A Note From Coach H

This edition jumps from how you lead to how your athletes recover, with a detour through what the Olympics are now treating as non-negotiable. There's also a stat in here that might make you rethink everything you thought you knew about post-workout nutrition.

In The Training Room, we're taking on a training staple that's been quietly doing more harm than good. And in Build Session, we've got two physical tools and two mental ones, including a simple language tweak that changes how your athletes actually perform. Dig in.

Let’s get into it →

🧠How You Lead Shapes How Tough Your Athletes Become:
A study published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching surveyed 301 collegiate volleyball players across a full season and found that coaches who practiced transformational leadership (building a shared vision, fostering personal growth, creating a task-focused team climate) produced athletes with measurably higher mental toughness. The mechanism runs through two pathways: the environment coaches create for the group, and the individual relationships they build with each athlete. The practical implication is straightforward; prioritize individualized feedback, set personalized goals, and measure each athlete's growth against their own baseline rather than their teammates'. (https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/5865/coach-leadership-athlete-mental-toughness)

⌚Olympic-Level Recovery Tracking Is Now Standard Issue:
Oura has been named the official wearable of Team USA and the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, covering both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games and LA28 in 2028. Team USA's chief medical officer put it plainly: supporting elite athletes requires a holistic approach that extends beyond training, Sleep, recovery, and readiness are foundational. Oura has already been embedded in the prep programs of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, USA Hockey, U.S. Speed Skating, and Women's Soccer since 2024. For coaches at every level, the signal is hard to ignore: what Olympic programs now consider standard infrastructure is available to any team willing to build recovery monitoring into their system. (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260206641709/en/URA-Named-Official-Wearable-of-Team-USA-and-LA28-Olympic-and-Paralympic-Games)

🧠States Are Now Requiring Coaches to Learn Mental Health Skills:
Several U.S. states have passed laws requiring mental health training for school-based coaches, and new research out of Ohio State University published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living confirms the approach is working. A study of 1,690 coaches who completed either an in-person or online state-approved training found statistically significant gains in confidence for both supporting student-athletes with mental health concerns and connecting them to appropriate resources, regardless of format. Before training, fewer than half of coaches reported feeling moderately or extremely confident in those areas; after, that number climbed to 88–94%. The most valued skills coaches took away weren't clinical, they were relational… How to approach a struggling athlete, how to ask open-ended questions, and how to recognize warning signs early. (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sports-and-active-living/articles/10.3389/fspor.2025.1701426/full)

McGill's Big 3: The Core Training Science Athletes Actually Need

Most coaches think of core training as “ab work”. McGill's research says that framing is the problem. His 2010 review in the Strength and Conditioning Journal makes a case that rewires how you think about the torso: the core musculature exists primarily to stiffen, to act as the transfer point between hip power and limb action, not to crunch, flex, or rotate. Every time a spine bends under load, it spends one of a finite number of bends before tissue damage accumulates. Most athletes don't know they're burning through that budget in the weight room.

The implications for program design are immediate. Exercises like the sit-up and the gym ball curl-up directly replicate the mechanism that causes disc herniation: repeated lumbar flexion under load. Abdominal hollowing, still coached as a cue in many programs, actually reduces spinal stability by decreasing the stiffness the column needs to hold. The abdominal brace, where all muscles contract together, is what the evidence supports. The difference between these two cues shows up measurably in how much load the spine can safely handle.

McGill's Big 3 puts this science into practice. The modified curl-up limits lumbar and cervical motion entirely. The side bridge builds the lateral musculature, including the often-neglected quadratus lumborum. The birddog trains posterior chain stability with the spine in neutral, avoiding the compressive load the "superman" exercise imposes at twice the rate. Isometric holds should stay under 10 seconds (endurance is built through reps, not duration), which prevents the oxygen debt and cramping that longer holds produce.

The broader principle is worth sitting with: a strong core doesn't mean a mobile one. McGill's data consistently shows that athletes with greater spinal range of motion carry a higher risk of future back trouble, and that strength without movement control actually increases injury risk. For any athlete in your program, whether they're dealing with back pain or simply chasing better performance, these three exercises provide a research-backed foundation before any loaded progression begins.

Only 1.8% of athletes can correctly identify what their body actually needs after a workout. A 2025 study published in Nutrients surveyed endurance athletes on their post-exercise nutrition knowledge and adherence. The results were sobering: despite training three or more times per week, only 1.8% of participants could correctly identify the optimal carbohydrate intake required for rapid glycogen resynthesis after exercise. Most athletes focused on protein while significantly underestimating how critical carbohydrate timing is to recovery. The gap between training volume and nutrition knowledge was wide enough to drive a bus through.

Here's why that number matters. When you train, your muscles burn through glycogen (stored carbohydrate) as their primary fuel source. The window immediately following exercise is when your muscles are most primed to replenish those stores, and when protein synthesis is most responsive to nutritional input. Miss that window consistently and you're not just leaving recovery on the table, you're showing up to every subsequent practice or game slightly more depleted than you needed to be. Over a long season, that accumulates in ways that are hard to pinpoint but easy to feel.

The practical implication for coaches is straightforward: your athletes are likely not eating what they need, when they need it, because they simply don't know. Most of the athletes in the study weren't ignoring nutrition, they were actively thinking about it. They just had the priorities inverted, chasing protein while their glycogen tanks sat empty. A brief, direct conversation about what recovery eating actually looks like (carbohydrates and protein together within two hours of practice) could be one of the higher-leverage things you do for your team this season.

Isometric Training for Strength & Tendon Health (Physical)

Most training programs chase movement. The push, the pull, the lift, etc… Isometric training takes a different approach: hold a position under load, don't move, and let the tension do the work. Sounds simple, but this is actually one of the most underutilized tools in athletic development, particularly when it comes to tendon health. Research consistently shows that sustained isometric holds stimulate tendon remodeling, increase connective tissue stiffness, and can reduce tendon pain (benefits that eccentric and concentric training alone often can't match). For athletes dealing with patellar, Achilles, or shoulder tendon issues, isometrics offer a training stimulus that loads the tissue without aggravating it.

The application is pretty straightforward. Target the tendons most at risk in your sport, quads and patellar tendon for jumping athletes, calves and Achilles for runners, and rotator cuff for throwers. Add 3-5 sets of 30-45 second holds at moderate intensity two to three times per week. Keep the joint angle specific to the sport demand and progress load gradually over weeks, not days. Tendons adapt slowly, but they do adapt. (https://phyba.com.au/blogs/blog/the-science-behind-isometrics-building-stronger-tendons-for-athletes)

Precompetition Imagery Scripting (Mental)

Most athletes have heard "visualize success" at some point, but very few have been taught to do it in a way that actually works. Imagery is not passive daydreaming, it's a structured mental rehearsal tool with a meaningful body of research behind it, showing improvements in confidence, focus, anxiety regulation, and skill execution when used correctly. The key word is correctly… Generic positive visualization produces generic results. What works is scripted, sensory-rich rehearsal tied to specific competitive scenarios. Such as what the environment looks, sounds, and feels like, how the body moves, or how the athlete responds to pressure moments.

Coaches can introduce this in under ten minutes. Have each athlete identify two or three high-pressure moments from their sport (a late-game free throw, a first touch after a substitution, a critical serve) and write a short script walking through exactly how they want to handle it. Use first-person, present tense, and include sensory detail. Athletes read or listen to their script in the 24-48 hours before competition. Over time, the nervous system treats the rehearsed scenario as familiar territory, which is exactly the point. (https://sportspsychology.medium.com/imagery-101-for-athletes-how-to-improve-your-performance-with-mental-rehearsal-2c6af97cf79)

Attentional Focus: Flip Your Cues (Mental)

How a coach phrases a cue shapes what the athlete's brain does with it, and most coaches are using cues that work against them. Research on attentional focus consistently shows that external cues, those directed at the outcome or effect of a movement, produce better performance and faster skill acquisition than internal cues, which direct attention to the body itself. Telling a shooter to "snap the wrist" is internal. Telling them to "put backspin on the ball" is external. The movement may be identical, but the brain processes it differently, and the external version wins in study after study. One review found that over 80% of cues given to elite sprinters were internal, even though external cues consistently outperform them.

The fix requires no equipment and no extra practice time, just deliberate language. Start by auditing two or three cues you use most often and rewriting them to focus on the effect rather than the body part. Instead of "drive your knees up," try "attack the ground." Instead of "keep your elbow in," try "throw through the target." Athletes move better, learn faster, and retain more when attention is pointed outward. (https://coachathletics.com.au/coaching-education/you-havent-coached-until-theyve-learned-why-attentional-focus-is-your-essential-coaching-tool)

Landmine Press Progressions (Physical)

The barbell overhead press is a staple, but for a lot of athletes it's also a liability. Shoulder impingement, limited mobility, and left-right imbalances make straight vertical pressing risky for many sport populations. The landmine press solves most of those problems at once. By anchoring one end of a barbell and pressing at an angle, athletes get a more natural arc of motion that loads the shoulder, chest, triceps, and core simultaneously, all with significantly less joint stress than a traditional press. The unilateral nature of the movement forces the core into anti-rotation, making it a genuine full-body training tool rather than just an upper body variation.

The progressions are easy to sequence: start in a half-kneeling position to eliminate lower body compensation, build to tall-kneeling, then to standing as control improves. From there, introduce a rotational component to mimic the pressing and throwing patterns that appear in most sports. Athletes who have stalled on overhead strength, are working around a shoulder issue, or need to close a left-right gap will all benefit from spending time here. (https://barbend.com/landmine-press/)