☕️ S&C Daily — Not Just a Strength Guy

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Florida rebuilt its strength program this year under new director of football performance Rusty Whitt, and kept one piece of the old staff. Jake Sankal, the director of football nutrition, came to Gainesville after eight years with Washington in the NFL, and he built a system where the macronutrient targets are not fixed. Yardage and load numbers come off GPS tracking, and he rewrote the wide receiver targets after seeing what they cover in the new offense. Some players are eating more than 5,100 calories a day.

"We've already changed them this year based on our yardage and how much our skill guys are running," Sankal said. "We realized it in spring ball when I started to see real practices." The measuring runs on a schedule. Players get 10 body composition assessments a year, an InBody for body fat and lean mass and a DEXA for a more precise read that takes in bone density.

Blood work is where the budget bites. At Washington every player got a blood test to find nutritional deficiencies. Florida's budget covers 12 a year, so Sankal spends them on the players who will make the biggest impact on the field or who carry the largest nutritional needs. "I'd be shocked if there's a program that utilizes supplements more than we do," Sankal said.

Most weight rooms use some variation of load divided by bodyweight - a two times bodyweight squat, a bodyweight bench. A new paper in Sports Medicine - Open ran the numbers on 101,898 drug-tested powerlifters and found those benchmarks are not equally hard to reach. Lighter athletes can hit far bigger multiples. Among the best male lifters, the deadlift multiple is 4.37 times bodyweight in the 59 kg class and 2.65 at 120 kg and above. Same standard of athlete, completely different number.

The gap widens as the athlete gets stronger. The drop-off with bodyweight is steeper at the top of the field than in the middle, so the multiplier misleads most on exactly the athletes a coach cares about most. What the authors publish instead is a table of standards in actual kilograms, broken out by lift, sex and weight class.

Switch mats are showing up next to force plates in CFB weight rooms, not replacing them. Miami, JMU, UCLA and Tulsa among them. The plate gives you the deep force profile. The mat gives you contact time, flight time and RSI in real time, on every rep, at group speed.

The Portable System: two mats, the Controller 3.0, cables, and the app. Under $1,000, free software, no subscription. Learn more

The NHL's new collective bargaining agreement took effect this week and fitness testing went with it. No body fat measurement, no skate test, no version of the rope test John Tortorella used to run on day one. Camps are shorter too - the Flyers have 11 days from their first session Thursday to their last practice on September 27. Whatever used to get sorted out in September has to be done by August now.

Defenseman Jamie Drysdale's summer runs on a fixed week: power Monday and Wednesday, strength Tuesday and Thursday, conditioning Friday. "It's not one magic summer that does anything," said Bryan Marshall, who has trained him since he was 14 and was just named the New York Islanders' director of player performance.

Tennessee's football sports performance director Derek Owings and head coach Josh Heupel are the only two staff members in the building with a relationship with every player on the roster. A position coach owns one room. That access is the argument Voice of the Vols Mike Keith made on 104.5 The Zone this week for what an in-season strength coach is actually for, and his point was that the job is not confined to the weight room.

"Did you notice him on the field during injury situations? Have you watched him during huddles?" Keith said. "He's a coach. That's the part of Derek Owings that you need to understand is that he is a coach. He's not just a strength guy." The evidence two games in is thin but specific. "They like the fact they didn't get tired," Keith said. "They like the fact that they haven't seen a bunch of cramps in the first two games."

SMU Olympic Sports Performance, run by Dr. Peter Kenn, is one of the first five programs in the country named an NSCA Collegiate Program of Distinction, a three-year designation running through 2029.

Chip Sigmon, App State's first strength and conditioning coach, receives a Special Service Award at Friday's Hall of Fame ceremony, 42 years after taking the job for room and board and no salary.

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