. I'm asking you (to try and get) 15 minutes more," Mah said.

In a new essay, Elon's assistant athletics director for peak performance, Nick DiMarco, draws a line between expressing a trait and developing one, and argues most programs confuse the two. A movement that shows what an athlete can already do is a test, not training.

So selection is a budget, not a menu. Every movement spends time, adaptive capacity and coaching attention, and none of the three refill. He is working inside 60-minute sessions four days a week, so he picks traits first, then the movements that build them.

That is why his athletes do not perform the Olympic lifts. He likes them. His argument is that the lift was never what drove the adaptation - the strength and explosiveness underneath it were, and those can be built without spending weeks teaching a clean.

"If a movement does not develop something the sport asks the athlete to do, it is not quality training; it is performative exercise," DiMarco writes.

Thirteen healthy young adults spent one night with no sleep at all and one night sleeping normally, in random order. After the sleepless night, muscle protein synthesis ran 18% lower, testosterone was down 24% and cortisol was up 21%. Markers of muscle breakdown did not move, so the damage is on the building side rather than the losing side. It is a small study and a full night awake is an extreme, but one night was enough.

In a new post, strength coach Michael Boyle makes the case that no sport needs its own in-season program. Every sport coach thinks his is the exception. He opens with a line he got from Marco Cardinale: "your sport isn't different, you just think it is."

What he runs is two days a week. Push, pull, legs, core. One or two working sets past the warm-up. Heavy early in the week if games fall on weekends. Nothing below five reps on bilateral lower body work, because a heavy squat or deadlift in season is not worth what it risks.

Attendance is the part he keeps returning to. A flexible policy means players skip. Skipping legs is the one that bites, because players come back sore before a game.

Keith D'Amelio is the Lakers' new director of integrated performance systems, reporting to president of basketball operations Rob Pelinka. He was most recently chief innovation officer for the New York Liberty, where he sat across basketball operations, health and performance, analytics and applied science. Before that he spent 13 years at Nike, with earlier stops at the Celtics, the Raptors and Stanford men's basketball.

"Keith brings a unique perspective at the intersection of athlete health, performance, sports science and technology," Pelinka said.

Tell us what you're running - equipment, tech, force plates, software - and we'll continue to share the results as they come in.

Jacksonville University

D.C. United

University of Florida

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