Or the qualities become detrained and your access to them becomes diminished.
“Strength & speed are important athletic qualities, right?
Because these are trainable qualities that require, well, training, if we don’t train them consistently, yes even (especially) in-season, we’re physically not allowed to access our highest levels of performance potential.”
-Ray Zingler on X
Anytime you put effort into anything, ideally you’d like to improve whatever it is you’re doing.
If you’re putting time into playing the guitar, you want to get better at it.
But how come if you want to get better at playing your sport, simply playing your sport more rarely (never as you get older) is enough to keep you improving?
Imagine the guitarist who devoted an immense amount of time to the instrument, but he didn’t take any time to read, learn, or study music. He had no idea about any of the chords, what they were called, or their functions. He just committed to strumming 3 hours a day.
He’d eventually teach himself something, right? Yes, he would. But would he ever reach the pinnacle of his potential if he never actually took the time to learn and understand the function of the components of the guitar? Of course not.
Well, what happens in sports and why often our kids pretty rapidly hit lulls and roadblocks in their performance is that they’re playing a ton of sport, they are really only “showcasing” their same abilities a bunch of times.
Few are doing anything real to adjust the inputs that affect the outputs. We ignore this because the genetic freaks can get away without doing anything and always improve, so we try to use the exception to justify the norm. This is horrible thinking regardless of the endeavor, but if you look at our youth sports from a global perspective, it doesn’t take a keen eye to see its truth.
In 2023, the kids who are playing sports are playing more than enough sport. Emphasis on MORE. They are dramatically overplaying. (It’s not because it’s what’s best for them, all you have to do is reduce the money and you’d watch the volume decrease overnight.)
Very few kids need additional sport specific training on top of the abundance of what they are already getting (even if a financially motivated coach tells you otherwise.)
What our kids need are increased inputs that affect outputs they can apply to their sports.
This is where (real) strength & speed training comes in, and we are largely ignore it for palatable tradeoffs that don’t actually work, and often negatively impact desired outcomes.
