You can’t remove a huge piece of the puzzle and call it complete.
“It’s understood that during the season, sport needs to be the main stimulus.
But if a sport coach doesn’t prioritize or steers you away from In-Season training, it’s because he or she doesn’t value your long-term, global athletic development.
(Even if they say they do.)”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I’ve been writing a lot about In-Season Training because obviously I understand the very real importance of it.
I don’t sit here and spend time making false claims on things that are self-serving. Everything I encourage from a youth athletic development perspective has been confirmed with research and proven by myself (and many others) anecdotally.
If In-Season training wasn’t important for the youth athlete, and not doing it didn’t detract from their athletic development, I’d tell you to skip it. I’d pour all my focus into off-season athletes.
Don’t get me wrong, I 100% understand that during the season, your sport is the most important extracurricular.
Sport is deserving of the majority of your time, focus, and energy.
For me to sit here and tell you that In-Season S&C and your In-Season Sport should share equal time/energy would be awfully silly.
But just because sport is the priority, doesn’t mean you can just ignore training/physical prep.
Many sport coaches (with large egos) don’t understand this notion. They believe it is THEIR time and all about THEM, which is why the only form of training many athletes get during the season is punishment conditioning, which does 3 things very well:
Detracts from performance, oftentimes heavily.
Increases risk of injury.
Pisses kids off.
No better way to build #culture during the season than to intentionally diminish performance, increase the risk of injury, & make your kids angry.
In order to thrive in a sport season, you must be strong, fast, explosive, and powerful throughout it.
To not train those qualities in (modified) capacity during the season is a disservice not only to yourself, but your teammates as well.
So how do we do this?
Very simply.
By prescribing the minimum effective doses of training during the season (see yesterday’s post).
This allows sport to maintain its focus, while keeping your value in said sport as high as you possibly can.
It’s so simple, it’s hard.
But the fault is not on the kids. The fault is on the adults “leading” them who understand nothing about true athletic performance and development.
If your coach doesn’t encourage or prioritize In-Season training, he or she can be the nicest person in the world. They can know the most, but I assure you, they don’t truly care about maximizing your potential as an athlete.
