☕️ S&C Daily — Up Against Anybody

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Jaden Williams was a high school junior in Los Angeles when his mother, Cleo Branch, died of a brain aneurysm. He points to that as the moment he started taking football seriously. Five years on he is a 6-foot-4, 290-pound defensive lineman at Kentucky, and the new strength staff has him running with the fastest players on the roster. "Crazy explosive for as big as he is," strength and conditioning coach Brandon Roberts said. "He has one of the fastest 10-yard splits out there. I put him up against anybody."

Turning that into snaps took longer. Williams was already one of the strongest players on the roster last season, when he barely played, and former head coach Mark Stoops told reporters the staff had not seen in practice what showed up in his one breakout game. Under a new staff he is in the defensive line rotation, and Kentucky held him out of most of the first preseason scrimmage to keep him healthy.

In a new essay, Steve Magness works through why elite athletes run the same session hundreds of times without checking out. The research he leans on found two causes of boredom, and repetition is not one of them. People get bored when they feel unchallenged and when the work seems pointless.

What changes is perception. Sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent the 1980s embedded with the best swim club in America and found the swimmers had turned staring at a black line into something to master. From the outside every rep looks identical. Magness writes that athletes far enough into the work start to feel the variations in effort and discomfort inside each one, so no two repeats are the same to them. Steph Curry described the same habit: "I was always curious about how can I get better the next session?"

The coaching version is the high school runner who hates laps. The answer is not to drop the laps and play games, Magness writes, but to keep the athlete around long enough for the miles to take on a purpose, at which point they start looking forward to the work. "It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices," Chambliss wrote. "They like it."

A new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine tracked 150,000 people over 30 years and found a specific dose of lifting tied to a lower risk of death. Ninety to 120 minutes of strength training a week produced a 13% lower risk of death from any cause and a 19% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, compared with doing none at all.

More was not better. Past two hours a week, the study found no further drop in risk. Pairing that same 90 to 120 minutes with 150 minutes of moderate aerobic work pushed the reduction to 45%.

The study was observational, so it cannot prove the lifting caused the lower risk. Researchers point to better blood sugar control, lower blood pressure and muscle-released hormones called myokines that reduce inflammation.

This Sunday in The AI Playbook: what the watermark actually is, and what it can and can't do.

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