Clap……….. Clap……. Clap… Clap. Clap. Clap.
“Lemme get a Boom on Tick, Tick”:
TICK, TICK, BOOOOOM!
The slow clap – the universal signal in football that it’s time to LOCK-IN once again did its job. This time, it marked the opening of the Gridiron Performance Panel (GPP) moderated by Justin Lima, PdD, which kicked off the coaching specific track at the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s (NSCA) National Conference on July 8, 2026 in New Orleans.
Founded in 1978, the NSCA has grown alongside the rapid evolution of sports, continually advancing through breakthroughs in research, coaching methodology, and evidence-based practice. Over the past decade, in particular, the field of strength and conditioning has undergone a significant transformation driven by advancements in technology, data analytics, and performance operations. These innovations have resulted in a more transparent, objective approach to athlete development.
Football strength and conditioning, however, has not always reflected this level of sophistication. For decades, the profession was characterized by a “meat-grinder” mentality: placing athletes under extreme physical stress and allowing mental and physical resilience to determine who succeeded. Reflecting on this era, NSCA Founder and GPP panelist Boyd Epley remarked, “When they did a good job, we blew smoke up their rear-ends… When they messed up, we hammered them in the head.” While this approach helped shape generations of successful athletes and coaches, it often relied more on doing hard things to get players tougher than using objective data to optimize processes. The sessions at this year’s NSCA National Conference highlighted that while the profession has advanced in many ways, coaching still requires great communication and relationships in order to optimize the training process.
Using Objective Data to Drive Decision Making
In recent years, the widespread adoption of technologies such as GPS tracking, force plates, velocity-based training, and athlete monitoring systems has fundamentally changed how coaches evaluate readiness, prescribe training, and manage athletes. Justin Lovett, Senior Director of Strength and Conditioning for the Los Angeles Rams spoke about the evolution of training from primarily conditioning-based with an emphasis on sport position to now hot-listing players based on individual performance traits collected both in practice and in the weight room. He went on to provide a powerful perspective to periodization stating that “players need the right thing now, not just where you wrote them to go”. This was corroborated by Colin Kenyon, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Tulane Football, who explained that the influx of objective information at his disposal has resulted in a “more honest, accurate, and deliberate approach” to the development of his training program. Objectifying the training process allows the coaching staff to make honest, transparent, and emotionless decisions which enables player trust in, and compliance to the program.
When members of the performance staff can integrate their philosophies to build an aligned plan, the process can be optimized for the player. GPP panelist Christian Brown, Director of Strength and Conditioning at Copiah Lincoln Community College shared that just 10 years ago many of the teams in his conference did not employ strength and conditioning coaches. When he assumed the role, he highlighted the importance of educating his athletics administration about the process of proper strength and conditioning. By getting the administration to understand the planning process, the importance of watching practices, and his own training, they were able to paint a picture of what he needed to succeed in that department. This resulted in the addition of staff members to work under his guise. This is an example of how the education of a stakeholder can allow them to better understand the needs of the program, and adequately provide what is needed to help their athletes succeed.
As stakeholders gain access to player performance data they gain the ability to make better decision about the training or recovery process. Jim Davis, GPP panelist and Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at New Trier High School used the metaphor of a pyramid to describe the potential of the performance team stating that “you can go higher with a broader, sturdier base”. Performance teams who can communicate at a high level, understand their role within the annual plan, and objectify the process with data will ultimately be the most successful. Creating systems for decision making throughout all stakeholders is the key to a broad, sturdy base on which to uplift athletes. With an integrated care model, stakeholders understand the goal of each training phase, which metrics are important now (and which require sacrifice), and are aligned in their decision making with a long-term goal in mind.
As avenues to collect data become more accessible, the bottle neck shifts from having the data to interpreting the data. This evolution has forced the expansion of performance staffs and a growing emphasis on effective communication, collaboration, and relationship-building between coaches and other athletics stakeholders. In order to truly optimize the training process, performance team members must have a system to share information. As GPP moderator Dr. Justin Lima PhD frequently says: record, rank, and publish your data. Staffs need to be able to decide what the key performance indicators (KPIs) should be, then accurately and efficiently collect, and share that information. The information does no good if it only lives in a database, or cannot be understood by members of the staff (or players for that matter).
Building trust through communication and relationships
Alignment of the performance team is critical. Poor communication between stakeholders reduces the athlete’s ability to understand what they are being asked to do, and why. This disconnect creates a sense of fear within the athlete. They lose trust in the process, resulting in limiting outputs in training, and disbelief in the effectiveness of the training process. When the performance team is aligned, and stakeholders have developed an intentional plan using objective information in their respective area they can fully explain to the athlete why they are executing this plan. When the athlete understands what that are being asked to do and why, they can choose to go all-in to attack the workout or practice.
This active decision making and execution is where mental toughness is developed. Doing an uncertain amount of meaningless work inhibits intent and send the brain into survival mode, thus pigeon-holing the athlete to submaximal output. In his keynote at the conference, Dr. William Kraemer spoke about the importance of warm-up sets as a form of removing fear from a lifting session saying “as coaches, you have to make your athlete understand what they are going to be doing. Fear in a workout is not good. Understanding what you’re trying to do and why you’re doing it is what is important.” He used the example of warm-up sets in the weight room as a way to experience a training stimulus at a reduced intensity as a way to “cope” with the idea of the heavier load to come. In this example, feeling the ascending weights of the warm up sets leading up to an intensive target weight is comparable to an athlete knowing the practice plan ahead of time. When they know what to expect, and believe that all they have to do, they can remove the governor and go all in. Surprise your athletes with post-practice conditioning, extra weight room sets, or physical punishment, and you place fear in their minds, sending them into survival mode, resulting in reduced effort and output.
Developing strong relationships between the performance team and the athletes they oversee is critical to athlete development. When an athlete believes you can help them, they will listen. Scott Bennett, GPP panelist, and Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Roanoke College shared a common conversation he has with his athletes during the training process saying “I’m not going to ask you to do something you don’t believe you can do, but I will ask you to do something you’ve never done.” This statement shows the athlete that in order to achieve something great (in this case, a personal lifting record) they must believe they can do it. It also shows that the coach believes in them. In this same respect, Justin Lovett and Jim Davis both alluded to the “conversations over commands” philosophy – meaning it is ultimately more productive to listen to the athlete, consider their message, and allow them some form of autonomy in the training process. In the NFL, coaches are dealing with multi-million dollar assets, and in high school, athletes who might be experiencing the training process for the first time. The common ground here is that doing right by the athlete is always important. Coaches need to be flexible enough in the application of their training programs to meet the athlete where they’re at, and should be able to modify a drill or exercise to put the athlete in a position to be successful while still achieving the desired adaptation.
Intensity is the key
Football players learn at a young age that they are playing a hard sport. Success at the line of scrimmage requires strain. Defensive players must try to initiate contact and wrap up to make a tackle. Offensive players need to be precise with the snap count and assignment of the designed play. As football coaches like to say: “you can’t just roll the ball out there and play”.
Compared to other sports, football requires a significant amount of preparation – both mentally and physically – to have success. Getting good at these items requires one key trait: intensity, a key theme of the sessions provided at this conference. Intensity, whether it is represented by a heavy lift, running at high speeds, or simply a high level of focus, is a function of the brain and central nervous system. As Dr. Kraemer said in his keynote “we are electrical beings”. He went on to describe strength as the single most important variable in performance. He explained that a weak athlete is one with “low maximal reserves of strength, and are in fact going to be closer to their capacity. They have a high relative stress per play. They have faster fatigue accumulation. They have lower braking forces. They have more recovery cost compared to a person with high strength reserves, which is just the opposite.” Dr. Kraemer also went on to classify absolute strength, and provide parameters for being “too weak” as well as “strong enough”. His research shows that male football players who cannot squat 1.5x bodyweight are too weak, but squatting 2x bodyweight enables them to focus more on power, as velocity becomes the low-hanging fruit. For females, the research shows 1x bodyweight is too weak, and 1.5x bodyweight is strong enough. As strength is a representation of neural output (or strain), this is a function of intensity
On its final day Ted Rath, Director of Sports Performance for the New Orleans Saints, spoke about using the systems he has created to get more intensity out of his players. One trap the performance team can easily fall into is constantly recommending “pulling back” or reducing training intensity when athlete readiness is suboptimal. Head coaches typically want to see their teams working hard, so the constant message to ease-up might be ill received, resulting in a “crying wolf” situation for the performance team. Rath instead recommends splitting practices into high-intensity sections (for the desired workload) and “above the neck” emphasis, or walk-through tempo for mental preparation. While this still results in low-threshold motor unit fatigue simply form time of feet, it reduces CNS overall impact, myofascial degradation, substrate utilization, and reduces likelihood of acute injury. This can be a powerful compromise between the head football coach and performance staff, and still result in a productive, aligned practice. It’s also a way to ensure that intensity does not fade during reps that are intended to be intense.
Training intensity is also critically important in the acclimatization process as athletes work up to higher training volumes in preparation for games. Derek Hansen had a bridge-the-gap presentation where he spoke about his 10×10 protocol for return to play and load accumulation. This simple drill starts at baseline by doing a 10 yard (or meter) acceleration for 10 repetitions. He provided a framework which is applicable for early stage return to play (RTP), as well as extensive conditioning to supplement volume loads using rapid accelerations and decelerations. For early stage hamstring or calf RTP, he recommends accelerations as fast as tolerable without pain (discomfort is okay), because the drill length does not elicit muscle lengthening to the point of risk, but it does provide the intensity needed to stimulate the desired muscle to fire. This results in blood flow to the injured cite, and promotes the correct motor pattern for accelerations. From an acclimatization standpoint, this drill can be periodized to increase volume load under intensity, and provides the specific plyometric stimulus that players will need to be robust to when they get into recurring practices. He recommends conducting this drill on a 4 day on / 1 day off pattern, and also suggests reducing deceleration distance (standard is 10 yards) as long as athletes can maintain goal finish times.
The take home here is that intensity. When an athlete attempts a 1RM, they have the maximal amount of muscle fibers firing in the least amount of time to complete a successful rep. When athletes partake in live practice reps, heart rate is higher, game speed is faster, and it is more applicable to the actual game. Athletes in a return to play situation are trying to get back onto the field – they should be completing reps of the same type of stimulus (sprinting, not jogging). Dial back the intensity to as low as needed, then dial it up to as high as possible – this allows the brain to find the target area of weakness, and repair it faster. Even things academic work such as reading or studying is improves through intent and intensity. Intensity is required to elicit desired adaptations. Simply put – try hard. When athletes strain, the brain responds.
Science, Technology, and Relationships
In the new era of football, performance teams who have the ability to collect objective data to drive decision making should have a leg up on the competition. Data collection won’t necessarily make or break your program, but it could give you a competitive advantage by understanding athlete workload, placing red flags on outlying metrics, and allowing practitioners to ask better questions about what their athletes need. Two critical factors to data collection are data analysis and communication. A strength and conditioning coach who collects data in isolation does have the ability to enhance decision making within the resistance training program, but if that individual can also present the data, and their interpretation of it, other p[performance team stakeholders might also be able to use it – the to ultimate benefit of the athlete. When specific data is collected for specific reasons, and communicated properly throughout the performance team so each stakeholder can make better decisions, the process is optimized.
When the performance team can anchor their decisions to acute or historical information, they can present the training plan to their athletes or teams in a more concrete manner. Coaches can more easily explain why athletes are being asked to do the things in the program, and they can build their own intrinsic motivation around those processes. Their understanding of the plan reduces fear an inhibitions arounf the process, allowing them to fully buy in and attack whatever might be in the plan that day. In addition, they will feel the model at work when coaches provide the right stimulus on the right day. An athlete who is allowed the autonomy to choose the best exercise for them on a given day for a given stimulus can immediately take ownership If that program. When an athlete believes the performance team is has their best interest, and they are feeling better than they ever have, performance will follow.
It is important to remember that stress equals adaptation. Simply put – doing easy things does not provide stress, doing hard things does. Athletes have a limited amount of stress they can take on any given day, and the decision to continue to compile more stress or allow the body to recover is a heavily philosophical decision that the performance team is tasked with making. At some points in the year, we want athletes to overreach. At other points, we want them to be as fresh as possible. An aligned performance team who can make decisions of the basis or objective information will be able to better communicate that plan to its athletes, resulting in a better output produce. In competitive sport, intensity is king. The more an athlete believes in the program, the more they will be able to contribute. More physiological and neurological throughput in less time results in a more robust system, and a more efficient, powerful, and motivated athlete.
Overview of the panel:
The Gridiron Performance Panel consisted of experienced coaches from every level of football, from the NFL down to High School. Justin Lovett – Senior Director of Strength and Conditioning for the Los Angeles Rams spoke from the Top level of the sport. From the collegiate perspective, the panel featured Colin Kenyon from Tulane (DI), Scott Bennett from Roanoke College (DIII), and Christian Brown out of Copiah-Lincoln Community College (Junior College). Jim Davis, who coaches one of the nation’s largest high schools – New Trier High School in Chicago spoke from the sport’s youngest population. In addition, the panel featured the founder of modern strength and conditioning (also known as the godfather): Boyd Epley. Boyd was the nation’s first paid strength and conditioning coach, and holds 5 NCAA National Championships in football over 3 decades! The panel was assembled by the NSCA Football Special Interest Group (SIG), led by Jon Lynch, who opened the discussion by emphasizing the importance of bringing together coaches from every level of football to share ideas, challenge perspectives, and advance the profession through industry-wide collaboration.
The panel was moderated by Industry leader and Owner and CEO of Strength Coach Network: an online community for S&C coaches to receive continuing education material, and share thoughts on their forum. Lima, a current high-school and private sector coach was formerly employed by Iowa, Maryland, Towson, and Harvard, and is also heavily involved with the NSCA – serving on the executive committees of the Football Special Interest Group and College Coaches Professional Development Group.
The Panel format was simple: Each panelist gets one primary question directed toward their level and area of expertise, which they get two minutes to answer. Each subsequent panelist then gets one minute to answer a similar follow-up question edited to relate to their level of football strength and conditioning.
