It’s the strength, speed, and power that needs to be added to the equation.
“Yes, some have more than others, but the modern youth athlete’s biggest problem isn’t ‘athletic skill’.
Modern kids, with the volumes they play, have no shortage of athletic skill.
The biggest difference between college athletes and HS athletes is strength, speed, and power.”
-Ray Zingler
Think about it.
Hours, thousands of hours, hell even tens of thousands of hours spent at ball fields, courts, and in pools everywhere.
Athletes working on their skills day in and day out. I truly love the dedication to their crafts.
But if Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule (the amount of hours of required practice to achieve expertise in any skill) were true, why don’t we have millions of phenoms running around in sports who have blasted past the 10k-hour mark in their teens?
If you’re familiar with the rule, you may have noticed I left out a major caveat to Gladwell’s rule: “the correct practice”.
It’s not just 10,000 hours, but the correct 10,000 hours.
Now obviously there are people out there who this rule doesn’t apply to as they attain “expertise” in far fewer hours of practice and there are people with 20k hours experience who aren’t experts at all.
But here is where I am going with this:
Whether or not you’re on the pursuit of athletic mastery, I think it’s a safe bet to assume most competitors would love to reach the pinnacle of their potential.
If not, why devote this much time, effort, energy, and resources into it?
Because of the volume of sport specific activity our modern kids are participating in, many of them have tremendous levels of athletic skill.
I mean, you spend that much time with a bat in your hands or a ball at your feet and you’re bound to become skillful with it.
But now you take that girl who lives at the softball field every day..
You get her in the weight room and get her (relatively) stronger with fundamental exercises like squats, deadlifts, rdls, and lunges.
And then you teach her to better display her newly found weight room strength in the form of sprinting and jumping, (which for weight room beginners, if trained correctly, getting stronger will have tremendous impact on sprint speeds and jump outputs.)
And then you take that BACK to the softball field?
Holy wow, it’s amazing what happens when you combine strength and power with athletic skill.
It’s almost like they were meant to work together, synergistically.
Oh yeah, they were.
We’ve just tried to bake the idea (truth) out of modern youth sports.
