☕️ S&C Daily — Less Practice, Maximum Care

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In a new AP story on how teams are stretching out the careers of NFL linemen, Patriots right tackle Morgan Moses walks through the plan the staff built for him. He sat out the on-field portion of minicamp this spring and takes veteran days off through the week, with the practice time redirected into off-field treatment. At 35 he started all 21 games of New England’s Super Bowl run. “I played all 21 games last year, so it worked,” Moses said of the program from Mike Vrabel and the sports performance staff.

The league is moving with him. Twelve linemen aged 35 or older started a game last season, the first time that has hit double digits since 2002, after averaging 3.1 a season from 2006 through 2019. The facilities are following the money - New England’s new athletic center ran $95 million, and San Francisco put $9 million into rehab and hydrotherapy alone.

Chris Beardsley recently resurfaced a 2025 Journal of Applied Physiology study on X, and the design is what makes it worth a second look. Strength-trained lifters trained one leg heavy at 3-5RM and the other light at 20-25RM for eight weeks, three sets to failure on leg press and knee extension, twice a week with a deload in the middle. The light leg did 3.5 times the volume load.

The growth came out the same. Muscle thickness in the vastus lateralis rose in both legs with no significant difference between them, though the distal region numerically favored the heavy leg. The strength did not follow. Leg press 1RM climbed around 20% on both sides, while knee extension 1RM rose about 9% on the heavy leg and did not improve at all on the light one.

Beardsley’s read is blunter: “The idea that volume load has anything to do with hypertrophy needs to be retired.”

Since Georgia stopped one-rep maxing, the number Scott Sinclair progresses is power output. A player who squats 350 at an output of 720 is being asked for 375 at 900 next time. Conditioning moved the same direction, away from everyone running the length of the field and toward the distances each position actually covers in a game.

Iowa hired Matt Gabriel as an assistant athletic performance coach for baseball, and he will also run strength and conditioning for the swimming and diving program. He spent 2023 to 2026 as a minor league strength coach in the Angels organization, working with their Class A affiliates and Double-A Rocket City.

Washington and Lee named Tucker Kindig an assistant strength and conditioning coach, a role he splits with assistant track and field duties overseeing the throws. He arrives from Shenandoah, where he coached throws for two seasons and grew the group from two athletes to ten. He threw there himself, finishing as a three-time All-American.

Williston Public Schools

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