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Good morning. Why pay-to-play may be quietly capping how hard coaches can push, Mac Jones on the Alabama weight room that made him, and what the latest research says about ice baths and muscle growth. Let's get into it…
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On a recent Bussin' With The Boys podcast, former Alabama QB Mac Jones pulled back the curtain on the culture behind a dynasty.
He credited legendary strength coach Scott Cochran for a program built on relentless standards and competition - lifts run like a circuit, sprinting station to station, plus a spring "fourth-quarter program" to harden players in the offseason. The buy-in tool that stuck with him: a shirt handed out each week to only about 10 guys who earned it. Jones chased one every week for four years, going head-to-head with Jalen Hurts and Tua Tagovailoa - and says that constant competition, more than any single lift, is what finally developed him. (A first-day chip helped too: an assistant mistook him for a walk-on, and he spent four years proving he wasn't.)
After the USMNT's round-of-16 exit, ESPN's Dan Wetzel makes an argument that lands well beyond soccer: the US isn't short on athletes, it's short on a system that lets coaches actually develop them.
His culprit is pay-to-play travel sports - a $40-billion-plus industry where families can spend $20,000 a year - and the incentive it creates. When kids and their parents are paying customers, how hard can a coach really push? How do you break a player down to build them back up, or hand them real adversity, when they can flee to another club the moment it gets uncomfortable? Clubs respond by recruiting new talent instead of developing what they have - what Wetzel calls a "circle of mediocrity."
A new meta-analysis pooling eight resistance-training studies asked a simple question: does an ice bath right after lifting blunt muscle growth? Short answer - yes, a little. Summarizing the research at Applied Performance, S&C coach Ramsey Nijem breaks down what it means.
The findings:
Lifters who took cold water immersion after training still gained muscle, just consistently less than those who skipped it
The reduction was small but held up across the studies
Cold may dampen the machinery of growth - muscle protein synthesis, mTOR signaling, satellite cell activity, and blood flow
The effect only applies to ice baths taken immediately after lifting; waiting a few hours or using them less often is still an open question
The coach's takeaway: ice baths aren't bad, they're just a recovery tool. If hypertrophy is the goal, don't make them automatic after every session - save cold water for stretches when recovery, not adaptation, is the priority.
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