With the beginning of football season, the long anticipated excitement for the early powerhouse match ups has finally arrived.

Applying the principles of scientific training, I have come up with ten (and a half) training guidelines for the combat athlete who must be present to ensure competitive success.

Question 1: I’d like to thank you for all of the helpful tips, but this is where we’re going to crash. As an athlete, I’ve been performing the Olympic lifts since middle school. I use them with the athletes I train from day one and haven’t had any problems.

Rites of passage that involve impressive feats of strength have been around for thousands of years. They exist in many different forms and many of them originated in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. Tests like the Husafell stone carry, which originated in Iceland, have now become objects of desire for many would-be Strongmen throughout the world.

I had finally done it! After countless hours of talking about it and planning just how I was going to do it, I opened my own performance enhancement training business. Well sort of…

Every day someone asks me a question about training speed. So here are those questions heard most frequently as well as the answers to them.

Did you ever wonder how song writers or comedians come up with their lyrics or material? As a person who loves music as well as a good comedy, I always wondered that very question. When I started my career coaching and training athletes, I researched other coaches to come up with new ideas for old exercises. Then it clicked. The more a person surrounds himself with the subject at hand, the more thoughts come to mind about that subject.

Hamstring injuries are common but mostly avoidable. Like many other injuries, they aren’t 100 percent preventable, but there are many ways to help reduce the occurrence in your athletes. If hamstring pulls do take place, I’ve added some treatment guidelines at the end. However, this doesn’t mean that your athletes shouldn’t seek medical assistance. A physician should always be consulted first.

Russians believe that if you wish to excel at a lift, you can’t beat frequent practice of this lift with a moderately heavy weight and never to failure. Vladimir Volkov, the European bench press champion and master’s world champion in the 220 lb weight class, has proved that point with a 639 lb bench in an IPF competition.

It’s extremely important that athletes perform Olympic lifts correctly. This means teaching lifts through a progression designed to implement proper form. Doing the lifts incorrectly, which is the case with the vast majority of young athletes, reduces the effect of the lift and creates a much higher likelihood of injury.

“The last part of progress is always easier than the next. Determination must be continually manufactured and tested.”

One of the biggest problems that we face in training today’s athletes is that they’re out of shape! Whether professional or amateur, many of these athletes come to their teams severely unconditioned. With physical education programs being cut from school curriculums and child obesity rising every year, we need to take a long hard look at the values that physical conditioning provides.

This is the time of the season when I’m sure you’re asked the same question over and over—how do I run a faster 40? Here are the top seven tips to increase your 40-yard time dramatically without having to run a step.

Speed is a product of stride length (the distance your hips travel in a stride) and stride frequency (the number of steps you take in a given time period). However, you won’t reach top speed by taking increasingly larger steps to increase stride length or taking short, quick steps to increase stride frequency.

In any sport, athletes need to be able to accelerate as quickly as possible to get to the ball or opponent first. As a coach, you must put your athletes in the best possible position to succeed.

If you’re reading this, you probably have a good understanding of why strength and conditioning is important. However, I’d like to reach the coaches, athletic directors, and lazy athletes who will never reach their potential because of a lack of education.

“Real deference doesn’t come based on size and intimidation but on monster work capacities and real street toughness.”

Sports, physical training, and coaching have been my life for the last three decades. From the time I started playing soccer when I was five years old until today, many of the life lessons I’ve learned have either been found on the field, in the dojo, or in the gym.

The title says it all, which is a quote from Tom Myslinski, currently the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania. Every youth sports related newspaper or magazine article you read these days has children as young as 7-8 years-old playing organized year-round sports.

When these young basketball players get older, they start searching for something to give them an advantage over their opponent. Most, if not all, think they must practice their skills more (shooting, dribbling, passing, rebounding) in order to gain an additional edge. However, once these skills have been developed to a high level through repetition and technique mechanics, what’s next?

I’ve been working with athletes for quite some time. Even though I haven’t overhauled the way I do things, I definitely make changes on a continual basis. One thing that has seen many changes is the way I warm up athletes. I’ve always used some type of movement-based stretching, and I’ve tried to stay away from any pre-workout static stretching. My belief has always been in the actual workout, not so much in what we did before the workout. I’ve always believed in getting a sweat going before moving on to the actual workout.

I guess I can begin by saying how wrong I was and how I took our Q&A staff for granted. I know EliteFTS has the best training team on the planet. Yes, this is a very cocky statement, but do me one favor here.

I get bombarded with emails on a daily bases ranging from business issues, training questions, product opportunities, spam and a number of other issues. While I personally answer most of my emails there are times when I forward them onto people I feel can do a better job answering the questions than I could.

It’s funny some of the things you see being a strength coach. I probably see most athletes more than their sport coaches do on average. So during a normal day in a somewhat normal week the things I see always amuse me in some form.