We’ve had to change the rules of football because of the volume of monsters strength training has created.
“Want proof that strength works?
We’ve literally had to change the rules of football because strength training works so well.
You think the physical capacities of athletes have increased the way they have over the last 20 years because of ladder & cone drills.
Strength wins.”
-Ray Zingler on X
The sports performance world is no different than any other industry.
There are ebbs and flows and pendulum swings just like there are everywhere else.
In the 90s and early 2000’s, “Strength & Conditioning” became popularized.
It’s not that they didn’t “lift weights” before this, of course they did (shout out Boyd Epley), but it was post 70s & 80s bodybuilding era that we really started (heavily) researching and implementing sports performance strength & conditioning across the board.
In 2024, we have more access to research, information, and tech than we did in 2004, when “strength” was becoming popularized.
And because we have more information and we’ve been “prioritizing this strength thing for a long time” naturally the pendulum wants to shift the other direction.
This is why you see all the craze about max velocity, mph, & etc. (important stuff).
These coaches (who care more about standing out on the internet than they do actual sports performance) sell out to a singular ideology, i.e. “speed development” because it’s “different” & “trendy”.
When in reality, true sports performance training is the marriage of ALL components of athleticism: strength, speed, power, capacity, mobility & etc.
But telling people this (true) information on the internet doesn’t get a lot of shares and retweets, so many take the “us vs. them” approach to stir the pot & grab a couple followers who also want to be trendy.
The coaches who care less about trying to win the internet and more about helping actual athletes know the importance of strength.
While obviously strength is not the be all end all and only a mere component of the sports performance pie. It’s the most important quality because it feeds all other qualities.
Yes, even (especially) the qualities that we performance coaches tend to care about most: Speed & Power.
If you need any convincing that strength training works, look at the evolution of the game of football over the last 20 years.
We’ve literally had to change the rules because strength has created monsters at scale and improved athletic performance like we’ve never seen before.
You can try to be trendy on social media all you want, but you ain’t getting increased performance without strength.
This is true for EVERY sport.
