Concurrent training programs consist of both endurance and resistance training to maximize all aspects of performance. For endurance athletes, research strongly supports the benefits of adding strength and power training to programs.

Reactive strength is a key strength and power ability driving athletic performance. Strength and power abilities include maximal muscle strength (how much force an athlete can generate irrespective of time) and rate of force development (RFD-how fast an athlete generates force). However, reactive strength is unique in that it involves the ability to couple movements that lengthen musculotendinous tissue (eccentric movement) followed those in which musculotendinous tissue shortens (concentric movement). These movements are called stretch-shorten-cycles (SSCs) and they occur readily in all kinds of human activities like running, jumping and change of direction movements. Movements that involve SSCs are often referred to as plyometrics and reactive strength and plyometric ability are sometimes used interchangeably.

A movement baseline is a series of activity-specific assessments that, when analyzed together, provide a snapshot of your movement patterns. It acts as an objective marker that allows you to set personalized goals and targets, measure meaningful change, and track and evaluate progress. Baselines are the foundation for performance, monitoring, and recovery plans.

If you live in the sport performance world, much ado has been made over the notion of injury prediction. If only we had a genie in a bottle that could predict an injury, right? These issues were brought to the forefront recently in a journal article published in Sports Medicine (Hughes, Riley, Callaghan, & Sergeant, 2020). The researchers went back retrospectively to obtain “periodic health examination” data that included measures of lower body joint strength and range of motion from soccer players to see if they could predict muscle injuries.