☕️ S&C Daily — One Sprint Isn't Enough

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Sportsmith asked six practitioners inside NFL organizations which objective marker gives them the most confidence that a hamstring strain is ready for full practice. Five of the six gave the same answer, and none of them meant a single sprint.

Jon Hernandez of the Rams wants a player to absorb a full practice week’s worth of high-speed running, spread across days, with no symptoms the next morning. He shapes the exposures around the position, sending a receiver through curvilinear weave runs for gunner work and a defensive back from a backpedal into a vertical sprint.

Bobby Gragston of the Chargers draws the line between capacity and robustness. One sprint at 95 to 100% of max shows capacity. Repeating it across sessions shows robustness. Staffs build toward that by running rehab at set percentages of the player’s own recorded top speed, then counting the yards he covers above 80 to 90% of it against what his position normally does in a week.

Connor Whicker of the Vikings was the dissent, holding out for eccentric hamstring strength back to 90 to 95% of the uninjured side. What most of them agreed on is what no longer counts. Players come back with small strength deficits and with MRI findings that never fully clear, and neither one predicts who tears it again.

The Memphis Grizzlies are hiring Robb Hornett as head strength and conditioning coach, the Commercial Appeal reported. He comes from Liberty and rejoins Mike Curtis, his old boss at Virginia and now the Grizzlies’ head of player health and performance.

In a new Science for Sport bulletin, Eric Curry breaks down a study that ran eccentric hamstring training against static stretching inside the same person. One leg trained eccentrically, the other stretched, three days a week for 10 weeks. Every participant was his own control, which takes the usual between-groups noise out of the result.

Both legs finished with about the same range of motion. Only the eccentric leg got stronger and bigger. Curry’s read is that eccentric work buys flexibility, strength and size in one slot rather than paying for range of motion with a separate stretching block.

Stanford Medicine wrote up the tools its sports medicine group is moving from elite athletes to ordinary patients. The one for coaches is OpenCap, built by bioengineer Scott Delp, which uses two phone cameras to produce the 3D movement analysis that used to require a $150,000 lab and a technician.

It builds a model of the person from the video and estimates the force going through their joints. Delp screens Stanford football players for hamstring injury risk with it, and Germany’s national volleyball team has used it on injuries. It runs more than 1,000 analyses a day, and the software is free, though it is built for clinicians and researchers rather than sold to coaches.

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