“Our kids are growing up in an era where adults are encouraging them to try to out specify their (severely lacking) general athletic base.
No matter how much confirmation bias you seek or money you pay to be told what you want to hear, you can’t out physiology, physiology.”
-Ray Zingler on X
They say experience is the greatest teacher and it is undoubtedly true.
I read and studied my ass off as a young professional trying to figure this stuff out and while I studied a lot of theories, learned a lot of science, and put a lot of my education into practice, I could have never understood in year 4 what I understood in year 14.
And I’ll have an even more evolved mindset going into year 30.
As we embark in year 16 at Zingler Strength, I am finishing up my 4th cycle of training athletes from 9th-12th grade and am over halfway through training my 3rdcycle of students from 6th-12th grade.
The point I’m making is not only have I trained thousands of kids in 16 years, I’ve watched and paid attention to their development, what works, what doesn’t work, what pays off, and what doesn’t pay off.
In 2009, when I first started training athletes, generally speaking, they were more well rounded athletically.
I believe this is for several reasons, stemming from the fact that PE was a higher priority in our education systems and the kids in 2009 grew up in a generation where they were regularly playing outside, riding bikes, playing pick-up games, and watching sports.
While travel ball was obviously still a thing and most older students had picked a maximum of 2 sports, the landscape looked largely different back then.
Today’s kids don’t have real PE, they aren’t playing outside, they aren’t riding bikes, they aren’t playing regular pick-up games.
They are sitting in chairs all day, then they sit in front of screens in their spare time.
Their sports are highly specified and highly structured and often played all year round with no true offseason.
We’re taking a generation of kids who don’t (largely to no fault of their own) have a general athletic base and funneling them into (earlier and earlier) specific environments they don’t have the requisite bases to be successful in.
While this strategy works for the few outliers (any strategy works for outliers) using an adult profitability model over a youth development model is robbing kids of their potential.
And it’s getting worse every single day.
The entire system needs to be overhauled.
