Physiologically speaking, you don’t have a choice.
“The qualities Strength & Speed begin to diminish in as little as 2 weeks, if untrained.
This means it is physiologically impossible to ‘be the best you can be’ without training regularly, in-season.
If you want to be the best you can be, you literally don’t have a choice.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
We all know that the strongest and fastest athletes (with skill, obviously) are the most valuable athletes to their teams.
They can hit balls further, play better defense, make more tackles, and outrun the opposition.
Strength and Speed are valuable qualities from picking teams at your neighborhood clubhouse backyard football games to the highest level of elite sports.
So, if you want to increase your value as an athlete, you can’t go wrong with enhancing your (trainable) strength and speed.
As essential as these qualities are, they come with a caveat. You must use the qualities (train them) or lose them.
Regardless of the studies you look at, strength and speed, without being trained, begin to diminish in as little as two weeks.
So what does this mean?
It means that if you want to continue to leverage the benefits your strength and speed provide you, you must train them regularly.
For many, who don’t have a true off-season, this means that you will be REQUIRED to train in-season.
“Yeah, but I’m hitting well and doing fine without it.”
If your goal is to be “fine” and you prefer to leave your athletic success and health up to chance, then “fine” might be sufficient for you.
But if you want to increase your chances of sustained success and do everything in your power to mitigate common overuse injury risks, and be the best you can be, then you don’t have a choice.
You have to strength and speed train, year-round.
You have to.
This isn’t meathead Ray Zingler barking at kids to get in the weightroom.
I’m simply explaining how fundamental physiology works as it relates to athletic performance. This isn’t Ray Zingler’s opinion. This is biology.
In my opinion, this is why local success is so dangerous.
There are big fish in small ponds everywhere who use their local success to justify how “they don’t have time” or why “they don’t need to”, but I promise those (outside of the drastically <1% anomaly’s) who not only make it, but thrive to and through the next level are training year-round.
If you want to be the best you can be and excel at the next level, you don’t have a choice. You have to train year-round.
