☕️ S&C Daily — Not Navy SEALs

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Dr. Bryan Mann, academic director of strength and conditioning at Texas A&M, brought a six-year-old article back in front of the profession this week. The trigger was Arizona State hockey player Matthew Mayich, hospitalized after collapsing during a military-style workout. Two years earlier a Tufts lacrosse session run by a recent Navy SEAL training graduate put 24 athletes into rhabdomyolysis. The article is "Your Players Are Not Navy SEALs" by Rusty Whitt, now director of football performance at Florida after two seasons at Tulane. Whitt is a former Green Beret who went through Special Forces selection himself.

Whitt's point is that military selection exists to find out who quits, and that is not a strength coach's job. His article lays out the risk-assessment questions he asks before any new drill and a first-week rule: returning players run 75% of the conditioning test, freshmen and transfers run half.

The post also raised a second question, which is who was actually running the workout. Word among coaches is that the head strength coach at Arizona State wanted nothing to do with it. Mann himself wrote that he would not speculate on responsibility while the situation is investigated.

"Exhaustion is not adaptation," Mann wrote. "Suffering is not toughness."

Deceleration is where games turn and where non-contact injuries live, and it's still the most under-coached quality in sport. That's the thinking behind Brakes, an album Move The Needle split into nine tracks: original and exclusive conversations with Les Spellman and Adam Petway, an hour-long practical on deceleration training and an e-book from practitioners across the field. The intro and first track are free. Check it out here.

In a new study, 17 trained men did power back squats at 65% of their max while researchers measured two things on every rep: how fast the bar moved, and how hard the lifter said that rep felt on a 0-to-10 scale. The point was to see whether the second number could stand in for the first.

One common way to run velocity-based training is to stop a set once bar speed drops a set amount from the fastest rep, often 10% for power work, and that normally takes a device to measure. Here the lifter's own rating did the job. When a lifter called a rep just under a 4 out of 10, bar speed had dropped about 10%, and that held across three different set lengths.

The takeaway for coaches is that at a moderate load, an athlete who reports a rep at an RPE of 4 is moving the bar about 10% slower than the set's fastest rep.

Alabama receiver Ryan Coleman-Williams stayed in Tuscaloosa for the entire offseason instead of leaving to train somewhere else. The plan started on the flight home from a 38-3 Rose Bowl loss. Strength coach Dave Ballou told him he would have to eat more than he was burning. He added 11 pounds of muscle in the spring and four more over the summer, and his squat reached 465 pounds, per The Athletic.

The speed held. He hit 23.2 miles per hour this offseason, tied for the fastest mark on the team.

"Man, he's strong," offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb said. "It's hard for him to wear down right now."

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

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