Seriously, what is it? We already have the big strength and little conditioning in our name. Our jobs read like this STRENGTH and conditioning (and for those who don’t have that as their title, kindly refer to this article talking about why one title serves us all best - and not that there is even a current job posting in Jan 2026 that says Athletic Performance Coach (Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach) so even they know they have to explain what it means). Even with the emphasis on strength what do we mean with this word?
**This will be a longer article because there is a lot to get into - so if you don’t have time for this - stop reading and come back another time. Do not read this unless you will actually pay attention.**
What Do We Mean by Strength?
I have become rather obsessed with this concept since doing more BJJ of late. Specifically, I remember listening to one of Jocko’s podcasts where he and Echo were saying how in the BJJ room it was almost an insult to tell someone that they were strong. It essentially means you don’t know how to roll and manipulate your body. Being on the mat I see and experience guys who weigh less than me, squat less, bench less, etc…but can pin and control me on the mat. How? Why does this matter in sport? Think American football - sure it helps to be strong in the weight room, but if you squat a house and can’t move the 3 tech - but the guy who squats less than you can move the 3 tech and chip to the ILB - you will be on the bench.
First off, this article may be a history lesson for many of you - I will be diving into the work of some of the brightest minds we have ever had in our field of strength and conditioning. Greats like Bondarchuk, Yessis, and Verkhoshansky will be talked about. Part of this is because at Strength Coach Network alongside Ultimate Athlete Concepts we are helping you read Supertraining with this reading guide. Another part is because too many strength coaches nowadays do not know who the greats are, nor do the ones who know give the credit to the OG’s. Also, let’s also remember what our job as strength and conditioning coaches is:
Reduce the risk of injury
Decrease the severity of potential injury
Improve athletic performance - stronger, faster, etc…
So, is strength being able to squat, bench, and deadlift a lot of weight? What about being able to clean or snatch a ton of weight? How about being able to fight for a rebound, go back up, and slam it down? What about being able to perform on the balance beam effortlessly, jump off, flip in the air, and stick the landing? Or even being able to hit 20+ mph running on the field? All of these things require strength. Sure, different levels of strength, but they all require strength.
This is why my personal definition of strength comes from my time at The University of Iowa working with the football team. As many of you working in American football know, the inseason and spring ball (non-competitive inseason) are times for professional development. During these times, everyone on staff would read a strength and conditioning book and or leadership book. One such time we read through High Performance Trainingfor Sports by Joyce and Lewindon.
During our time reading this book as a staff Coach Doyle said something I will never forget “strength is maintaining posture under load.”His statement, as simple as it is, was just as profound. Coach Doyle was dead on. Think about all the above examples:
Squat a ton of weight - need to be able to keep your chest up and drive though your legs to complete the rep.
Bench a ton of weight - need to be able to keep your chest up, shoulders pulled back, and press the bar back up under heavy loads.
Deadlift a ton of weight - just like a squat only with the bar on the ground.
Clean a ton of weight - perform the deadlift from above but then be able to get the bar into the ground, pull yourself under the bar while the bar lands on the front of your shoulders in the front rack position
Snatch a ton of weight - perform the deadlift but with hands wide, get the bar into the air like the clean, but not the bar is caught overhead with arms extended.
Getting rebound for put back dunk - fighting off another person in space body to body, extending arms in the air while jumping off the ground, landing on the ground and then immediately jumping back up (through contact) to slam dunk the ball
Balance beam routine - the stability required to walk, jump, and twist on a piece of equipment few inches wide, while performing several feet in the air, jumping, spinning in the air, and landing with chest up
Sprinting fast - able to maintain stiffness into the ground to maximize flight time and minimize ground contact time and not “sink” into the ground with “mushy” GCT.
Check x8 on Coach Doyle’s definition.
**Side note - Please forgive my over-simplification here on these explanations. My point here is not to dive into the technical nuance of each rep. Rather, the goal is to get you to see that Coach Doyle’s (and now my) definition of strength is 100% accurate.**
So as you see barbell strength is ONE of the definitions of strength, however it is NOT the only definition of strength. In fact, many of you working in team sports have to deal with this already. Some of you are working with sport coaches that do not want you to SBD, or lift your athletes heavy for fear of creating immovable robots who can’t play sport. Others of you are working with sport coaches that put too much of a premium on the weight room and only care if athletes can (insert whatever lift here) a certain amount of weight.
Why Does This Matter?
Like just about everything in life the answer lies in the middle. While sport coaches who don’t want you to lift your athletes heavy are certainly missing the mark; not getting to tap into type II fibers, or get the tendon benefits from lifting maximal loads. So too are the sport coaches who only care if you get all of your offensive lineman to squat 550lb or more; kindly remind these sport coaches that at no point during a game do the refs blow their whistles, stop the game, bring out the power racks, and let the players have at it.
Insert Dynamic Correspondence. What is dynamic correspondence, thanks for asking. Dynamic Correspondence is something that we at Strength Coach Network have talked about a lot. Not only from Jeff Moyer (whose in-person gym is called DCSports Training - take a guess what the DC stands for) but from Jay DeMayo, Matt Thome, KWF, and more.
Dynamic Correspondence comes from Yuri Verkhoshansky and utilizes five criteria to define specialized means of training rather than the competition exercise (which in his day and time was Olympic lifting or power lifting):
1. Same muscle groups
2. Same range of motion
3. Emphasis portion of the range of motion
4. Magnitude of force and duration applied
5. Same type of muscular contraction
It might have seemed like a throwaway sentence but it is not - remember that the ONLY people who’s sport involves lifting back then were Powerlifters and Olympic weight lifters. Nowadays you can add in Strongman, CrossFit, and Hyrox (apologies to any other sport that I overlooked).
Again, why does this matter? Because for us strength and conditioning coaches, 90% of what we do is general. We generally get the athlete (organism) stronger, faster, more powerful, etc…so they can handle the stress (physical, emotional, psychological) of playing team sport (practice, game, travel). This is what lead Coach Bondarchuk to create his famous exercise classification pyramid seem below:
Image from Bondarchuk System Course, module 2 - Exercise Classifications, from Derek Evely, hosted on Strength Coach Network.
Without getting into the weeds too deep, Dynamic Correspondence fits closer to the top of the pyramid from Coach Bondarchuk - SPE and SDE. Let's bring back Verkhoshansky definition of Dynamic Correspondence:
1. Same muscle groups
2. Same range of motion
3. Emphasis portion of the range of motion
4. Magnitude of force and duration applied
5. Same type of muscular contraction
Looking at this list one would be hard pressed that squat, bench, deadlift, clean, snatch, even lunges, would be in the SDE category for a team sport athlete. Does this mean they are not important? NO SHOT. These movements would fit in the SPE category - and look at the definition of the acronym Specific Preparatory Exercises. These movements do a GREAT job specifically prepping the athlete for their team sport. Also notice that the SPE part of the pyramid is BIGGER than the SDE. That’s right, that means as the strength and conditioning coach you SHOULD program squat, bench, deadlift, clean, snatch, etc…more than you program your SPE movements. What it does not mean is these Dynamic Correspondence movements are: stupid, silly, waste of time, or should be ignored all together.
Strength For Team Sport Athletes
I think I have done a good job putting enough disclaimers in here for the SBD and Olympic lifting crowd, but if not here is one more - these movements are important, they are key to the success of your athlete’s health/development, and you need to program more of these than the movements I am about to talk about. Now that is out of the way, let’s talk about team sports. Let’s keep pulling on the thread of the offensive lineman and the sport coaches need for him to squat over 550lbs. Let’s just say that this guy can squat 515 for 1 easy and he has a Vitruve encoder on the bar and peak velo for the rep was around 0.70 and average velo was 0.30 - we would all say that is strong - there is that word again haha.
Now, would it make sense for this offensive lineman to keep working back squat to drive his numbers up, or what if he spent more time doing sled pushes. When we compare the exercise of sled pushes to run blocking a defensive lineman this is a better Dynamic Correspondence exercise than the back squat, in particular the last 2: Magnitude of force/duration applied and Same type of muscular contraction.
Performing that back squat, while it was fast as measured on the Vitruve encoder, it was not performed at the same speeds as run blocking. THIS DOES NOT MEAN SLED PUSHES WILL BE AT THE SAME SPEED EITHER. It does mean that sled pushing gets closer to the actual event of run blocking. Keeping in mind, what our job as strength and conditioning coaches is - wouldn’t it make sense to start implementing sled pushes into the program rather than add more back squats? I say yes.
Let’s take that basketball example with the player in the post fighting for the rebound and a putback dunk. Is back squatting something that he should do - 100% no questions (sorry crew that doesn’t believe in it), but should this be all he works on? Nope. Exercises that help him fight in space and “own his sphere of strength” as Mike Chatman calls it are important and need to be used. What are these exercises? Yes contact prep and grappling is key for these athletes - but so are these:
Lateral Lunge pick up and drop - click here for video:
Base rotation - click here for video:
Forward lunge with diagonal reach - click here for video:
Where did I learn these? From Mike Chatman when we worked together at Towson. Like I said, during slow times strength and conditioning staff need to work on professional development. Think about it, if your athletes are practicing more and lifting less, that means you don’t have to lead sessions. Sure you might have to be at practice but after you recondition your guys bring a book, laptop, tablet, etc…and do some learning. That is what Mike and I did with the staff during March and April when the men’s basketball season was done for him and football was in spring ball. Click here to listen to Mike’s Cheek Mid Weeky episode here.
How Applied Functional Science and ViPR PRO Fit Into Strength Work
Those not familiar with Applied Functional Science from Gary Gray I would recommend looking into. This is something that we also dove into at Towson as not only did Mike have experience with it, so did Aaron. During the summer of 2018 we dove deep into this and I recommend you do the same. In fact I am having Gary’s son Doug (who is in many of the educational videos from AFS) on the Cheeky Mid Weeky in February 2026. At the time of this writing his episode has not been released, but if you are reading this after April of 2026 check out the Strength Coach Network YouTube channel and search “Doug” for his episode. I also spoke about this concept with another basketball strength coach who also worked for Todd - Dom Walker from Miss State men’s basketball joined the show and you can listen to his episode here.
Why does this matter? AFS talks about what are functional and non-functional movements, and this spurred the mind of another strength coach Todd Wright. Todd is well known for his work in basketball and developing STRONG players. The methods that Todd uses are "unconventional" to the SBD strength coach but when looked at through the lens of strength is posture under load - Todd loads his athletes up! Take for instance this movement here:
Forward/backward pivot - click for video:
This movement is called a forward/backward pivot and is one of several in the pivot matrix. Whether it was termed that by Gary Gray and the AFS crew or Todd Wright does not matter, that is what I was taught and that is what I call it. Why does this matter? Doing this movement with the ViPR PRO I have (32kg) is no joke. Do this for reps as fast as you can will increase the strength in that motion. Go back to dynamic correspondence again: Same muscle groups, Same range of motion, Emphasis portion of the range of motion, Magnitude of force and duration applied, and Same type of muscular contraction. Therefore, doing this forward pivot exercise with the 32kg (70lb) ViPR PRO has a high potential of increasing someone’s sphere of strength on the court.
What about also adding in the movements from earlier in this article - the lateral lunge + pick up, the base rotation, and the forward lunge + diagonal rip. All of these movements will help increase that sphere of strength. To me, forget about the FMS and how bunched up can you do a lunge - I want to know how much space you can take up, own, control, and be strong as heck in. Why? Cuz that is sport - owning space and being strong in all of it.
Now, I might have got the SBD crew mad, and now the fascia crew might get mad at me. These movements are not fascia training. Like I talked about on this podcast with Andrew Mitchell and Michol Dalcourt, as of now there is no way to separate fascia from the muscle. Therefore calling something fascia training is like saying muscle training, or bone training (Michol says this exact thing in the podcast episode). As we know from texts like Supertraining or Science and Practice of training, these movements I have demonstrated above work: inter-muscle coordination, intra-muscle coordination, rate coding/synchronization, and motor learning. Therefore calling it fascia training would be misleading.
Hold on one second, maybe these coaches called it fascia training because other coaches bashed them and said “that isn’t strength training - where is the heavy weight.” Like Ted Lasso said - lets be curious not judgemental (I am talking to myself here too). Now people who do not have the definition of strength that I have outlined here would be correct - it is not a max effort or 90% plus squat; but that does not mean it is not a strength movement.
Remember, strength is maintaining posture under load - you go perform these movements and use the 16kg or 32kg ViPR PRO that I have or the 20kg we had at Towson and tell me that isn’t strength work. It is strength at length. This phrase was somehow allowed by strength coaches to the Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) crew - but not the fascia crew? Why? Who knows - but let’s just work to fix it.
Programming THIS Strength Work with OTHER Strength Work
Hopefully by now you agree with me that strength is maintaining posture under load, we need our team sport athletes to SBD heavy and to perform these “other” movements; remember Bondarchuk’s pyramid. Now you might be asking yourself - ok how do I add this into my athlete’s training? Great question and my answer is what it always is - it depends. What time of the year you are in, what your facility design is, the training age of the athletes you work with, how comfortable you are with the movements, etc…So for starters, start doing these movements I showed you. Do them for speed, do them for reps, and do them for strength (there is that concept from Louie Simmons again - click here for that blog) and get good at them. Then start to apply them with your athletes.
Where? You can add them in the warm up, you can add them as a pair with your A or B block main movements, you can add them as the main movement of your accessories in C and D block. Again where it fits will be based on you and your set up. For me at Towson we would do all three. We would have our ViPR in the warm up and have all 5 of them lined up. Our warm up was broken up into 4 groups of 10 athletes at 4 different stations - with one of them being a ViPR PRO spot. One athlete would perform the reps, the other would be resting, then they would flip. We would even have the resting athlete hit or perpetuate the ViPR PRO or the athlete lifting with the ViPR PRO - see image below.
We would also have it in our A block paired with our Olympic movement. So rather than performing a different torso movement we would often use the ViPR base rotation. That is what I called it at Towson because that is what Chatman called it - what you call it will be up to you. We would progress the athletes from bilateral stance to unilateral split stance for this movement. We would also program it in the C block for reps and would perform the lunge + rotational reach shown to you earlier. So here are some simple guides for how we used them at Towson and how I use them now at Goldfinch:
Warm up: 1 set of 10-12 reps (5 or 6 each if unilateral)
Pair in A or B block: 3-5 sets with 6-8 reps (3 or 4 each if unilateral)
Pair in C or D block: 2-3 sets with 16-20 reps (8 or 10 each if unilateral)
One the movement was performed with good technical proficiency we ask the athlete to move from eccentric to concentric with greater speed, we also ask the athlete to move through a deeper range of motion, and to take a larger step - for those of you with a background in the AFS stuff this sounds a lot like tweekology and yes it is. We then give athletes heavier ViPR and let them learn how to move with this new load, then we tweak in the same ways. Will do, and have done the exact same but with a lighter ViPR. So, to start simple add in:
Base rotation bilateral - shown in article
Base rotation lunge stance - see top image below
F/B pivot matrix - shown in article
Lateral lunge to pick up and then put back down - shown in article
- Forward lunge with diagonal reach - shown in article
- Forward lunge with cross body reach - see bottom image below
If it is in the warm up, do one set of 10-12, if it is paired in A or B block, do 3-5 sets of 6-8 reps, and if in C or D block do 2-3 sets of 16-20 reps. I have seen and have been messing around with some full kneeling, and ½ kneeing movements. Since I am still messing around with them I am not going to give you any feedback or suggestions with them - but stay tuned for me to explain this more for you. Thanks for reading this, I will report back to you soon on how these kneeling and half kneeling movements work for me. Until then you can check out this blog on what SBD, clean, snatch, etc…numbers are strong enough for football players, and you can learn more about ViPR PRO here.
Talk soon,
Justin
PS - I sent out a few rough draft copies of this to some of my close contacts and heard the following:
“This does a really nice job of keeping the definition of strength simple”
“Really good read was actually a good refresher for me”
“I think readers would love getting your thoughts on how you would continue to progress ViPR exercise programming if you do have any more thoughts on this matter.”
“This does a really nice job of keeping the definition of strength simple then breaking it down into dynamic correspondence”
“As a reader I would want to see another layer of progression if possible.”
So I will write a follow up on how you can progress this work. For now, start with those exercises and mess around with them. Until then, stay strong!
