☕️ S&C Daily — Still Got the Juice

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Giants assistant general manager Brandon Brown said Wednesday that GPS data and sports science support the case that wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. still has juice at 33. The staff tested Beckham when he worked out for the team and has tracked him since, and per beat reports his numbers have come back in line with what New York wanted to see.

Final roster cuts land Sunday night. A season-ending knee injury to Calvin Austin III opened a spot in a receiver room that will go about seven deep, and Brown also credited Beckham for the habits he has handed to the younger players in it.

In a new Teamworks piece on return to play, Bret Kelly, Tom Robertson and Nick Walsh start from something most strength coaches know by feel: an athlete disappears into rehab, comes back, and the weight room is working off a status update instead of a program. Their argument is that the break is not the injury or the surgery. It is the handoff.

The rest of it is the build. How to keep a returning athlete inside the same system as everyone else, why rehab work should carry sets, reps and intensity like any other lift, and how to read GPS and force plate numbers against an athlete’s own pre-injury baseline to decide when he is ready to progress.

A new piece makes the case that Illinois basketball’s decade owes more to strength and conditioning coach Adam Fletcher than anyone hands him. Fletcher played at Miami (Ohio) and started out as an assistant at Michigan, where the Wolverines shared the 2012 Big Ten title. He was at Towson in 2014 for the best season in that program’s Division I history, 25 wins and its first postseason wins. He has been at Illinois since August 2015.

The work he gets credited for is as much off the floor as on it. Ayo Dosunmu arrived on campus at 185 pounds and left at about 200, and Fletcher’s program runs recovery, mental wellness, nutrition and hydration alongside the lifting rather than after it.

A new KINEXON guide puts benchmark ranges on football workload by position group, built off the GPS and LPS metrics teams already track through camp. Skill players get judged on volume and speed, with a medium camp day landing between 2,500 and 3,500 total yards, 150 to 250 yards of high-speed running and 85 to 92% of max velocity. Linemen barely register on those, so the guide moves them onto mechanical load and efforts, with 1,500 to 2,200 total yards and a top speed sitting between 70 and 80% of max.

Two details are worth more than the tables. Newcomers, transfers and freshmen start about 15% below the listed thresholds and ramp from there. And in-season the volume comes down while the speed band goes up, from 85 to 92% of max in camp to 88 to 95% after it, so players keep touching top-end speed once practice windows get shorter.

KINEXON says to treat the ranges as starting points and calibrate them against a team’s own history before rolling them out.

Towson University

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