☕️ S&C Daily — We're Hunting Green

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In a new team video walking through how the Chargers run an offseason, executive director of player performance Ben Herbert describes a program built on finding what a player is bad at and then asking whether he wants to fix it. His example is a single-arm press: seven quality reps with a 130-pound dumbbell on the right side, three on the left. “Would you like to improve your single arm pressing capability with your left side?” If the answer is yes, it goes into the prescription.

Every player gets a profile built off 33 key performance indicators, running from flexibility and mobility through strength, power, speed and acceleration. The results come back color coded, and Herbert sends each player his own card, then resends it every three or four weeks so the man can watch his own reds turn. “We’re hunting green,” he said. “We want to eliminate all the yellow, all the orange, and all the red.”

Rookies get pulled out and trained separately for most of the offseason program, on the theory that teaching them slowly up front speeds everything after it. Every player on the roster wears a GPS unit, including the ones rehabbing, and the movement data goes back to position coaches at the end of the day ranked inside each group.

The foundation is trained top down, starting at the neck in flexion, extension and rotation, with ten dedicated machines the staff uses to test max isometric neck strength. “I’ll take protecting your head over your ankle, your knee, your shoulder, anything,” Herbert said.

Brad Schoenfeld resurfaced his own 2021 review of branched-chain amino acids on X, and the conclusion has not softened since. Leucine starts muscle protein synthesis but cannot carry it. All nine essential amino acids are needed to sustain the process, so leucine turns the machinery on and then stalls without the rest.

Once daily protein is adequate, the review found, adding BCAAs or isolated leucine does not further improve muscle growth or strength. The number it lands on is 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight a day, eaten in meals carrying the full set of essential amino acids. Scattered benefits turned up for recovery markers and did not translate into better performance.

The carve-out is older adults, and possibly vegans, who struggle to reach that intake or the 2 to 3 grams of leucine per meal that maximizes the response. For everyone else the review calls supplementation superfluous, and notes the only reliable cost is the money.

Maral Javadifar was hired as the Thunder’s athletic performance director in June, after seven years as a strength and conditioning coach with the Buccaneers, including their Super Bowl LV team. Her first assignment took her across the Atlantic, where she is working with rookie center Aday Mara on his conditioning.

Mara is 7-foot-3 and went 12th in this year’s draft out of Michigan’s national title team. He has said himself that he needs to be in better game shape for the NBA, and he is home in Spain for World Cup qualifiers, so the work is fitting around games against Portugal and Greece.

Equipment reviewer Cooper Mitchell posted that manufacturers in China are copying not only the designs of some of the most respected strength equipment ever built but the brand logos stamped on it, and selling the result cheap. Part of what makes it work is that several of the names being copied no longer exist. Cybex and Flex Fitness are gone, and Bodymasters is only partly back.

Mitchell’s point is that there is real engineering in the originals, in the angles, arm lengths, handle diameters and padding, and copying a silhouette does not copy any of it. He says he is picking out pieces to order and test.

Tell us what you’re running - equipment, tech, force plates, software - and we’ll continue to share the results as they come in.

University of Oregon

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