☕️ S&C Daily — Take Them to the Sewer

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In a new essay, Steve Magness argues there is no single right emotional state for competing, and he uses the two women who played this month’s US Open final to show it. Aryna Sabalenka plays angry on purpose and has said that trying to stay flat "was destroying me from the inside." Elena Rybakina, who beat her, shows nothing: "you just don’t want to let the opponent see your frustration." Same match, same level, opposite approaches.

Anger comes in three forms, he writes. Productive anger points at the next play. Cathartic anger gets let out to make the feeling go away. Reactive rage is when the anger takes over and beating the opponent stops being the point. Only the first one helps, and letting it out does not drain it. Brad Bushman's research found people who vented came out angrier than people who did nothing, and Bushman's line for it is that venting is "like using gasoline to put out a fire."

The blank face is not free either. In one study, hiding the expression worked as a poker face and did nothing to the feeling underneath - sympathetic activation went up rather than down, and memory for what happened got worse. So the job is not to pick a temperament. It is to learn which one is your default, learn where it breaks, and build the opposite one into something you can reach for when a moment asks for it.

A new study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise had one group train the Nordic hamstring curl and another train the stiff-leg deadlift, then measured all three hamstring muscles before and after. The two lifts did not build the same muscle. The Nordic group grew the semitendinosus by 24.4%. The stiff-leg deadlift group grew the semimembranosus by 11.2%. Each lift grew one muscle and largely left the rest of the hamstring alone.

Why the Nordic does that is clear enough. The muscle it grew is the one the modelling showed working at the longest length and the highest force, and it was also the muscle that ended up most sore after a single hard session. The stiff-leg deadlift did not follow that logic, and the researchers say force does not explain its result. The practical point holds either way. Pick one of these lifts and you are not training the hamstring, you are training a part of it.

The sewer is Duke's offseason, winter and summer, run by strength coach David Feeley. "We basically have three workouts in one, and that last workout is probably harder than the first two hours of the workout," cornerback Dylan Flowers said. That third piece is the whole point of it. It is built to feel like the end of a game rather than the middle of a workout. "It's basically just the finishing. We always talk about the last play. It's not going to be clean, it's not going to be perfect," Flowers said.

At Illinois on Saturday the Blue Devils trailed by 10 twice and gave up 24 points in the first half. They held Illinois to three after the break and won 31-27. "We took them to the sewer," Flowers said.

A firefighter can go from asleep to maximal exertion within minutes when a call comes in overnight. In a new SimpliFaster piece, Alex Redshaw uses that to explain why readiness numbers do not transfer cleanly from sport. A soccer player knows when the game is. A firefighter does not, and the stress of the shift itself moves HRV and readiness scores as much as training does, so the same number can mean different things on different days and has to be read against that person's own baseline.

Conditioning is where he sees it go wrong most often. Many firefighters spend the bulk of their sessions in zones that are too high, which limits aerobic adaptation and builds fatigue they carry into work - and aerobic fitness is the quality that matters most here, with cardiac events among the leading causes of firefighter line of duty deaths. The equipment is not the fix. A force plate or a wearable dashboard on its own does not improve anything until somebody qualified reads it and makes a decision off it.

Chaminade hired Reyn Yamashiro as strength and conditioning coach and is pairing S&C with sports medicine this season, giving its athletic trainers input on how the programs are written.

Brett Platts of the Frisco RoughRiders won a Double-A Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year award from the Professional Baseball Strength and Conditioning Coaches Society, his second.

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