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Topic for discussion raised by Jon Goodwin, S&C Interest Group committee member responsible for liaison with other organisations (UKSCA, NSCA etc): How far does current research influence practice? What modifications have Interest Group members made recently in their coaching, programming and monitoring based on research evidence?

From working with a number of Strength and Conditioning Coaches from local teams and a number of S&C Coaches on our MSc Programme, it would appear that they are so busy with day to day work that many of them do not have much time to keep up to date with the most recent research. Most rely on CDP sessions / workshops and publications such as Professional Strength and Conditioning (UKSCA Publication). However, those on the registered on the part time MSc or on part time PhD's, who have to keep up to date do find that research findings influence their practices. As Dr Kilduff mentions monitoring fatigue is a very topical area and something that can be implimented relatively easily. Maybe the key to helping keep S&C coaches up to date is the generation of additional applied reviews such as those previously published by Dr Gamble within the Strength and Conditioning Journal. Would this be useful? Or would additional workshops / CPD sessions in specific areas be useful?

Reading the thoughts above my approach is from the other end. If in research we wish to bring applied work, then it unfortunately does not tend to score high in terms of research outputs. The impact factor of applied journals is considerably lower than more fundamental research journals, and the applied questions do not score in terms of getting research funding. As a result, if researchers from the overarching fields (e.g. biomechanics in my case) publish something that is applied, it often tends to be a derivative or an 'interesting message' and a little of their spare time which makes them write the paper. The paper will more than often hardly be mentioned in the researcher's future work. Question is then, how do we overcome that? Well, one good thing about the current research climate is that the emphasis in research scoring is turning towards impact. That means, is there any direct impact in society from the research. This has negative consequences for driving a fundamental research agenda, but is a very positive stimulus for initiating research that has an immediate impact, for example on the athlete, the sport club, or sports federations. Let me finally come back to availability of resources. Also on this front there is good news, because gradually more and more research is getting published in open access journals. Books such as Paul's recent book on Strength and Conditioning in team sports are however ideal for those who have little extra time available but wish to keep somehow up to date with the most recent research.

Hi people, I'm pretty new to this forum and have just been accredited with the NSCA about a month ago. I wanted to get involved in some discussion on this forum as i'm just about to start an MSc strength and conditioning in october, and thought it would be a good way to reflect on some of the key issues that concern S&C practitioners. It's a shame that some practitioners and some students find it difficult to find time to keep up to date with the latest research. I've had similar problems and it seems as though there aren't enough hours in the day to keep up to date. Although, i've found that the NSCA's webinars, free podcasts and S&C journals help a lot in keeping my knowledge fresh, i'm always hungry to learn new things. I believe that although the research is very important for practitioners, a lot can be learnt from reflective practice aswell, especially during the initial years of practicing as a coach. Also, i believe that a lot of the research that is published in S&C journals may not be directly relevant to every coaches specific goals and some students may benefit from having a very clear vision of what they want to achieve from their reading. I dont mean that to sound patronising as they may do this already. But i was reading a few articles by Ian Jeffreys and it got me thinking about how i study and plan my time. Ian states in most of his articles that we should 'start with the end in mind' and i think this can apply to our research and reading aswell. For example, if i have 2 hours in the evening, i want to read something that will help me achieve my goals and forget about the rest for the time being. Of course, if we're working with a range of different sports and different types of athletes, this may still seem difficult. However, i think we need to really think about what we want to get out of our reading and what our weak links are in our current practice, in order to develop our practice more rapidly. This may cut down the amount of reading that is required to achieve optimal progress towards our goals and may help those practitioners that are struggling to keep up to date. Any thoughts? Again i don't mean that to sound patronising as a lot of you guys are top coaches and researchers. However, i was thinking more about those practioners and students that P.Comfort mentioned