It is often said that life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards and transitions give us an ideal opportunity to reflect. As I hand on the baton of editor of Professional Strength and Conditioning (PSC) to the capable hands of Chris Bishop, this gives me an opportunity to reflect on the journey of the journal – a refection that will both look back and project forward. 

The UKSCA was formed in 2004, bringing together a disparate band of individuals practising this rapidly developing discipline of strength and conditioning. This formation was a game changer, creating an organisation around which coaches could coalesce – and one of the key member benefits planned at the initial meeting was the development of a journal. The first printed journal was published in 2006 and I have been fortunate to hold the role of its editor ever since. 

The key question at that time was, and continues to be: what benefits could a journal bring to our members and to the profession of strength and conditioning? Ultimately, this revolved around establishing what would make PSC different to the already well-established journals out there at the point: to understand this requires us to revisit the strength and conditioning landscape at that time. 

Although new to the UK, the discipline of S&C had been around in the US since the late Sixties, emerging as coaches saw the impact that resistance training had on athletic performance. However, despite there being a base of tacit knowledge, there was little explicit knowledge to support the practices utilised in the discipline. This lack of evidence was often held against S&C by more established sport science disciplines, with S&C often considered a poor relation in this field. To counter this, a drive to legitimise the discipline emerged – to formalise much of the tacit knowledge present in the field into explicit formats and to develop an evidence base for S&C. As this journey developed, the nature of the journals changed. Applied journals, which developed initially as a means of coaches sharing information, were supplemented with research journals, and slowly but surely an evidence base emerged to support S&C practices. 

However, change always has consequences, as the author Arnold Bennett neatly describes: ‘any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts’. Although many of the developments were positive, the pendulum was arguably swinging too far and we were suffering from what the English, Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton named ‘the aggregation fallacy’ – i.e., that more of a good thing isn’t always better and everything has its ideal level and distribution, a concept Aristotle called the ‘golden mean’. 

As time progressed and strength and conditioning developed as both an academic and applied discipline, research submissions started to outnumber practical submissions. Increasingly, S&C education became more formalised, and based around this body of knowledge. The drive for legitimacy and credibility increasingly extended to the applied journals: here, the drive for evidence-based practice increasingly meant that submissions had to be supported by documented research evidence before being accepted.  Add in the drive for publications from academia, and the net result was that fewer and fewer articles being submitted by coaches and more and more by people working in academia.

All this changed the perspective completely. To understand this, the observations of philosopher Bertrand Russell are enlightening: he distinguished between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. For example: I know Bristol, the city I live in, by acquaintance, but I know Trieste only from the descriptions I’ve read of it. Unfortunately, the S&C profession was potentially sacrificing the former for the latter, losing valuable practical insight as a result. 

Clearly, an emphasis on knowledge by description means that the pursuit of knowledge becomes something valued purely for its own sake, with no concern for its practical effects or benefits: a major oversight. It is always useful to keep in mind the words of Francis Bacon, ironically one of the acknowledge pioneers of the scientific method, that the ‘great end in life is not knowledge but action’.

Ancient Greek philosophers had a specific term for practical knowledge gained through acquaintance – Phronesis. In practical disciplines such as strength and conditioning, this should always play a crucial role in developing practice but for this to happen we need channels through which experienced practitioners can share this practical knowledge. Yet this need has increasingly been overlooked and – even worse – derided as purely anecdotal.  

So how could PSC make a difference? The classic ancient Chinese text the Daodejing states that, ‘the way ahead seems to lead backward’, and this has been part of the approach of this journal: to reflect the original incarnation of S&C journals and represent a broad-church approach. PSC has encouraged a range of voices – deliberately avoiding taking routes that would limit its flexibility and believing that diversity of thought and ideas lie at the heart of its usefulness. Hopefully, we have ensured that practitioners still have a vehicle to outline their ideas and findings and not feel restricted by the confines of too narrow an interpretation of ‘evidence’. 

This journal has avoided the binary belief that anecdotal evidence is bad and that only research-based evidence is worthy of consideration. As the philosopher Aristotle states, we should: ‘pay no less attention to the unproved assertions and opinions of experienced and older people than to demonstrations of fact; because they have an insight from their experience which enables them to see correctly’. With PSC we have tried to blur the separation of theory and practice, to encourage divergence of thought and ideas that stem from practice and observation. The journal has also encouraged the blurring of boundaries for what is considered beneficial knowledge for a S&C coach, by publishing articles that explore disciplines outside of the traditional realm of the field. Nowadays, many of these ideas have outlets online, but the fact that these articles have a home in a published journal is an important consideration, allowing it to be referenced in academia. 

I would like to think that this journal’s approach has already had great value, but it could become even more crucial as we enter the next iteration of strength and conditioning. It could be argued that tacit knowledge is again on the increase. In the past, the ability to measure accurately lay to a large extent in academic institutions, but today technology allows highly accurate measurements to be made in multiple settings, thus allowing a new stream of potential evidence to emerge directly from practice and not solely from experiment. Add to this the amount of data generated that is ‘proprietary’ in nature and we have a potential explosion in the amount of tacit knowledge being generated. Consequently, forms of communication such as interviews, case studies, action statements etc. will become even more valuable – and journals with flexible submission procedures will become even more important if we are to make the best use of this information. In addition, there is a danger that the increase in technology and AI will blur the advantages to be gained in some traditional aspects of S&C; therefore, the unique advantages conferred by effective coaching are likely to become ever more important and again flexible journals able to explore these areas are likely to become crucial.  

I hope that PSC has been able to reflect these needs over the years and provide this voice for application and diverging ideas. Undoubtedly, there have been challenges, the biggest being generating sufficient submissions whilst maintaining the underpinning values and goals. Throughout this journey I’ve had great support and I’d like to thank the Editorial Panel, the Column Editors and everyone who has reviewed articles. I have a special thanks to the Managing Editors, Kate Smith and Mary Fogarty, from who I have learnt so much and who have kept me focused and shown immense patience with me and the processes. Also, my thanks to Olivia Holborn now, and Trisha Kelly before, who have been responsible for the layout of the journal Finally, my sincerest thanks to everyone who has submitted an article; every time we write we subject our work to the light of criticism, yet only by exploring new ideas can our discipline progress. 

As we move into this brave new world, it is likely that the advantage of the modern coach will lie, not in blindly following any preset path, but by combining the wisdom of insight and experience with the best that science can advise us. This requires us to think differently, to focus not just on knowledge but to gain wisdom from practice. As in the words attributed to the famous martial artist Bruce Lee  says, we should “absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is specifically our own”, creating our own path to mastery – and I hope that Professional Strength and Conditioning will be a valuable companion on this journey.