☕️ S&C Daily — Pour Into Each Other

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The Duke Chronicle sat in on Duke’s last lift of fall camp, where director of football sports performance David Feeley holds every player to the same standard with no exceptions. Head coach Manny Diaz calls the room the church of Feeley. Feeley’s case is that the sameness is what produces the trust.

"When you treat everybody equally accountable, there’s an enormous amount of trust that goes on in the world," Feeley said. "We start that day one in January."

It shows up in the details. Players lift two to a rack in sync with the pair beside them, tablets on the racks track bar speed and the players lead the warmup themselves. Everybody wears the same shirt with "this is the way" across the chest. Freshmen are not in the room yet, and train separately until they have learned it.

Partway through, one player at a time lifts in front of everybody. Feeley is the first voice cheering and the rest of the team circles up around him, so every rep gets watched by the whole room. Graduate linebacker Nick Morris Jr. has been through five winters and summers of it.

"It is such a difficult environment not only physically, but mentally," Morris said. "Every single person that plays on a Duke football field will have gone through at least a summer with him."

Feeley closed the session by telling the team what all of it had been for. "Pour into each other," he said. "Now’s the time."

In a new News & Observer story, NC State director of football nutrition Jaelyn Shipman walks through what her staff does with 125 players every day. Every player takes a saliva test each morning and gets sorted by hydration status before breakfast, then hydration shots and carbohydrates before practice and tart cherry juice after it.

The plans themselves are individual. Some players get hourly instructions, others get what to eat at set times with the quantities spelled out, and Shipman builds them with the position coaches, the strength staff and athletic training. Most of the adjusting happens in the offseason. Once August comes the job is holding the plan in place.

The roster numbers moved. Defensive lineman AJ Prim went from 287 pounds to 300. Tight end Vander Ploog arrived from Oregon at 220 and is listed at 250. Quarterback CJ Bailey was 185 as a high school senior and is now 218. Away from the facility, players text Shipman photos of what they are eating.

"I don’t feel responsible for wins and losses," Shipman said. "But I do feel responsible if there’s a guy that ends up having major issues like cramping, or they are just sluggish and under-fueled."

The job showed up elsewhere in Week 1. South Carolina beat Kent State on Saturday with the heat index near 110 degrees, the hottest home game in Williams-Brice Stadium history, and both teams agreed to cut five minutes off the fourth quarter. Shane Beamer gave the game ball to Yimy Queipo Rodriguez, his director of football performance nutrition.

Myles Garrett is preparing for a Week 1 game in Australia against the 49ers, and part of that preparation has run through Billy Coffey, a strength and conditioning coach at Wanderers Rugby Union Football Club outside Sydney. Coffey trained at the Australian Institute of Sport and has won an award for his work refining tackling technique.

The change is one step. Instead of taking a full step and letting his legs pull him into contact, Garrett takes a shorter pre-step and drives through the hips into the hit. Coffey’s case is that tackling should be a lower-body action rather than a shoulder or head one, which is where the concussion risk sits.

Rhonda Patrick shared a new Nature Health paper this week that matched 4,793 nights of food logs against wearable sleep tracking. It is observational rather than a controlled trial.

Fiber was the one that moved. Days with more of it produced more deep sleep and more REM, less light sleep, and a nocturnal heart rate about one beat per minute lower. Eating a wider variety of plant foods did the same to heart rate. The shifts in sleep stages were small, under a point and a half each.

The macro split did not matter. Day to day changes in carbohydrate, fat and protein showed no reliable effect once the authors corrected for multiple comparisons, and neither did individual micronutrients.

University of Oklahoma

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