Good morning. Demetrious Johnson is calling out an S&C coach after Khamzat Chimaev's UFC title loss, a new piece argues the neck is one of the most overlooked structures in sports, and Kyle Southall draws a line between recovery and readiness. Let's get into it.
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🥊 Demetrious Johnson Blames S&C Coach for Chimaev's UFC 328 Loss
After Khamzat Chimaev lost his UFC middleweight title to Sean Strickland via split decision Saturday, the conversation quickly shifted to conditioning. Former UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson, who trained with Chimaev during camp, called out the workload in a YouTube reaction video. "There comes a point in time when you're already in shape, you can't push your cardio any further, physically it's impossible, the only thing you're gonna get is diminishing returns," Johnson said.
He added that he watched Chimaev go too hard in camp: "Sometimes less is more and more is less." S&C coach Sam Calavitta of the Treigning Lab has also drawn criticism from Aljamain Sterling, who commented: "It's funny that people think doing all that equates to great conditioning in the fight." Read More
📖 The Cervical Spine Might Be the Most Undertrained Structure in Sports
Brad Thorpe published a piece arguing that the neck is one of the most overlooked structures in all of sports performance. His case: the cervical spine is deeply integrated with the nervous system's ability to organize posture, balance, anticipatory stabilization, and force transfer through the kinetic chain - yet almost no programs include structured cervical spine training.
He points to an experiment where a 45-second cervical isometric intervention produced a 21.8% immediate improvement in eccentric braking force in an athlete with three prior ACL reconstructions. His argument is not about injury prevention alone. It's about the cervical spine as a central regulator of whole-body force expression. Read More
🏃 Recovery and Readiness Are Not the Same Thing
Performance coach Kyle Southall published part one of a series on SimpliFaster drawing a distinction that gets collapsed constantly in practice: recovery and readiness are not the same construct.
Recovery describes what has already happened in response to past stress. Readiness describes what the athlete can tolerate right now. The two operate on different timescales, respond to different stressors, and should inform different decisions. Southall's argument is that wearable dashboards and composite readiness scores have amplified the confusion rather than resolved it - most aggregate multiple signals without defining what the score actually represents. An athlete can be metabolically recovered but neurologically fatigued. Another can feel sharp while connective tissue is still compromised. Neither scenario shows up cleanly in a single daily metric. Read More
📊 FY2025 Athletic Revenue Rankings: Texas Leads, a Big Gap Behind
New EADA data shared by analyst Jeff Fuller shows 2025 total athletic revenue for all FBS programs. Texas leads at $343.1M, followed by Ohio State ($295.3M), Notre Dame ($289.6M), Tennessee ($285.4M) and Penn State ($254.4M). The gap between the haves and have-nots is significant - the top 10 programs all cleared $234M, while programs ranked 70th and below fall under $100M. All FBS schools, including private institutions, are required to self-report these figures to the US Department of Education annually. Read More
🥍 Florida State Adds Michael Stegemoeller to S&C Staff
Michael Stegemoeller has been hired as Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach for Florida State women's lacrosse.
Director of Sports Performance
Henderson State University | view
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