NSCA Journals, are they Worth It?

I was thinking of joining NSCA just to receive Strength and Conditioning Journal and Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Are they worth $120/yr or can you find much the same info for free at T-Nation and on PubMed?

Thanks!

Ben Fury

(Current or former subscribers only please)

No. You may find a nugget or two, but it will take you motherfucking forever to sift through the bullshit. It is not a very time-efficient means of finding useful training info.

You’re better off reading Diesel Crew, the old articles here, EFS, Ross Enamait’s stuff, Louie’s articles, and Defranco’s Q&A. Those guys know more than the eggheads ever will.

If you are a stregnth and conditioning professional or the like I would say it is worth it without a doubt.

If you are just training for yourself you would have to decide if it is worth it for you.

10$ per month…

The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research is incredibly dense, and I would recommend it only to hardcore research nerds. Their other journal (the name escapes me at the moment) is much more “simplified” meaning only that it has much more of the stuff that strength coaches would care about (i.e. useful training advice) and less of the “research nerd” stuff, like methods, descriptions of statistics, etc.

The NSCA and pretty much all the other organizations have become and abysmal joke. They really have nothing to do with anything strength and/or conditioning related anymore.

[quote]JGerman wrote:
If you are a stregnth and conditioning professional or the like I would say it is worth it without a doubt.

If you are just training for yourself you would have to decide if it is worth it for you.

10$ per month… [/quote]

Agreed. The NSCA is geared around the strength and conditioning of athletes in general, and not so much the strength sports and nothing concerning PL or BB.

I wouldn’t quite call them nerds, mainly b/c I am one too, but much of the work you find about strength training is spun off of the work published by the NSCA.

[quote]1000rippedbuff wrote:
The NSCA and pretty much all the other organizations have become and abysmal joke. They really have nothing to do with anything strength and/or conditioning related anymore.[/quote]

They do serve a purpose. The question is do they serve the majority of strength athletes well? Usually not.

The really sad thing I see is the lack of understanding or caring about proprioception and real world transfer. I asked a researcher why they used machine exercises in a power development study instead of squats, DLs and O type lifts… the answer? 1RM testing was easier to administer on the machines! Oh, I see, mediocre results are acceptable because we don’t want to hire some real strength and conditioning experts to exercise and test our study subjects.

Sad. More study dollars wasted on studies that don’t apply to anything real that can make a difference.

[quote]Ben Fury wrote:

Sad. More study dollars wasted on studies that don’t apply to anything real that can make a difference.

[/quote]

That statement applies to essentially all exercise and nutrition research. We know folks should eat less and move more, what we don’t know is how to get them to do it.

[quote]Ben Fury wrote:
1000rippedbuff wrote:
The NSCA and pretty much all the other organizations have become and abysmal joke. They really have nothing to do with anything strength and/or conditioning related anymore.

They do serve a purpose. The question is do they serve the majority of strength athletes well? Usually not.

The really sad thing I see is the lack of understanding or caring about proprioception and real world transfer. I asked a researcher why they used machine exercises in a power development study instead of squats, DLs and O type lifts… the answer? 1RM testing was easier to administer on the machines! Oh, I see, mediocre results are acceptable because we don’t want to hire some real strength and conditioning experts to exercise and test our study subjects.

Sad. More study dollars wasted on studies that don’t apply to anything real that can make a difference.

[/quote]
The sadness lies in no one performing studies on subjects such as powerlifting and writing high quality papers. The NSCA just publishes them.

There were a few very interesting articles in this January 2009’s Volume 23, Number 1 J o S&C Research.

If you continue to have hunches about buying it, your going to give in and buy it, so just buy it, realize it does, or does not have anything necessary, and well…move on.