Justin Lovett | Gathering Infinity Stones

What does it take to become an award-winning Director of Strength and Conditioning in the National Football League (NFL)? Justin Lovett reveals the “we over me” mentality that guides his role with the Los Angeles Rams. Lovett reflects on receiving the 2024 NSCA Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year Award after being an NSCA Member for over 20 years. He draws parallels between working with high school and NFL athletes — where the desired training responses are the same and ability levels vary — making versatility key. Lovett also stresses the importance of finding clean and effective training methods to accommodate wear and tear in football athletes. He compares the Rams’ hiring philosophy to gathering “infinity stones,” emphasizing character attributes, culture alignment, and staff chemistry. Lovett and NSCA Coaching and Sport Science Program Manager Eric McMahon discuss progressing into leadership and the rise of performance director roles, as well as how to seek out career and networking opportunities.

Connect with Justin on Instagram: @strcoachlovett, Twitter/X: @justin_lovett,  or LinkedIn: Justin Lovett | Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs or LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs  

“Your ability to individualize is critical, and make it position or sport or athlete-specific in many cases... It's never quite a repeat one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach.” 7:25

“You need some juice. You need some authentic and genuine passion.” 13:45

“I think, first and foremost, the thing that resonates with me is that it's never about you. It's never about you. These players shouldn't be able to recognize who the head strength coach is when we're working the floor. Everybody — it's almost a flat hierarchy where we're here to help players, so it doesn't matter who gets the credit.” 18:45

“Your players have to be available. They have to feel like they are in a position where they're improving. And you have to be able to audit your programs and show them metrically that, yes, you are in a prime state or a ready state to compete at the highest level. So, it's never about you, ever about you. And the minute it becomes about you, you should leave. And I strongly believe that.” 19:45

“You have to provide strategies for them to grow horizontally within your organization, within your department, and vertically.” 20:30

“I think that's an empowering message for anyone listening is that no matter what you're going through, the challenge you're facing, how you're feeling about your current role or where you want to be, there's someone that's had that experience or can help you maybe relate to that experience better, going back to it's not about us. It's about our athletes, our teams, the programs that we are tasked with empowering and growing, and the people that we influence in this business.” 33:50

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:02.71] Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast, season 8, episode 10.
[00:00:07.63] I think first and foremost, that the thing that resonates with me is that it's never about you. It's never about you. These players shouldn't be able to recognize who the head strength coach is when we're working the floor. Everybody, it's almost a flat hierarchy where we're here to help players. So it doesn't matter who gets the credit.
[00:00:29.62] This is the NSCA's Coaching Podcast, where we talk to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know but probably didn't learn in school. There's strength and conditioning, and then there's everything else.
[00:00:40.18] This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm Eric McMahon, NSCA's Coaching and Sports Science Program Manager. Today we have another episode about football. And we have Justin Lovett, the 2024 NSCA Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year with us. He's the director of strength and conditioning with the LA Rams. Justin, welcome.
[00:01:00.46] Thanks for having me, Eric. It's awesome to be a part of this. I love what you guys do.
[00:01:05.63] Yeah. No, we appreciate you. Got to connect at the last national conference. You were a presenter. I know it's tough for you to get to coaches during the NFL season, all you guys in the NFL. But our national conference in July is always a good one for you.
[00:01:24.33] Yeah, that's right. Definitely miss the coaches, but hitting that national is pretty neat. That's the first time I had been to that one, so it was very cool, and enjoyed reconnecting out there.
[00:01:37.85] Yeah. So I was in baseball for a lot of years. And I could always go to coaches, but I could never go to national. And so it was sort of the opposite, where coming into this job now I go to all the conferences. And it's cool to see the research side of things. And with the growth of sports science, that's a really important event for us in the summer. So we were happy to have you there as a presenter.
[00:02:03.75] You had a big year with the NSCA, winning that Professional Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year Award. What was that experience like for you, winning that award?
[00:02:13.89] Yeah. Very humbling, actually. Because you think about the-- I've been a NSCA member for 20 years. That's the first thing I did when we graduated. And my wife's in health and kinesiology, and she was a PE teacher at one time as well. So, for us, that's where it started. And 20 years later, after getting grief from my wife of taking our CSCS materials to study on our honeymoon in Laguna Beach 20 years ago, full circle, that award was 20 years from when we first got rolling.
[00:02:54.52] So that was really humbling. And all the people that reached out through the NSCA and through the giant network that you all have, that was incredibly humbling for players, and former players, and coaches, and friends seeing it. I mean, that was pretty cool.
[00:03:14.02] One of the cool things that we have at the NSCA is a coaching task force. And they are involved in voting on award winners and the finalists of who wins these Coach of the Year awards. And one of the things that I learned about you through that process was that you were actually working at the high school level years ago here in Colorado, and worked your way in high school, and then college, professional. You've really worked all the way across the field. So I thought that was really cool that you were a high school teacher.
[00:03:47.87] Yeah. The first event I went to was out in Colorado Springs at headquarters, and got to see, and experience, and learn. So just being a part of the NSCA was very cool at the high school level. Because, as you know, different levels, there's different demands from coaching at high school coaching and college and coaching in the pros. And we really didn't have any ambition to coach anywhere other than high school at the time.
[00:04:16.98] We had spent four years at the high school level, and my wife was a teacher too. And we thought we were set forever and would have kept rolling to those Colorado Springs NSCA workshops and clinics that you all have. But it just turned out a different way. So I can't thank you guys enough and the coaching task force enough for honoring us with this opportunity to win the award. And, like I said earlier, very humbling and was something I'll definitely-- one of the coolest experiences I've had in this career so far, so very cool.
[00:04:52.58] Looking across the landscape of athlete development, I think it's cool have that high school, almost block zero or getting athletes started with their training journey and then now at the NFL level. What are some of the things you take from working at the high school level that carry with you today to the NFL?
[00:05:14.83] How you view an athlete on the spectrum of development really doesn't change in terms of shapes and the responses that you're trying to elicit, from stacked joints to symmetrical firing of those joints. So the shapes are the same. And, now, a professional athlete doesn't take two reps to fix a coaching cue. A high school athlete might take a more nuanced approach and more regressions, but ultimately you're hunting the same thing.
[00:05:49.10] You don't want to have dysfunction and build strength on top of dysfunction or power on top of dysfunction. You're trying to clean that up first. And the scope of practice in the professional realm is you have guys that come from small schools that had one strength coach for football and that strength coach also did other sports. Maybe it was a football coach that was also a strength coach.
[00:06:13.77] You have guys that had tremendous experiences at the high school level and college experience was the same, where they have elite strength and conditioning and performance staffs. So they're very engaged and very in tune with their bodies, and what they need from sleep to a dietary standpoint. But you have guys completely opposite that, like I mentioned, that didn't have those luxuries at the small schools. But it doesn't matter how you got here. You got here.
[00:06:44.94] So we have the high end caliber guy that might need some tweaks under the hood, and then you have a guy that he doesn't really need to know a lot. It's our job to make sure that he's ready and he can access his performance attributes. So you're working with a different type of skill set and level of experience, but that's a broad range that you have to cover on a spectrum.
[00:07:10.46] And, to me, it has tremendous similarities to high school, where you're working with an incoming ninth grader or a senior that has 16 offers. You're working within the same group, the same parameters, however, they have different needs. So your ability to individualize is critical, and make it position or sport or athlete-specific in many cases. So it's very similar, but yet it's very expansive, and it's never quite a repeat one-size-fits-all cookie cutter approach.
[00:07:49.80] We've seen an evolution in the field around exercise selection. And I think this is one of those topics that the pendulum sort of swings one way or the other. And then we see things kind of come back into the fold. For example, more athletes are deadlifting today than they were 20 years ago, maybe a few less-- a few less athletes are squatting today, and more single leg and things like that. Do you feel like at the professional level, because you're dealing with so many different backgrounds and experiences with strength and conditioning, that you have to be more versatile across all the schools of thought in strength and conditioning? How do you approach that?
[00:08:28.04] We do have a mixed method or a watered down approach when it comes to our pulls and our twitch work. And really, at the high school level, it was basic, simple, clean, and effective coaching cues and Olympic pool progressions, where maybe it took us a long time to get to a catch of a power clean, or the nuances between a hand clean and a power clean, or maybe our overhead movements were very limited.
[00:09:03.95] We'd always say save some of those split stance variations, or jerks, or snatches for the fancy and the high-end college coach that you're going to experience next. When we got to college, it was an advancement of those rudimentary primary power and strength development exercises. But, again, we would say let's save those fancy snatch progressions, these intricate clusters, for the fancy NFL coach.
[00:09:36.68] So now that we're here in the NFL, we have nowhere to go, and it is a watered down approach. Because at this level, these guys are coming from small schools, like we said. They're also coming from Big 10, SEC, and they have a lot of wear and tear. And so to think that we're going to have our roster catch a clean with bad wrists, elbows, and shoulders, and backs, and knees that have been taken advantage of by this game, it's unrealistic. So it's on us to find the cleanest and the most effective modality from a pull or a strength development standpoint that fits that athlete.
[00:10:18.72] So whether it's joint preservation-- those guys are in different buckets when it comes to modality selection versus your rookies that are coming in that might have a clean injury history that you can go, go. And so, yeah, we're very athlete-centric when it comes to our patterns, and we don't have any sacred cows. So if something works for an athlete or they have melted into a certain protocol from wherever they were at in college to now whoever they're working with professionally on the private sector in between stints with us-- if it works, it works. We want that. And we want to be open minded to adapt to the athlete as he progresses through his career.
[00:11:04.31] Last year's team, last year's players had certain limitations, certain strengths and weaknesses. This year's team is different. And those athletes that were on last year's team and who are going to be on this year's team, they've advanced. They've encountered challenges throughout the season with their bodies, knees, shoulders, more wear and tear. Some guys got out clean, so they can advance whatever they were working on last off-season and last in-season. But some guys have to take a step back and have to reimagine how they want to train and operate from a performance standpoint to keep ascending or to play another year.
[00:11:45.69] Yeah. It's just like the evolution of the playbook from roster changes year to year, you might have some different personnel. And one year you might run the ball a little more or pass the ball or run different scheme. There's a lot of parallels in terms of just being dynamic as a coach. And obviously, at the highest level, it's competitive. You got to compete out there and you got to have a lot of tools in your toolbox. So I like hearing that because it empowers coaches to have a versatile and dynamic skill set and not be really stuck in one way of thinking.
[00:12:22.69] You recently had some new hires on your staff kind of going through that phase of staff development and building up your team for the season. What's your approach to building a strength and conditioning staff? Do you key in on any particular specialties from staff member to staff member or how do you approach that?
[00:12:47.33] It's a mixture of skill sets and character attributes that we're looking for. So we like to look for versatile coaches that have certain wheelhouses or go-to attributes. So maybe it's a field general. You need a field general. As if you're building a basketball team, you need a field general. You need somebody that's strong with field progressions, that can handle the dynamics of wide receivers, defensive backs, running backs, tight ends, linebackers at this level.
[00:13:25.74] You also need somebody that has a strong foundation in Olympic movements-- the base of what we do and what strength and conditioning is, and somebody that's very technical in the weight room. You also need somebody that has some thump. Maybe that's where the character comes in. You need some juice. You need some authentic and genuine passion. We all have that. But if you're building a basketball team, chemistry is just as important as skill sets.
[00:13:57.07] I think I used to chase a lot of attributes on the floor or attributes on the field. But didn't necessarily do our assistance or our program right because I didn't dive into the character as much and how they will play off of one another and the connectedness that you feel when you hit on your staff with how they play off each other and how they interact-- setting them up for the right groups to work with. That has tremendous impact, and it accelerates everything that we're about. So that that's been a stronger consideration and a much deeper dive when it comes to the hiring process and even the onboarding process.
[00:14:42.11] We follow alignment with Coach McVay and his culture here. So that trumps anything that we're about. And, really, it's we over me, so anybody that we get in here, first and foremost, you have to be a good person. And we feel like, if you're even interviewing with us, then you do have tremendous skill sets and you should be considered among the best in what you do in the world. So it's less really about diving into the granular nuances of exercise selection, how you audit your programs for successful outcomes. We know that can take care of itself if we have the right person who is ego-free, who is here to engage and support our players, doesn't have an agenda, and has a passion for this business, and the sport of football, and is on fire to show up and work for the Rams.
[00:15:42.48] That's, in a nutshell, that's kind of what we've been going through the last couple of months. And we finally got our crew here, and we're excited. And, really, another thing I'd say about having new staff members-- it's tough because, on one sense, you lose a lot of good staff members based on proximity to success. So anybody that seems like shares a plane with Sean McVay is going to get a job at some point. So we know that, we lean into that.
[00:16:10.51] We have a lot of people that come through and spend a little time with us and then also have some additional opportunities to advance their career in many different ways. But with that, whatever we lose-- we've lost tremendous coaches with elite capacity and great people. When we bring in others, it's almost like gathering Infinity Stones. We have another offense to call. We have another defense that we can check to from a schematic standpoint in our weight room and on the field. And we're leaning into those new ideas, those new thought processes, those new experiences that we add to the table and add that to the mix.
[00:16:53.88] We have our DNA, our core concepts that we like to roll through. And we are a versatile organism by heart. But when you add new staff and you hit it right, there's some magic and the players feel it. And there's a new energy. So it's been refreshing. It's been fun. And it's really taken the sting away from losing great people, because that hurts. And we're happy for them, but yet we're still here with the Rams trying to do business and do right for our players. So there is a little pressure to not fall off. It's continue the ascent in what we're doing programming-wise and performance department-wise.
[00:17:38.13] There's definitely those two sides of coaches move on, but that's good for them. That's career progression, typically. And one thing-- you talked about building your roster. You have different sort of positions, roles that you're looking to fill on your staff, but not just in the strength office, how those roles impact the team as a whole. The we over me, I love that.
[00:18:07.89] The progression into leadership for coaches-- I want to dig into that a little bit more. You're in a director role. You're part of bringing staff members in and building the culture of an organization. You've been in a few different leadership roles now. And it's one where you even spoke to it, how you prepare your staff before to what you've learned from that and where you're at today. What are some of the key lessons you think? There's a lot of coaches that want to move up the ladder. Maybe outside of strength and conditioning, what do they need to know to be able to take that next step and contribute at the leadership level?
[00:18:46.95] Well, I think first and foremost, the thing that resonates with me is that it's never about you. It's never about you. These players shouldn't be able to recognize who the head strength coach is when we're working the floor. Everybody-- it's almost a flat hierarchy where we're here to help players, so it doesn't matter who gets the credit.
[00:19:07.87] Like Mike Tomlin once said about-- I'm taking it out of context, but nameless gray faces. Could care less. They're not going to watch us walk away if we get a new job. They want what they need to help extend and maximize their careers. So if you understand that-- and that's no different.
[00:19:26.49] College is a challenge because sometimes there's a more of a culture component than a production component from performance. You have to have both, but culture can really be more of a driver in college and trump performance protocols, versus in the pros you can talk culture all you want. But at the end of the day, it has to be an audit. Your players have to be available. They have to feel like they are in a position where they're improving. And you have to be able to audit your programs and show them metrically that, yes, you are in a prime state or a ready state to compete at the highest level.
[00:20:05.26] So it's never about you, ever about you. And the minute it becomes about you, you should leave. And I strongly believe that. And so if you take that approach as a leader, or a director in a department, then when you onboard your coaches, your assistants, you have to empower them. You have to provide strategies for them to grow horizontally within your organization, within your department, and vertically.
[00:20:38.06] One of the unique things that I think we're seeing is the increased role of performance directors at the NFL level. Coming up, the highest you could get was to be a head strength coach. That's all I wanted to be. And now we're feeling our young coaches-- when you talk to them, where do you guys see yourself in three to five years? Performance director. And that shook me a little bit.
[00:21:07.93] You guys don't want to be a head strength coach? No. Because the head strength coach is only weight room and field. We need to have proximity to operations, for travel, circadian rhythm considerations. We need proximity to nutrition, dietary needs, proximity to tactical performance, as far as help with performance science to guide or at least provide strategies for your coaches to operate within a performance mindset tactically.
[00:21:43.31] Now, that's been a change. And if you are a leader or a director, I think that you have to view it from that perspective and with a different perception of what that job is to your guys or your gals. And so it's been pretty-- I've learned more from-- I would say, with this type of mindset, I've been able to learn more from our assistants than they ever would learn from me. And that's why the analogy of gathering Infinity Stones resonates. Because everything that they do, I'm learning, because they're tremendous in their field of expertise.
[00:22:30.46] And little do they know-- and maybe it happens to some, maybe it doesn't-- but the minute you go from elite assistant-- maybe you're a technician on the floor. You're a wizard on the field. You can go position-specific and you can talk their language, from speed turn, zone turn, or get in there with some hand fighting and match up your feet. The minute you cross over from one of the best assistants on a staff and you get to sit and make decisions as a director or head strength coach, instantly you know nothing.
[00:23:07.04] Now it's not about you. And it's not about your journey of what it took to get there. It's about everybody else that now you in the director chair answer to. How are you helping those guys develop? Are you putting your thumb on them? Are you allowing them and encouraging them with psychological safety to write, to improve your program beyond whatever the director thinks he can do when it comes to writing programs in the weight room and on the field?
[00:23:37.89] If you can do that, then I think then you have a healthy department. You have a healthy organization. If it's about you in any way, there's stunted growth. There's bottlenecks of information. And when there's silence it creates negativity. And so as collaborative and as transparent as you can be, that's what we're selling here in Los Angeles with anybody that comes aboard.
[00:24:06.22] It's not about me. It's about them and wherever they go. And as long as we are in proximity to these elite assistants, I feel like I get to be a part of some cheat codes and see how the next generation is taking over this field and making us better. And it's just advancing all of us and raising the level of what we can do here for the Rams.
[00:24:32.46] Yeah. The thing that jumps out to me-- I remember years ago you'd hear this at conferences-- coaches, leaders of staff saying, I want my assistants to want my job. They want to become that head strength coach. Well, now you might have someone on your staff that wants a different job or a different role. There are so many different opportunities now on a performance staff.
[00:24:54.61] So, like you said, it creates-- you have to be really versatile in how you convey a message to an assistant or someone that you're working with that may have a little different mindset, or thought process, or approach, or skill set. And that creates-- it's a real different type of leadership than we've seen or that culture leading the way mindset that you talked about in college. And to me, it really gets to, as coaches, we all want to be great at what we do. And we probably can all connect with a time that we're like, man, I'm killing it right now. This is awesome.
[00:25:39.77] It's that coach who's the lead at what they do. They're a speed expert or they're the field general or whatever it may be. And then they get that bump up, they get promoted and they have a completely new job description and skill set. And they're not experts at that anymore. So to me, it goes back to that, what your process of becoming great in your role? And if someone can do that, they're progressing. Right?
[00:26:04.94] But then what's their ability now to take a step back and say, OK, I'm now faced with new challenges. How do I be great at this role? So for young coaches-- it really doesn't matter whatever stage you're working in of your career. There's a big lesson there. That process, that kind of messy middle that you're working through right now, is what you're going to revisit every time there's a change or transition.
[00:26:35.46] Justin, you've had a few transitions in your career moving around-- NFL, back to college, back to the NFL. Coaches move around in this business. You got to go chase opportunity. What's your advice or thoughts on that for coaches that are maybe navigating those experiences?
[00:26:55.49] I would say don't be afraid to reach out. And I remember when we didn't get renewed in Denver and a new crew came in. And as hurtful as that was, reaching out and trying to stay in the league was something that we were trying to do. Because once you're out of the NFL, it's like you were never in. And that goes for any of us, no matter how long you were in it. And it feels like that way in college, too.
[00:27:23.22] So I would reach out and I would invite myself over to watch a lift in Baltimore or Philadelphia, and would kind of blow through some maybe stop signs socially. You don't mind if I stop by? I'm in town. I'd show up in town and say, by the way, I'm 15 minutes away. Can I swing through? That's a little harder to say no to when somebody's 15 minutes away versus I'm going to get a flight. And now there's pressure for me to take care of you or walk you through whatever we do. And nobody has time for that.
[00:27:54.82] But if you're around the corner and you want to meet for coffee, or if it's an off day but just checking to see if anybody's around-- yeah, come on through. Don't be afraid to do that. I remember when I got an email back from Bill Belichick. I was the third assistant out in Denver, and he had no business emailing me back to say, just keep rolling, keep doing your thing. It's something that resonated with me.
[00:28:22.75] And now I think all of us try to reach back to every message that comes our way on LinkedIn or on direct message. But if it doesn't come back to you in a response, I've found the best strategy for me was not to take anything personal. You're seeking opportunity. You're seeking the ability to network. And if none of those things happen for you from a net point network standpoint-- you weren't able to visit, nobody reaches back to you, then there's the conferences.
[00:28:54.66] At the national conferences, coaches, conferences, people that you've talked to, I guarantee they have name recognition. And I've talked to several people that introduce themselves and I'll remember them from maybe a lack of correspondence. And it was not intentional. I just wasn't able to get back to somebody. But that viewing their stuff and sending their information, I'm always watching-- and I think most of us are always watching the game and how it turns.
[00:29:22.60] They want to know where the next best strength coach is coming from. Why are they on the cutting edge of what they do? How did they get there? Who do they work for, and why is their system so dynamic? Or at least maybe through a social media lens, why does it appear so dynamic?
[00:29:38.91] And I think we're all watching. So we're all seeing these young coaches advance, and wouldn't be afraid to reach out and take advantage of any opportunity to try to talk to somebody even if you fail 9 times out of 10. Keep rolling. It's about how you can get connected, and over time it can happen, just more reps. And so I would suggest that.
[00:30:05.73] And really, another thing that struck me when you were mentioning some of the transitions on the way to the end destination for some people, which is being a head strength coach or being a director of performances-- throughout transitions, if you are an elite assistant that is eyes forward chasing the cutting edge, it happened to me where we got our first-- I had been a strength coach in college, an assistant in the NFL, an assistant. In college before moving to a head strength job. And you'd think that I have these high end progressions, these very complex ways of doing business that nobody else is doing.
[00:30:49.69] Proprietary-- you think your stuff is proprietary and nobody else can figure out your system. But then you get your first group of athletes on the floor. It comes back to the basics. You're eventually going to go back from where you came from. So the basics was, what's my cadence? What's my rhythm? What's my vocabulary like on a stretch?
[00:31:18.19] Will they snap down? Do I say ready, set? Do I say set? What's the chronological order of my stretch on-- do we start ground based? Do we start with a skip? Do I have stations? Am I sharing with another room? All those things you don't even-- for me, I did not even think of coming up. I thought, man, that's elementary. I can handle that in my sleep. I don't even need to write anything down.
[00:31:40.18] However, I had that back end taken care of. Front of the house wasn't. So it was very humbling. It was like a right cross to the bridge of the nose. You think you have everything, but it comes back to the basics. Who's cleaning the weight room between? Who's picking it up? What do the optics look like? If the head coach walks in and he sees a snapshot of a bad transition, that might be what you're evaluated on, as opposed to at the end of spring ball, your max day, your max week.
[00:32:16.81] You're evaluated on more than numbers. And then we get to the fall, player availability. That's part of your evaluation too. Do you appear organized? Do you appear in control? All those things didn't really dawn on me when I was an assistant. I always had it in my head, I could probably do this better, I could probably clean it up, but didn't take the time to investigate every facet of what running a program would entail, from showing up, to who gets the bagels, to how we switching rock and refuel with muscle milk, and how are we doing it for free if we don't have a budget. I can't do that.
[00:32:56.43] Do we have somebody on staff that can do that, that can network locally? All of those things, I think, just ran us over. And, luckily, we had a great-- as we've been fortunate in our time in this field to have great head football coaches that can overcome a lot of the green mistakes that I would make, and even the mistakes up here in the NFL that you can just-- it's like deodorant. You can make mistakes, but you work for a great head coach that understands that you're trying to help the players and supports that. In college and in the pros, you can navigate through a lot of difficulties along the way to running, eventually, a successful string conditioning or performance department.
[00:33:41.30] Yeah. And, to your point, lots of challenges in this profession. But there's more mentors in the field than ever before, then when you got into the profession, when I got into the profession. I think that's an empowering message for anyone listening is that, no matter what you're going through, the challenge you're facing, how you're feeling about your current role or where you want to be, there's someone that's had that experience or can help you maybe relate to that experience better, going back to it's not about us. It's about our athletes, our teams, the programs that we are tasked with empowering and growing, and the people that we influence in this business. But that's why we love it, man. I appreciate you sharing all this.
[00:34:27.49] It's been great. It's a fascinating field. It's becoming more diverse in terms of thought as we go. Like you had mentioned, from the old days, where the strength coach might have had to wear too many hats, now those guys are performance directors and who's going to blend return to play, return to performance programming with sports medicine and strength and conditioning, who's going to organize everybody's voices of dissension into a cohesive message that moves the needle and that is consistent throughout your organization.
[00:35:07.26] So back then it was probably a lot of us that were ill-suited for multiple roles. But now, with this younger generation, the more exposures they get along the way with tremendous mentors and different avenues to learn about performance science and string conditioning and how it interrelates, it's fascinating to watch the evolution of this business on multiple levels.
[00:35:37.37] Yeah. We've moved from how do you accomplish the basic tasks even though there's a lot of them to how do we optimize, how do we maximize each individual area. And there's a lot of depth there. In the spirit of mentorship and the spirit of connecting, what's the best way for our listeners to connect with you?
[00:35:57.68] Yeah. I'm on X and Instagram. I'm not sure I know my handles, but it's just my first and last name. I get messages and I do look at them on LinkedIn, as well as-- my emails sometimes gets overrun by-- yeah, I don't want to do the email because it's already ugly.
[00:36:23.04] All right. Well, we'll add your social media in the show notes, and hopefully some listeners will want to connect with you and just continue the conversation. So, Justin, thanks for being with us. Everybody, we appreciate you tuning in. And thanks to Sorinex Exercise Equipment. We appreciate their support.
[00:36:41.17] Hey, this is Kenna Smoak Minnici, the 2024 Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year Award recipient. You just listened to an episode on the NSCA Coaching Podcast. Go Army. Beat Navy.
[00:36:55.22] This was the NSCA's Coaching Podcast. The National Strength and Conditioning Association was founded 1978 by strength and conditioning coaches to share information, resources, and help advance the profession. Serving coaches for over 40 years, the NSCA is the trusted source for strength and conditioning professionals. Be sure to join us next time.

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