Here is why general athletic development is critical to your kid’s sport specific potential.
“Imagine spending 5:1, 10:1, even 10:0 ratios of:
Sport specifics (competition, practice, specific instruction) : Physical preparation/general athleticism development..
And then being perplexed as to why we havethe biggest youth sport injury/burnout epidemic we’ve ever seen.”
-Ray Zingler on X
Let’s be conservative.
Let’s say your kid performs 10 hours of sport per week in the form of practices, games, specific sport instruction, and maybe a little work on his own
(I said conservative, and I meant it, lol.)
And then he trains, generally, 1 hour per week to improve his overall athleticism and generally physical preparedness for sport.
Let’s give him 2-weeks off per year to be nice, but at the end of the year he would have:
500 hours of sport
50 hours for preparation for sport.
Yikes city, right?
Now imagine if he didn’t do ANY general athleticism work and we increased the dosages of weekly sport participation to something a bit more realistic, like 15 hours per week (still low).
In 50 weeks, he’d have performed 750 hours of specific sport work and 0 hours of general sport preparation.
And for the record, going to the globo gym a few times per week to perform poorly executed bench presses, “ab workouts”, and mirror selfies doesn’t suffice.
And then what if I told you this was the NORM for most teenage athletes?
Would you be surprised that we are experiencing the greatest levels of burn out and preventable injury that we’ve ever experienced in human history?
Probably not, right?
I mean do too much of one thing and not enough to support the demands of the abundance, and shit is bound to break somewhere is it not?
Ever tried to plug to me plugs into a power strip? What happens if it experiences too many volts? It’s trips. Its done. Immediate feedback.
The problem with the over activity in sport and under activity of preparation for sport is that the negative effects can’t be immediately felt.
This is why people can justify getting away without it.
It’s the same reason smokers can justify smoking cigarettes, too.
America, especially, is a reactive society.
Do what we want to do regardless of it being right and then hopefully they have pills, shots, or loan forgiveness programs to bail us out of our lack of personal discipline and responsibility.
Don’t be that guy.
Prioritize and take pride in your preparation.
It’s the only way you can be the best you can be.
