What is Strength and Conditioning?

What is Strength and Conditioning?

Strength and Conditioning (S&C) is the sports science discipline that is concerned with helping athletes and people develop attributes of their physical capabilities for sports performance and health and wellbeing.

Although historically it was focused on sporting performance, the world of sports science and health & wellbeing are coming together meaning S&C is relevant for us all. In our current culture where people are living very sedentary lives, S&C is important in order to develop health, wellbeing and physicality for independent longevity, i.e. independent living as we age. Pain during movement is not a foregone conclusion with age. Pain is a sign that something isn't working correctly and should be addressed rather than brushed off as a part of the ageing process.

If I asked you whether you wanted to get a disease of the Western World that could be prevented through lifestyle choices, none of you would say “yes please, pick me!”. Yet many people do not see physical prowess as an attribute to independent longevity, health and wellbeing.

Movement isn’t a nice to have. It’s a must have. Well, if you want to live a life in good health!

Not only is S&C important for health and wellbeing, it is a key attribute of developing performance for sport.

What Does Strength and Conditioning Involve?

Movement

This is about looking at your gait and posture and working to help you develop good movement patterns.

This is key for sports performance to reduce injury risk and ensure the correct muscles and mechanics are being used in your movement. For example, landing and planting mechanics in sports like netball and football are important in reducing the risk of ACL injuries as you learn to land and plant the lower body in strong positions.

Good movement patterns are key in life since our sedentary lifestyles mean we are losing the ability to move in the way the human body was designed. If we become stiff and tight and are not moving as we were designed to it can lead to daily pain and discomfort. Over time, if our tight muscles are encouraging our joints to operate in a sub-optimal pattern it can increase the wear and tear that can lead to conditions like osteoarthritis.

Developing good movement patterns is key for both sport and life.

Strength

Although I am a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I think the movie Pumping Iron meant that the sport of body building dominated media and public perceptions of strength training for several years to make people think training with weights will make us big and bulky.

This is a problem in sports as many athletes, like runners, footballers and cyclists, don’t want to become ‘bulky’. In life many women also worry about getting too muscly through weight training.

The truth is it takes a very specific type of weight training to grow big muscles.

Strength training is possible without getting big and bulky.

No one should fear strength training.

We should all look to strength training as one of the ways to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

As we age our muscle mass begins to decline. When we strength train we are able to maintain a good level of muscle mass no matter our age. Maintaining a good level of lean muscle mass is correlated with longevity in the health literature.

For sports, increasing the maximal force producing capabilities of your main working muscles means more power output which equals more speed and strength for less energy! For example, if you are a runner or play a running sport, if you are stronger in your legs you can run faster for less effort. Speed in sport is all about being able to apply the most amount of force in the quickest time – yes, even for running! In running, speed is about the ability to apply the most amount of force in each ground contact (step) in the quickest time possible. In sports science we call the Rate of Force Development (RFD).

In S&C for sport, it is important for a coach to understand the demands of the athlete's sport in order to train the appropriate types of muscular strength and power since different sports and different playing positions in the same sport require different types of strength.

All sports benefit from strength training.

Developing and maintaining strength is key for aiding improvements in both sports performance and health for life.

Conditioning

Although I view conditioning more broadly in terms of developing attributes of strength and movement, for me I focus this element of my work as concerned with developing people’s cardiovascular conditioning.

I am very interested in the way we can develop our cardiovascular system, hence studying sport and exercise physiology. Most recreational endurance athletes overtrain. They get in miles that they think will help them when in reality they are getting too much volume of training for their rest, recovery, nutrition and needs for physical adaptation – we call these ‘junk miles’. Volume is context specific. Just doing lots of miles won’t improve your performance and you run the risk of overtraining and hindering your performance and progression.

Training should be smartly programmed and most recreationally competitive athletes would benefit from a more evidenced-based and individualised training plan.

By comparison, most team sport athletes don’t get enough cardiovascular training. If team sport players developed their aerobic capacity they would be fitter and more able to recover between bouts of play in their sport.

Sports like martial arts, surfing, skateboarding, motorsports, freestyle snow sports etc. might not see the relevance of cardiovascular training...

but all sports benefit from a well-tuned cardiovascular engine.

For those not concerned with sport, the fitness industry has skewed our perceptions of what type of cardiovascular training is good for us. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) has become the focus. The trouble with this is that it is a type of training that burns a lot of carbohydrates meaning that most people then crave and overeat carbs following exercise – a behaviour pattern that is in conflict with most people’s aims of participating in exercise in the first place as they seek to slim down. It also puts the body into the stress response and hence overdoing HIIT training can lead to increased injury and illness risk. If we are training like this several times a week, most people are not getting enough rest and recovery between sessions. This detracts from health and fitness.

Whether sports performance or health are your goals for developing cardiovascular fitness, I embed health at the heart of the programmes I write. I think it’s important to get the volume and intensity at a level that sees you improving your fitness over time.

Cardiovascular training is key for both sports performance and health and longevity.

What I Offer

I offer S&C Coaching for life and for athletes of all levels from recreational to highly competitive. I work with both adults and teenagers.

Most notably I have supported…

the following teenagers:

Kayla, a teen ice hockey goalie who has made the 2022-2023 U18 Team GB squad
Noah, a teen rugby player who has recently made the Bath Rugby Developing Player Programme (DPP)
Cody, a teen taekwondo athlete who achieved two gold and one bronze medals at World Championships
Bonita, a teen rower who got into the Hartpury College & British Rowing Academy in 2020

the following adults:

Marianne Day to the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships in 2022 for road racing in cycling
Louise Austin to 9 World Records in her age category on the SkiErg
David Blackmore to complete a sub-4 hour marathon (one of his life goals) as well as completing a host of events since 2021 including Vienna Marathon, London Marathon, Brighton Marathon, the Great North Run, London Landmarks Half Marathon and cycling the Lap of Anglia.

I am an accredited S&C Coach through the UK Strength and Conditioning Association (UKSCA). I currently write and edit a column that I initiated for the UKSCA's Journal called 'Empowering Female Coaches'.

Publications

Craft, V. (2023) Redress the gender balance in S&C: Women need more voice. Professional Strength & Conditioning: The Journal of the UK Strength & Conditioning Association. 68, 27-28.

For a list of my relevant qualifications, please scroll down the About Me page.

Get In Touch

If you would like Strength & Conditioning Coaching in-person or remotely to help you, please get in touch for more details.

What is Strength and Conditioning?