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How do you get players ready for late-season play while still keeping them mobile, moving well, and ready for explosive, high-velocity play? In professional baseball, players have already played close to 100 games over the course of 3.5 months and, yet, have two more months to play. It is important to support them with an approach of preparation and recovery to be ready for each day. Below are some of my favorite ways to approach this critical time in the season to manage workload, keep players active, and mitigate injury risk. 1. Taking care of the basics: Fueling, hydration, and sleep. At this point in the season, players have their routines and are making adjustments as needed to ensure they are ready to go. Making sure they are taking care of their fueling needs with the proper nutrition is key to bouncing back appropriately. By staying on top of these three components, we can keep players ready to go and recovering well. This is a large part to the recovery process not only post game, but the morning before a game as well. When we play every day, we need to make sure we are replacing what we are utilizing. This is a major focus for our players. 2. Manual therapy - The utilization of manual therapy for recovery purposes is something I harness a lot, but will tend to increase this time of year. Targeting tissues in the arm which already have a large amount of innings under them is important to help preparing for throwing each day. One of my favorites is the use of cups on the posterior shoulder coupled with active movements. To me, this helps give an active release to the tissue, brings blood flow, and prepares the tissue for the movements they will undergo. On the flip side, dry needling is a technique to employ post game to help jump start the recovery process and prepare for the next day. This can be done in various different ways depending on the desired outcome. 3. Targeted breathing based exercises - Breathing is a great way to down regulate the system and prepare for the next day. Coupling that with motion based exercise can help restore ranges, coordinate rib cage mechanics, and promote recovery all in one. Typical exercises that I will have our players use including sidelying arm bars with rotation, seated or inverted prayer positions, and supine reaching. The results have shown themselves with improved ranges of motion day 1 post outing and ability to bounce back better. Looking forward to hearing other strategies! Let me know what you all are using or seeing. Let's help our players prepare for the late season push. Andrew Staehling - Minor League Medical Coordinator, Milwaukee Brewers

Calling all Los Angeles Athletic Trainers! I’m looking for 4 Athletic Trainers to provide medical coverage for a high-level basketball camp in Thousand Oaks, CA. 📍 Location: Sports Academy 📅 Dates: August 5–7 🕗 Hours: 8AM–12PM & 3-6PM 💲 Pay: $50/hour Responsibilities include: • Taping • First aid and injury evaluation • Emergency response and management

With the school year right around the corner, I thought it might be a good opportunity to spark some conversation surrounding starting the school year off strong with your performance team (S&C coaches, skill coaches, dietitians, etc.). I can share some of my thoughts surrounding communication and collaboration, and I would also love to hear what everyone else does at the beginning of the school year to set their performance team up for success. First thing is first. Keeping the athlete at the center. I think the simplest way to keep the athlete at the center of each decision is “getting it right vs. being right”. What gets in the way of most decision making is ego. When our ego is involved, we want to BE RIGHT. What happens when we make ourselves right? Somebody else is WRONG. That is not keeping the athlete in the center, nor is it creating good collaboration with your team. When you are making a decision with your performance team, ask yourself, am I committed to getting it right, or am I committed to being right? If you live into the former, you will find better communication, collaboration, and ultimately find a better decision making process with your team. Collaboration: Establish a time to meet with your whole performance team and talk over goals and expectations for the year. Allow each party to share so that team goals can be created. Create scheduled times to connect and collaborate on problems, players, solutions, development. Make sure to create unscheduled collisions and connection points too throughout the year. Communication: Establish open lines of communications (group texts, Slack groups, What’s app groups, email chains). Ask other members of the team how they receive communication the best (voice notes, face to face, text, direct, indirect). Be a good listener! - most of us listen to respond. If you can be present and listen to understand, your response will be far more powerful. Most importantly, you have to establish how each member of your team responds the best to collaboration and communication and you have to respect that. Humans are unique even in how they like to be communicated with. What works for one person on your team may not work the same for a different member. That’s ok, and is to be expected. Good communication and collaboration is meeting people where they are at! Excited to hear what else the community can add to this thread!

Hello, Sounds like you are an extremely dedicated Athletic Trainer, and super hard working! A few things come to mind when thinking about doing more Pour more into the roles you already fill. How can you make the processes at the high schools and summer baseball league better? EAPs, prevention programs (i.e. arm care for baseball - I can provide some ideas if needed), strength and conditioning routines, informational sessions for the students and coaches, proper warm ups, recovery options, nutrition Pour more into yourself!! Make sure that you are filling your own cup and developing yourself. Professionally with your skills and knowledge, as well as personally. Make sure you are honing in your communication, leadership, presence - read books, podcasts, etc to expose yourself to those things Please let me know if this helps and if there is anything I would be able to be of assistance! Good luck Mike

Hi everyone, Along with @Floriswardenaar and @DanaWhiteNutrition , I had the chance to present "Evaluating Dietary Supplements for Athlete Safety and Performance" at NATA 2026, and wanted to bring the conversation here since supplement questions come up in the athletic training room almost daily. Why this matters: the grand majority of competitive athletes are using supplements in some form — multivitamins, sports drinks, protein powders, caffeine, creatine — and on average athletes report using around four different products. But supplements aren't premarket-approved by the FDA (DSHEA puts the burden on manufacturers before sale, with FDA/FTC enforcing after the fact), so adulteration and spiking are real risks. Studies estimate roughly a quarter of supplements carry some risk of unintentional doping, and dietary supplements have been linked to a meaningful share of doping violations over the years. Practical framework for reviewing a product with an athlete — "Is it Safe? Is it Legal? Does it Work?" Is it safe? Is it third-party tested? Not all certifications are equal — a "certified" label doesn't automatically mean it's been screened for banned substances, so know the difference between quality-control certifications and sport-specific banned-substance testing (NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Sport, BSCG, HASTA, Cologne List, NZVT). Check for known side effects/interactions using Examine.com , ConsumerLab , or the Natural Medicines Database . Report adverse events at www.safetyreporting.hhs.gov . Is it legal for your athlete's governing body? Olympic/Paralympic/Pan Am athletes: WADA Prohibited List ( wada-ama.org ) and GlobalDRO.com to check medication status. Collegiate athletes: current NCAA Banned Substances List . Pro leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc.) each have their own PED policies negotiated with their players' unions — don't assume NCAA/WADA rules apply. Does it work? The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) Supplement Framework (ABCD classification) is a great starting point for grading evidence — Group A (sports foods, medical supplements, and performance supplements like caffeine, beta-alanine, nitrate, creatine) has the strongest support; Group D is banned/high contamination risk. A practical, real-world example: if an athlete is choosing between Pre-workout/caffiene products, it's worth knowing that some mainstream options do carry NSF Certified for Sport status — for instance, Gatorade's Fast Twitch is NSF Certified for Sport. Tell your athletes to check specific products against the NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport Database BEFORE purchasing. Bottom line: ATs and Sports Performance Coaches are often the first point of contact when an athlete asks "can I take this?" You don't need to be the supplement expert — but knowing this framework, and knowing when/how to loop in a sports RD, protects both the athlete's health and their eligibility. Heads up: a full peer-reviewed article on this exact topic is set to publish in the Journal of Athletic Training this August. I'll come back and link it here once it's live — it'll have more detail than we could fit into the NATA session. What’s showing up on your desk?? Is it mostly creatine and protein questions, or are athletes coming to you with riskier stuff like pre-workouts and "fat burners"? And where do you get stuck: identifying what's actually in a product, figuring out if it's legal for your athlete's level, or something else?

Curious to hear from the community on this topic - I have thought a lot recently about leadership and what it truly means to be a good "leader". A lot of people have said the phrase "lead by example". I am wondering if that is good enough. Can just leading by example make you a great leader?? I think there is more than that phrase to being a great leader and if that is what you would love to be, I'd argue that you must go beyond just leading by example. Maybe I am wrong though, maybe you can just put your head down, lead by example, and be a great leader amongst your team / organization. Some questions for the community: What does leadership mean to you? How do you like to be led in your group / organization / team? What have been some of the qualities of the best leaders you've been around / worked for? Can we lead from a middle management position (i.e up and down the chain of command)? What are some "red flags" in a leader? Would love to hear from the community on this one. It can be a polarizing topic and there is definitely more than one way to skin the cat so to speak about good or great leadership. Excited to hear from you guys!

Great taste!

Woohoo!! Excited for a fun week of learning and networking! Can’t wait to see you all in Philly!

6 hours ago, JoanaVS said: Good morning and thanks for your time first of all, my question is: when is it necessary to start including sodium supplements? What temperature, height or length of time? Currently in Spain its 30+ degrees and my recommendation is trainings of more than 1h30/2h or heavy sweaters to add sodium aprox. 300mg minimum / h, can you provide evidence and recommendations for sodium intake? thanks! Hi @JoanaVS - this is a very popular question. There are no recommendations based on body size/height or temperature. Although I will say larger athletes tend to sweat more since they produce more metabolic heat and warmer temperatures will cause increases in sweat rates (compared to cooler temperatures) causing greater total sodium losses. Most of the research bases sodium inclusion on duration of activity and sweat profiles (sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration) as you have mentioned. ACSM’s Joint Position Statement (2016) suggests including sodium with athletes who have high sweat rates (>1.2L/h), have “salty sweat”, or undergo activity durations >2h. A big reason for the inclusion of sodium is to avoid hyponatremia (blood Na <135mmol/L) in longer events versus maintaining performance. In estimating sweat sodium concentrations of athletes, some have suggested averages anywhere from 35mmol/L (Sawka, 2000) to 50mmol/L (Thomas, 2016). But the fact of the matter is both sweat rates and sweat sodium concentrations vary widely across athletes across different sports and change depending upon the intensity, environmental conditions, etc (Baker, 2016). Knowing an athlete’s sweat sodium losses may be somewhat helpful but does not necessarily solve the issue since there is no solid recommendation of how much to replace. There have been a couple of articles suggesting 300-600mg/hr (1.7-2.9g salt) with a sweat rate of >1.2L/h (Vitale, 2019; Kerksick, 2018) which your 300mg/h may be based on. And there is another recommendation of 30-50mmol/L sodium consumption (Rehrer, 2001). But both of these recommendations may be too generalized and don’t take into account tolerability. Overall, the focus should be on fluid replacement first with inclusion of sodium (no specific dosage) for longer duration events since fluid replacement may be too diluted causing plasma sodium levels to decrease to a severe degree. Also, inclusion of sodium is appropriate if you do have a heavy and/or salty sweater athlete. So you may start off with conducting a fluid balance assessment to see how much sweat your athlete loses per hour (sweat rate) and then include some sodium (as tolerated) in their regimen if their sweat rate is >1.2L/h for over 2 hours duration. McCubbin (2025) also does an excellent job of providing an updated review and a figure for when to include sodium based on the literature. Hope this helps! Thomas, D. T., Erdman, K. A., & Burke, L. M. (2016). Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: nutrition and athletic performance. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 116(3), 501-528. Baker, L. B., Barnes, K. A., Anderson, M. L., Passe, D. H., & Stofan, J. R. (2016). Normative data for regional sweat sodium concentration and whole-body sweating rate in athletes. Journal of sports sciences, 34(4), 358-368. Sawka, M. N., & Montain, S. J. (2000). Fluid and electrolyte supplementation for exercise heat stress. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 72(2), 564S-572S. Vitale, K., & Getzin, A. (2019). Nutrition and supplement update for the endurance athlete: review and recommendations. Nutrients, 11(6), 1289. Kerksick, C. M., Wilborn, C. D., Roberts, M. D., Smith-Ryan, A., Kleiner, S. M., Jäger, R., ... & Kreider, R. B. (2018). ISSN exercise & sports nutrition review update: research & recommendations. Journal of the international society of sports nutrition, 15(1), 38. Rehrer, N. J. (2001). Fluid and electrolyte balance in ultra-endurance sport. Sports Medicine, 31(10), 701-715. McCubbin, A. J. (2025). Sodium intake for athletes before, during and after exercise: review and recommendations. Performance Nutrition, 1(1), 11.