☕️ S&C Daily — Volume of What?

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In a new Sportsmith roundtable, six load-monitoring practitioners make the same case from different sports: total distance and high-speed running describe what an athlete did, not what it cost them. Every change of direction carries a mechanical price - eccentric work to decelerate, concentric work to re-accelerate - and linear metrics miss all of it.

Matt Jay, a high performance manager in Australia's rugby league, points to middle forwards, who "rarely dominate high-speed running metrics, yet they consistently experience the highest levels of fatigue." Celtic's Will Currie puts it plainly - "football is rarely linear. The only time we probably see truly linear running is during post-match conditioning" - and says his small-pitch, high-tempo days barely register on a linear summary despite being mechanically dense. Chicago Fire's Darcy Norman sees the biggest gain in return to play, where straight-line running is only one gate: players get exposed when they have to brake hard, redirect, and absorb force repeatedly. His reframe captures the shift - from measuring how much work a player did to understanding "what kind of work they actually had to survive."

Teenagers are winning at the highest level right now - Lamine Yamal took a World Cup at 18, Mirra Andreeva won the French Open at 19 - and in a new Athletic piece on that wave, maturation expert Sean Cumming explains how clubs learned to stop writing off the ones who don't look ready yet.

Growth comes in bursts rather than steadily, so academies now measure players every three to four months from age nine, and every six weeks once a spurt starts. The reason is that a spurt can tank performance temporarily. Gareth Bale was a standout in Southampton's academy at 15 until a growth spurt hit and his play dropped off - he survived the cut by a single vote, and only because staff recognized what was happening and rebuilt his program around core strength and balance. Six months later he was through it. Cumming also assessed the two top-ranked 13-year-old tennis players in the country. The No. 1 was 6-foot-2 and already through puberty, so he was winning mostly on size. The No. 2 was about the same height but hadn't started puberty yet, meaning years of growth were still coming. He grew to 6-foot-8 - and passed the kid ranked ahead of him.

Panthers linebacker Nic Scourton tore his ACL on the first day of training camp practice, on a field reporters described as wet - and the NFLPA will review video of that practice to understand how it happened.

The scrutiny is about the calendar: the first five days of camp are a mandated acclimation period under Article 23 of the CBA. Day one is limited to physicals, meetings and classroom work, with on-field activity restricted to running and conditioning. Days two through five allow no live contact, and only one of the two daily practices can use helmets and protective shirts. Per a source, the review will determine whether this was a non-contact fluke or whether the Panthers strayed past those limits.

Cal Dietz - the longtime Minnesota hockey strength coach who wrote Triphasic Training - argues that one of the most overlooked performance variables is diaphragm function. Over 15 years, he says athletes arriving from programs that heavily emphasize constant core bracing tend to show elevated resting heart rates and slower recovery between efforts - and that within weeks in his program, resting heart rates commonly drop 10 to 20 beats per minute.

His explanation: a chronically tense abdominal wall limits how far the diaphragm can move, pushing athletes toward shallow chest breathing, which he says reduces the pressure changes that help return venous blood to the heart. Dietz is clear that bracing itself isn't the problem - athletes need stiffness for heavy lifting, sprinting and collisions. The issue is never turning it off: "Brace when force production requires it. Relax when it doesn't."

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