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Low levels of body fat, while important, aren’t the be-all and end-all of athletic performance. You certainly don’t want to lug around unnecessary pounds, but deliberately undereating can lead to serious social and physiological issues. High-intensity competition requires food-generated energy, and many nutrients allow adequate recovery.

Video review is a proven method of learning new skills. It can provide immediate feedback, showing athletes flaws in technique. It also forms a “library” of successive improvements in the desired technique over a period of time. Many athletes use video images to match their internal sense of proper technique.

Numerous studies are continually fine-tuning the best approaches to training. Feedback is one, though it can be a double-edged sword. Neuromuscular fatigue (NMF) is another. And per author Nassim Taleb, one of the best predictors of something sticking around is how long that thing has already been around.

More than 1.1 million high school athletes play high school football each year and over 600,000 male athletes participate in high school track and field. These numbers indicate only a portion of what is a truly a complimentary connection between football and track. Each year almost 60% of football players drafted by the NFL participated in high school track and field; more than half of all Division I-FBS football recruits participate in track and field. TrackingFootball.com was created to research this connection and take a much closer look at the multi-sport connection that exists between football and other sports.

The science of speed training is a murky business.  What works for one may injure another.  Strength can improve speed or destroy it.  Plyometrics may result in broken records or broken athletes.  Periodization is sacred to some, scoffed at by others.  Should speed coaches adopt the training concepts of body builders, endurance athletes, or swimmers?  Maybe we should copy the Jamaicans and eat more mountain yams.  Or maybe we should cling to that old-time religion and coach like our forefathers.

Pressure in competition can be internal and/or external. Six techniques help athletes deal with pressure and thereby maximize their performances.

SmartCoach is an open, scalable range of products consisting of data acquisition hardware and planning/analysis software tools which are constantly updated by working closely with professional strength coaches to understand their needs, collect their invaluable feedback, and continue to develop new features.

The University of the Pacific’s women’s cross country team had the best season in school history in 2014. Before the season began, coach Josh Jones re-evaluated his training methods. He took advantage of new technology to plan and evaluate workouts, and provide immediate individualized feedback for his athletes. They better understood the purpose of every workout and how close they came to accomplishing this purpose. As a result, three runners surpassed the previous school record by substantial margins and many others achieved personal bests.

In recent years, Jamaicans have dominated the 100 meters, the signature event in track and field. The roots of that domination go back nearly half a century, to a visit from legendary American coach Bud Winters. Winter’s scientific approach had a profound influence on then-young coach Glen Mills, now regarded as the world’s best sprint technician. Mills’s athletes, such as Usain Bolt and Yohan Blake, have elevated Jamaican sprinting to the top rung of the world’s sprint ladder. Jamaican Sprint Success: Thanks to an American?

Velocity Based Training (VBT) is as simple as it sounds in some respect: you are performing exercises and adjusting loads based on a velocity measurement. In order to obtain these measurements, various products are available on the market, including the well-established GymAware system. Quite simply, for the coach or athlete, the goal is to utilize a VBT system in order to retrieve more accurate feedback from barbell exercises, beyond load and repetitions.

Mental toughness gets a lot of lip service, but telling someone to “shake it off,” is the mental equivalent of saying “be faster.” It’s easy to say, but without proper training is nearly impossible to achieve. The tools to objectively train the physiology behind mental performance haven’t been there, until now.

The key to high school track success is marketing. Not TV marketing. Not profit-based marketing. High school track must be sold to kids. Track coaches must find ways to make running fun. Track coaches must find ways to make track meets more exciting. We must think out of the box. We must think like kids.