The Current State of Strength and Conditioning Coaching.

This essay is about the current state of the strength and conditioning profession,

most of which is practiced in high schools, colleges, and universities,

and at the professional sports level.

Those of you who are reading this in the far distant future while you drive your

flying cars may observe with amusement that all these problems have long since been corrected.

If I have even described them accurately here in 2017, and my concerns turned out to be about as relevant to your advanced civilization as global warming.

From atop your glacier, you may look down on a landscape devoid of weak, over-trained athletes,

and wondered just what in the hell I was so concerned about way back in 2017.

I hope so. All right, full disclosure. I have never served as a strength coach for a university or professional sports team. I have coached thousands

of individuals, but never a large group of elite athletes selected for the program by well-paid recruiters or a draft system.

I do not know how to integrate relatively inexperienced freshmen with advanced seniors,

how different levels of training advancement within the team affect the organization of the workouts,

or how to make sure everyone on the team

achieves the highest level of his strength and performance potential while struggling through

an ineffective program that focuses on the expression of developed strength and the performance

and practice of strength-dependent activities in the weight room and on the practice field,

as opposed to the training of strength.

The problem is that most D1 and pro-team strength and conditioning coaches don't know these things either,

because a program like this doesn't make any sense. And the only reason it appears

to work is because genetically gifted kids who work hard at virtually anything who are fed and rested

adequately and who do not die before they graduate will get better at athletics as they grow from being 18 years old to 22 years old.

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