A youth athletes performance and availability hinges on the quality of their physical preparation.
“Youth athletics are getting increasingly more competitive.
Athletes are getting bigger, stronger, and faster.
In the modern era, if you’re not leveraging sound, year-round S&C Training, you’re leaving performance and safety on the table.
Don’t skimp on the lowest hanging fruit.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
A youth athlete in the modern era not leveraging sound, year-round strength & conditioning is no different than them trading text messaging (or snapchat) as their main source of communication for hand written, mailed letters.
Regardless of how you look at it, it doesn’t make sense.
Not in the ever-evolving world where youth athletes are getting bigger, stronger, faster, and more powerful every single day.
That 13-year-old on the mound with pumpkin delts and a goatee? Yeah, he’s actually 13.
We know from the get-go, the playing field is unlevel. The days of “pound ball” are over.
It is our duty as adults to give our kids the best chance to succeed if our kids want to immerse themselves in the modern world of competitive athletics.
In order to safely compete at a high level, consistently, our kids bodies must not only be prepared for the inevitable demands that will be placed upon them, they must consistently be getting better to fend off the dogs, ferociously competing for their ‘spot’.
You can say it isn’t a ‘dog-eat-dog world,’ but you’d be lying to yourself.
Beyond the obvious benefits of improving confidence, strength, speed, power, & resilience via S&C, which are all required for athletes to consistently improve if they want to continue to develop and compete at the highest levels..
An argument can be made that NOT leveraging S&C in the sporting world we’re living in is outright dangerous.
We are placing immense demands on our kids with the volume of sport we are encouraging them to participate in. Whether this is ‘right or wrong’ doesn’t change the fact that we must prepare them for said demands.
We all know the best ability is availability, so wipe out the “performance” benefits of S&C if you want, and look at it from an “opportunity to better maintain availability” perspective, and you’ve got 2x your value of S&C right there in your lap.
I’m not a fear monger so won’t try to scare you with statistics, but google “youth-sport injury rates/causation”, it will provide humbling information that is worsening by the day.
We are asking the most generally underprepared generation of kids to do more specific work than any other generation and they are paying for it in a multitude of ways.
