☕️ S&C Daily — Less Time Learning, More Time Training

November 4, 2026

In a new Sportsmith interview, LSU assistant strength and conditioning coach Ashley Kowalewski walks through how she decides what goes in a program. She starts with the adaptation, then the athlete, then the cost: learning time, fatigue and coaching attention. In a college setting, if she can’t teach an exercise in three sessions or less, she has a hard time justifying it.

The clean is her example. For a tall volleyball player who struggles to hold a front-rack catch, she reaches for a hang clean pull, a loaded jump, a throw or a landmine hang power clean with a Viking handle instead. The same logic runs through her squats: a back squat, belt squat and leg press can all build lower-body strength, and she picks by which constraints help that athlete. “Less time learning, more time training,” Kowalewski said.

A new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research put 33 high-level college soccer players, 18 men and 15 women, through 10 x 15-meter sprints. Each sprint was followed by a 5-meter enforced deceleration, with 20 seconds of recovery between reps. Researchers tracked sprint speed and deceleration on every rep, and tested countermovement jump and kicking before and after.

Deceleration fatigued far more than sprint speed. Jump and kicking performance didn’t drop significantly, though the women lost peak ball speed and the men didn’t. Players with better deceleration ability showed smaller performance drops. The authors’ conclusion: deceleration capacity is “more prone to acute fatigue than sprint ability.”

The San Francisco 49ers got a C-minus for their training room in the NFLPA report card released in February, with players calling the tub room too small and too crowded. Only the Cardinals and Cowboys graded lower. So this offseason the team spent $9 million knocking down walls in the hydrotherapy room next to the Levi’s Stadium locker room, nearly tripling its size.

The rebuilt room adds an in-ground cold tub, a multi-level therapy pool with a deep-water area for low- and non-impact running, and a treadmill pool that lowers players coming off surgery to a depth of up to six feet. The 49ers carry 16 players who are 30 or older. Quarterback Mac Jones limits his cold tub time to 12 minutes a week: three-minute sessions, four times a week, often a quick dunk before practice. “You don’t want to overdo it,” Jones said.

The Seattle Mariners hired Brett Platts as an assistant MLB strength and conditioning coach. Platts, 27, spent five years in the Cubs and Rangers organizations, most recently at Double-A. He never reached the majors as a player, but said “I’m able to do it as a staff member.”

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