☕️ S&C Daily — Same Work, Different Cost

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“Identical external load does not mean identical internal responses,” Marc Lewis writes in a new Sportsmith article. Tracking data shows what a football player did. Heart rate shows how he responded to it. Average college practice heart rate sits at roughly 55 to 65% of age-predicted max, and across 10 in-season weeks of Division I data, heart rate-derived load tracked meaningfully only with low-intensity movement and total distance. High-speed running lined up weakly with both heart rate and RPE-based load.

He points to Renaghan and colleagues, who followed 30 Division I starters across 13 in-season weeks. Higher acute and cumulative cardiac load were both linked to lower maximum running speed, and players with a higher resting heart rate the next day showed bigger drops in top speed. Time above 150 bpm was tied to a higher next-day resting heart rate and impaired heart rate recovery, though Lewis says that is not a universal red flag.

His framework compares each athlete against his own rolling numbers from the same day of the week, from the GD-4 contact day to the GD-1 recovery day. In one example, two linebackers log similar GD-4 workloads, but one posts a much higher heart rate and TRIMP than his own norm. Lewis does not change his training automatically. He checks the next morning’s resting heart rate, HRV and wellness answers before deciding on GD-3.

In NFL.com’s Next Woman Up series, Lions assistant strength and conditioning coach and director of sports science Jill Costanza walked through the team’s regular-season week. Monday starts with game data and GPS metrics to see which players took a high load, plus a recovery lift. Players are off Tuesday, so she and head S&C coach Josh Schuler go over injury reports and return-to-play protocols. Wednesdays and Thursdays bring a morning lift, practice, a post-practice lift for anyone who missed the morning, then a practice data report for Dan Campbell.

Her path ran through an internship at Texas, three years with the Army and two with Air Force special forces, where she met Mike Clark, Campbell’s strength coach at Texas A&M. When Campbell got the Detroit job and brought Clark in as human performance director, Costanza was the first person Clark asked to come with him. That didn’t happen until she was 41. “It’s never too late,” she said.

A new study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness put 30 resistance-trained youth handball players (22 men, 8 women, around 18 years old) through a seven-week, in-season lower-body program. One group took every set to failure. The other did the same volume split into twice as many sets.

The split group moved the bar faster in training. Both groups added 15% to their back squat 1RM and 6% to squat jump height, and neither group out-gained the other in quad size on ultrasound. Only the split group raised maximal vertical power. Neither group changed its one-legged jump and reach, 20 m sprint or change-of-direction times.

Taylor Swift put out new music Tuesday, and Justin Lima used it to make a case in a new Strength Coach Network piece: singers and performers are athletes. They dance and sing on stage for hours, several days a week, for weeks and months at a time, plus rehearsal. His read is that it looks like in-season games and practice, with an offseason spent getting ready for tour.

Lima points to Ben Bruno, who worked with Justin Timberlake while he was on tour, and Frank Barone, who left college and pro soccer S&C to train clients one-on-one in California. He files training performers under private-sector S&C, a niche like corporate wellness. “Now you will never be able to unsee performers as athletes,” Lima writes.

Springfield College officially announced Jeff Stern as head strength and conditioning coach and assistant professor of strength and conditioning. The 2020 alum and former Pride halfback comes from UMass, where he led speed sessions and return-to-play protocols for football.

Oregon State named Ragean Hill deputy AD and chief sports performance and operations officer, with sports performance among the areas she oversees. She spent seven years as an executive associate AD at Charlotte.

Austin Reaves will have his own trainer this season: former Lakers head S&C coach Ed Streit, per The Athletic. Streit is expected to be on the Lakers’ staff, similar to LeBron James’ trainer Mike Mancias. Reaves played a career-low 51 games last season.

At media day, Grizzlies GM Zach Kleiman said availability is the goal for the rebuilt health and performance staff led by Mike Curtis. Curtis was Memphis’ head S&C coach from 2002-08 before 17 years with Virginia men’s basketball.

Suns big Khaman Maluach gave the credit to Phoenix’s strength staff. “I feel like I got a lot stronger … it’s a big piece for me,” Maluach said. “Credit to our strength and conditioning team.”

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