National Council on Strength & Fitness - NCSF

National Council on Strength & Fitness - NCSF Setting Standards, Developing Professionals, and Serving the Public through Education and Certification
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On a suspension trainer, the increased time-under-tension comes from stabilizing the exercise, and that is one of the to...
09/18/2026

On a suspension trainer, the increased time-under-tension comes from stabilizing the exercise, and that is one of the tool's most significant advantages.

Body position relative to the anchor point sets the intensity. The stabilizing demand comes with every rep: the body must remain stable throughout each movement, so the core is constantly activated to support peripheral joint actions, and stabilizing muscles and opposing muscle groups are recruited to maintain balance and control.

Multiple muscle groups are engaged simultaneously, and peripheral-to-central stability paths increase.

That prolonged supportive engagement, across both local and global stability systems, promotes muscle mechanical efficiency with appropriate overload, leading to improved movement proficiency, strength, and overall performance.

For a working coach: on a suspension trainer, the time spent holding position counts toward the stimulus.

A functional testing battery for older adults.Physical testing should be functionally specific. A common battery include...
09/17/2026

A functional testing battery for older adults.

Physical testing should be functionally specific. A common battery includes balance, coordination, mobility, power, and upper- and lower-body functional strength.

Mobility and lower-body power: timed walking speed over 15 feet. Lower-body power and strength: a sit-to-stand from a chair, arms crossed.

Balance: walk a straight line taped to the floor and count steps off the line for dynamic balance. A timed single-leg stance tests static balance and is a predictor of falling risk.

Change of direction: lateral movement is often impaired with age. Time a figure 8 around two cones, or use the Edgren side-step test.

Upper body: wall push-ups, or the Senior Arm Curl test (30 seconds of dumbbell curls) in place of a basic hand grip strength test.

Flexibility: shoulder mobility is often impaired in older adults, so the Apley Back Scratch test is useful. A modified chair sit-and-reach covers lower-body mobility where appropriate.

Aerobic capacity, if desired: the 6-minute walk test or 2-minute Step-in-Place test.

Coordination: devise tests around the ADLs the client wants to improve, or use the Soda Pop Test used by SHAPE America.

Put all possible safety measures in place, including knowledge of all stop-test indicators and close attention to client feedback. Valid data identifies true capability and guides activity progressions.

Among the components of physical fitness, the ones tied into the neuromuscular system appear to be the most correlated w...
09/14/2026

Among the components of physical fitness, the ones tied into the neuromuscular system appear to be the most correlated with being able to perform activities of daily living.

ADLs are the everyday tasks older adults want to keep doing on their own: getting dressed, bathing, getting out of a favorite chair, getting around town. Once those tasks can't be done on one's own, quality of life often begins to drastically fall.

Cardiorespiratory capacity is still important, both for functional capacity and for combating disease. Maintaining muscular strength, power and endurance, along with balance, flexibility and coordination, is crucial to staying independent.

For the working coach: a common older-adult assessment battery includes balance, coordination, mobility, power, and upper- and lower-body functional strength, with aerobic testing added if desired.

A previously sedentary sixty-year-old who starts training is working on two different timelines. Total arterial compli...
09/10/2026

A previously sedentary sixty-year-old who starts training is working on two
different timelines.

Total arterial compliance, blood pressure, and cardiac afterload improved with even a modest lifelong dose of two to three sessions a week. Similar improvements were reported after one year of endurance training in previously sedentary seniors. The functional components of arterial compliance are more readily influenced by exercise training.

Aortic structure runs slower. One year of training at over two hundred minutes a week of moderate and high-intensity work did not substantially improve biological aortic age in previously sedentary seniors. Age-related changes in large elastic vessel structure are not reversible by exercise training alone when initiated later in life. One theory is that lifelong vigorous endurance exercise inhibits the remodeling of the aorta toward stiffness, and that the effect accrues across a lifetime of training — which is why one year has little impact.

How much weekly exercise it takes to keep an artery compliant depends on the size of the artery.A cross-sectional study ...
09/08/2026

How much weekly exercise it takes to keep an artery compliant depends on the size of the artery.

A cross-sectional study of 102 seniors with more than twenty-five years of consistent exercise history sorted them by weekly frequency: sedentary (fewer than two sessions), casual (two to three), committed (four to five), and Masters athletes (six to seven plus regular competition).

At the casual dose, carotid stiffness, left ventricular afterload, and central blood pressures were lower than in the sedentary group. Central arterial stiffness was not. Biological aortic age and central pulse wave velocity only differed from sedentary at the committed dose and above - four to five sessions a week, each longer than thirty minutes.

Peripheral arterial stiffness showed no significant difference at any dose. This is cross-sectional data on lifelong exercise histories, not a training trial.

Sources: NCSF — What Does Science Reveal About Heart Health and Exercise Frequency — NCSF Blog, 2018. Shibata, S., et al. — The Effect of Lifelong Exercise Frequency on Arterial Stiffness — The Journal of Physiology, 2018

When a client starts a GLP-1, the resistance training floor moves. Programs should emphasize hypertrophy and strength t...
09/02/2026

When a client starts a GLP-1, the resistance training floor moves.

Programs should emphasize hypertrophy and strength training matched to the individual's capabilities. Higher loads and higher volumes are what demonstrate effective lean mass maintenance, and they should be applied consistently alongside the pharmaceutical therapy.

Strength training volume should exceed the Guidelines for Americans, at least three days a week.

Nutrition is the other half of it. These drugs significantly lower food intake, which is why protein and micronutrient sufficiency has to be checked rather than assumed.

One caveat worth stating plainly. Most of the research on GLP-1 receptor agonists and exercise has looked at aerobic training, and less is known about how GLP-1 signaling affects skeletal muscle adaptations to resistance exercise. The figures for supervised resistance training past ten weeks - roughly 3 kg of lean mass and 25% strength, in both men and women - come from the resistance training literature generally, not from trials in patients on these drugs.

Lean mass loss associated with GLP-1 treatment runs to roughly 10%, or about 6 kg. In aging terms, that equates to a dec...
08/28/2026

Lean mass loss associated with GLP-1 treatment runs to roughly 10%, or about 6 kg. In aging terms, that equates to a decade or more.

The scale of it varies across studies. Semaglutide alone over 20 weeks produced reductions in both fat and lean mass, about 5 kg and 2 kg respectively.

Maintaining muscle mass and function as people age is crucial to avoiding sarcopenia and osteoporosis, and both are strongly linked to morbidity and mortality. Which is what makes lean mass the variable to track through a course of treatment.

Aerobic exercise appears to interact positively with GLP-1 treatment here. In that same 20-week study, no further declines in muscle mass were observed when treatment was combined with cycling.

A 16-week obesity trial paired GLP-1 treatment with a diet and exercise program built to the Guidelines for Americans. F...
08/25/2026

A 16-week obesity trial paired GLP-1 treatment with a diet and exercise program built to the Guidelines for Americans. Fat-free mass still came down 2.3 kg, against 1.5 kg.

Guidelines-level activity was insufficient to prevent muscle mass loss during treatment.

Exercise is recommended alongside GLP-1 receptor agonist treatment. What that recommendation does not settle is the dose. This finding marks one end of it - the general activity floor sits below the line.

The strength training recommendation that follows sits above the guidelines, at least three days a week.

For a working coach: a client on a GLP-1 who is meeting the activity guidelines is not, on this evidence, doing enough to hold lean mass.

The greatest force acting on a bone during activity is muscle contraction.Muscles work synergistically. When one side of...
08/17/2026

The greatest force acting on a bone during activity is muscle contraction.

Muscles work synergistically. When one side of a synergy is meaningfully stronger or tighter than its partner, the stress arriving at the bone attachment is unequal, and that inequality repeats with every stride. On easy days as well as hard days. Over thousands of repetitions it accumulates.

This is the contributor that tends to go unexamined in athletes who are otherwise doing everything right. Progression is conservative, footwear is appropriate, nutrition is handled, and the stress fracture still happens. Muscle imbalance may be the cause nobody screened for.

For the working coach: when a client with a clean training history develops bone stress, imbalance testing belongs in the workup, with resistance training and flexibility work to correct what it finds.

The most common error in rebound box jump training: box height keeps climbing while movement speed drops, particularly d...
08/14/2026

The most common error in rebound box jump training: box height keeps climbing while movement speed drops, particularly during the amortization phase - the ground contact between jumps.

Rebound work at moderate heights, around 50% of max jump height, exists to train reactive strength, turnover speed, and center-of-mass control. Two focus points protect those qualities: both feet land at the same time, and ground contact speed stays the emphasis, not box contact time. That second point is very important when working in the frontal plane.

For lateral repeat jumps, start lower than sagittal-plane heights and increase the rate of movement before considering any height change.

For the working coach: watch the amortization phase. That is where the error shows first.

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