The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) is proud to announce the recipients of the organization’s 2024 Peer Awards. These distinctive awards honor professionals around the world for outstanding achievement in their field. Each individual was nominated by the NSCA community and will be formally recognized at the 2024 NSCA National Conference in Baltimore, MD, this July 10-13.

Strength and conditioning professionals who incorporate a properly designed and supervised training program can help their young athletes train, compete, and reduce the likelihood of injury.

Coaches can also benefit from understanding the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement and positive and negative punishment as they relate to motivation. Although coaches use a mixture of both reward and punishment, using rewards and a positive approach is arguably the best approach because it focuses on what athletes should do and what they did right.

Endurance sports are typically not thought of as highly technical endeavors, but proper movement during training and competition for endurance sports can affect both performance and health.

The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) Advocates to Raise the Certification Standards with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)

The purpose of this article is to strongly suggest and offer a pragmatic and stepwise approach that takes into account the ideas and concepts of shared decision making that allows for the “best practices,” pre-participation screenings, evaluations, and stratification flow charts for safe and effective return to play for athletes.

The path to actual integration of mental and physical training for the tactical athlete is paved with growing empiricism. The current challenge is to sustain creative development of functional approaches and demonstrate that integration can deliver potential benefits.

Acceleration and maximum speed are terms used in speed development programs, and when developing a program, it is vital to differentiate between the two. This allows coaches to target their training to the capacity most important in their own sport.

In this lecture from the NSCA's 2016 Coaches Conference, Caitlin Quinn discusses how to implement simple techniques for creating a disciplined (yet enjoyable) team lifting environment. Quinn talks about how to hold athletes to a high standard of knowledge and movement accountability, how to teach simple physiology to achieve desirable technique, how to instill a level of ownership within each athlete, and how to place a large emphasis on an athlete's mental engagement throughout a lifting session.

This article provides an overview of how information collected through a performance-monitoring program can be used to assist in the development of a sliding sport talent identification program.