A chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, 5th edition — every table, value, formula, and high-yield fact you need, with practice questions and slide decks.
How bone, muscle, and the heart-lung system are built, and what changes in each of them the instant you start moving.
How joints work as levers, why the same load can feel harder or easier depending on the angle, the five things that can actually resist a muscle's pull, and the specific back, shoulder, and knee mechanics behind common lifting injuries.
How the body keeps rebuilding ATP through three overlapping systems, why each one trades speed for capacity, how fast phosphagens and glycogen come back once they're spent, and how work-to-rest ratios let you aim training at the system you actually want to develop.
Which gland makes what, how a hormone actually gets a message into a cell, and — the part the exam leans on hardest — exactly which workout variables move testosterone, growth hormone, and cortisol.
Resistance training rewires the nervous system before it ever changes the muscle itself — and everything it builds, from tendon stiffness to bone density, unwinds again the moment loading stops.
What steady endurance work rebuilds in the heart, lungs, and muscle — the training-status ceiling on V̇O₂max, how altitude and heat force the body to adjust, why smoking, vaping, and blood doping change the numbers, and how fast it all unwinds once training stops.
Two clients can share a birth year and still be years apart biologically. This chapter covers how growth and maturation actually unfold in youth, what's really behind sarcopenia and bone loss in older adults, and how program design has to bend around both.
How male-female strength gaps shrink once you account for lean mass, why ACL and bone-health risks land harder on female athletes, and why the evidence doesn't yet support building a program around cycle phase.
How arousal, anxiety, and stress relate to performance, the five competing theories that try to explain that relationship, the mental-skills toolkit coaches actually use, and the motor learning principles behind good practice design.
Where a strength coach's scope ends and a dietitian's begins, how the DRI system actually works, protein and carbohydrate targets in g/kg, and the hydration and electrolyte numbers you're expected to know cold.
How to time carbohydrate, protein, and fluid intake before, during, and after competition; the loading protocols that maximize glycogen stores; sizing up energy needs and body composition goals; and catching the early warning signs of RED-S and disordered eating.
How the NCAA sorts banned drugs into classes, what steroids and hormone mimetics actually do to performance and health, and the specific evidence-based dosing behind creatine, caffeine, beta-alanine, sodium bicarbonate, and HMB.
What makes a test worth trusting, how to build a battery that actually matches an athlete's sport, and the order that keeps an early test from wrecking the ones that follow.
What a vertical jump, a 1RM, and a skinfold actually measure, how each is supposed to be run start to finish, and the statistics — z-scores, percentiles, effect size, smallest worthwhile change — that turn a raw number into a defensible conclusion.
How to structure a warm-up with the RAMP framework, why static stretching gets timed away from the start line, the three PNF techniques and the reflexes behind them, and the numbers for programming a flexibility session.
How you grip a bar, brace your body against a bench or a machine seat, pace and breathe through a rep, and read a spotting situation correctly — down to the one category of lift you never put your hands on.
How to load, progress, and coach movement when the tool isn't a barbell — bodyweight and suspension work, what instability training actually buys you, chains and bands as variable resistance, loading the eccentric phase on purpose, strongman-style implements, and training one limb at a time.
The chapter the exam leans on hardest: six guiding principles, a seven-step design sequence, the %1RM-to-reps relationship, how load/reps/sets/rest map onto a training goal, the 1RM testing protocol, and the 2-for-2 progression rule.
Every phase of the stretch-shortening cycle, the two competing models of why it works, how volume and intensity should scale with an athlete's training status, depth-jump box-height guidelines including the widely cited 220-pound threshold, and the full safety checklist before anyone starts jumping.
What actually separates flat-out speed from change-of-direction ability from true agility, how rate of force development and impulse show up in a sprint stride, why the spring-mass model matters, what changes phase-by-phase in a sprint, how to load resisted and assisted sprint work, and how to build athletes from closed cone drills toward reactive game speed.
How to build an aerobic program from the ground up: five sequential design decisions, five distinct training methods each with their own prescription rules, three separate ways to quantify effort that don't move in lockstep, and how altitude, heat, and a concurrent lifting schedule change the plan.
How coaches sequence a year of training on purpose — the mechanistic theories behind cycling stress and rest, the hierarchy from a multiyear plan down to a single session, and the full periodized resistance-training model with its intensity and volume ranges for every period.
Who sits on the return-to-play team, how an injury gets classified and staged through healing, the protocols that drive progressive loading back to full strength, and the medical red flags — from rhabdomyolysis to heat stroke — every strength coach has to recognize on sight.
How planned overreaching turns into supercompensation, how unplanned overreaching turns into overtraining syndrome instead, the sympathetic and parasympathetic ways that syndrome shows up, why speed and power fail before maximal strength does, and how to monitor and recover from it.
How a strength and conditioning space gets planned, built, and run — plus the small set of dimensions the exam leans on hardest: square footage per person, ceiling height, temperature, spacing between stations, walkway width, and mirror placement.
The administrative side of the job: what a mission statement is actually for, who is legally allowed to clear an athlete, how negligence gets proven, and why extra sprints can never be a punishment. Dense, vocabulary-heavy, and one of the most reliably testable chapters in the exam.
Cmd+P → Save as PDF for a printable book.pptx/ folder holds one PowerPoint deck per chapter for fast review.