☕️ S&C Daily — The Best-Conditioned Athlete He's Been Around

November 3, 2026

Raiders coach Klint Kubiak calls wide receiver Tre Tucker the “best-conditioned athlete” he has ever been around. Tucker, the team’s leader in receiving yards, ranks 11th in the NFL in fourth-quarter receiving yards and is tied for the league lead in fourth-quarter touchdown catches. He credits his aerobic base to high school track, where he won Ohio state titles in the 100, 200 and long jump, and to wrestling, which he gave up after his freshman year.

At Cincinnati, he added 20 pounds without losing speed, and his strength coach there, Brady Collins, now at Wisconsin, said he couldn’t remember Tucker ever being gassed or needing a break. Tucker now spends his offseason in Las Vegas training at the team facility, focused more on building his body than on football skills. He also leans on David Goggins’ “40 percent rule”: when you’re tired, you still have 40 percent left.

Lots of lifters judge an exercise by whether they feel it in the target muscle. Brad Schoenfeld shared a recent study that put that to the test. Nine trained men did leg curls at three hip angles, 5 sets of 10 at 70% of 1RM. Researchers used MRI to measure which hamstring regions were activated. Lifters then rated how strongly they felt each region contract, on a 0 to 10 scale.

The regions where lifters felt the strongest contraction weren’t necessarily the ones the MRI showed working hardest. At 40°, the upper biceps femoris was more active than its lower end, yet lifters rated the upper outer hamstring lower than the middle. Schoenfeld notes the MRI measure is indirect and the study didn’t test mind-muscle cues. His bottom line: don’t assume “a stronger sensation translates into greater muscle activation.”

A new meta-analysis in Sports Medicine – Open pooled 31 studies with 609 female team-sport athletes to see what plyometric training does for them. Plyos beat control groups across the board: higher countermovement jumps, better reactive strength, faster 10, 20 and 30 m sprints and quicker agility times. The biggest gains showed up in agility and drop jump reactive strength.

Program length mattered. Blocks longer than six weeks produced bigger improvements in reactive strength, 10 m sprint and agility, and the authors point to eight weeks or more as where gains stood out.

Alabama forward Keitenn Bristow didn’t play after Jan. 10 last season, but he’s back for Year 2. Nate Oats said Bristow spent the spring working with strength coach Henry Barrera and head trainer Clarke Holter to add weight. “His body’s bigger, stronger,” Oats said.

Stevenson University hired Aaron Jahnke as its head strength and conditioning coach. He comes from Catholic University, where as director of sport performance he oversaw strength and conditioning for 24 varsity programs. Before that, he was a graduate assistant at Salisbury in 2023-24, where he also played football and was a 2022 captain.

Cooper Mitchell (@homegymcoop) shared a robot squat rack that automatically spots lifters, handles nearly 900 pounds and tracks lifting metrics. He expects to see them in university and pro weight rooms within 10 years.

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