☕️ S&C Daily — Lifting Far Too Light

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The New York Islanders named Bryan Marshall director of player performance, a job that puts him over strength and conditioning at the NHL club, the AHL affiliate and the prospect level. He spent 13 seasons with Vancouver, most recently as director of applied sports science, and has also worked with Toronto and the London Knights. He founded Milo Athletics in Mississauga and is still its program director.

The same announcement added Andrew Kacsor as a strength and conditioning coach, working alongside Joe Erdos, who stays in the role. "Bryan's track record of developing elite athletes at every level of the player's development process, combined with Andrew's training and approach to athlete development, gives us real depth in this department," general manager Mathieu Darche said.

Writing for SimpliFaster, Robbie Grow makes the case that the standard advice given to distance runners - light weight, high reps, activate the slow-twitch fibers - is a stimulus too small to matter on top of a 20 to 30 hour training week. What he programs instead is heavy.

The study he leans on is Storen et al. Seventeen well-trained distance runners, eight weeks, one group lifting and one not. Running economy at 70% of VO2max improved 5%, time to exhaustion on the MAS assessment improved 23.1% and rate of force development rose 26%, with no change in body weight. The adaptation came through the nervous system rather than added mass.

The program is two total-body lifts a week, three in lighter blocks and one during peak mileage. Grow sets load off a percentage of perceived difficulty rather than a 1RM so the athlete has room to move with what the legs have that day. The lifts sit on Monday and Thursday, which leaves 48 hours of recovery before the track workout and the long run.

Georgia has run shorter practices through August, partly because of a hotter than usual month and partly to have more left in the tank at the end of the season. Scott Sinclair, the Bulldogs' director of strength and conditioning, said one idea has governed the camp. "You gotta push guys, but you also gotta make sure you get guys to the race on Saturday," Sinclair said. "So load management is a big word we use, and making sure that they can be ready to go and handle the load for a Saturday."

Returning starters have been held to snap limits whether or not they are hurt. Drew Bobo and Gabe Harris came into fall camp with existing injuries, but tight end Lawson Luckie and running back Nate Frazier have seen their reps cut too. "Injured or not, those guys would have been on a pitch count this fall," head coach Kirby Smart said. "There's not enough snaps to go around, so we spread them out more, and those guys have been on pitch counts in terms of snap counts for practices."

Writing for Science for Sport, Eric Curry relays an argument from coach and sport scientist Eamonn Flanagan about what chronic band-assisted jumping does to the back half of a jump. The band helps on the way up and fights on the way down.

That resistance slows the rate of eccentric unloading and stretches the gap between the unloading phase and the eccentric braking phase, which is the window the stretch-shortening cycle works in. Assisted jumps still improve take-off velocity, lower-limb rate of force development and jump performance. Flanagan's point is that a faster take-off does not prove the stretch-shortening cycle got a better stimulus, and a plyometric block built mostly on assisted jumps over a long stretch risks under-stimulating it.

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George Washington University

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