Here is why strength is still the limiting factor & lowest hanging fruit for most athletes:
“What are the athletic qualities most athletes are after?
Speed, power, explosiveness, agility, physical resilience, & confidence, right?
Guess what feeds those qualities?
Strength does.
In 2024, strength is still the limiting factor & lowers hanging fruit for most.”
-Ray Zingler on X
There are few things more bizarre to me that outsourcing our kids most critical quality for not only sport, but for life, to the (severely) unqualified.
The only reason I have the ability to wrap my head around it in any capacity is because I understand consumer misconceptions related to athletic performance.
Misconceptions that are accentuated by “professionals” in our field as they play into the palatability narratives because a) they don’t know what they’re doing (many of these cases) or b) the fastest track to money in the performance world is “coaching” the randomized assortment of closed drills that do not transfer to sport, that we’ve branded “speed & agility.”
In Year 14 in the Sports Performance Industry, with over 30,000 hours of coaching on the floor, I promise you I understand what athletes “want” and “need”.
Not only do I “get it”, I agree with the idea that sport skill, speed, first step quickness, agility & etc. are far more attractive qualities than “strength”.
Nobody is earning starting spot on their team if they can squat 400 pounds, but can’t field a ground ball.
It’s usually not the guy who bench presses the most who is being interviewed after the game for his performance. It’s the guy who ran the fastest and scored the most touchdowns to help his team win.
If I had half a brain, I’d axe all this work that lacks sex appeal and throw a bunch of cones on the ground and do “speed & agility” like everybody else.
But I’ll tell you why I am still stubborn and stick to this strength thing.
Despite strength being the red headed stepchild of the performance world, it is still the most critical component of athletic performance.
Again, it may not be the “most exciting” or “most desired” but this does not take away from how critical it is.
You use and value the coffee maker in your home far more than you do the fire extinguisher, but which one is more critical? Case and point.
In a world where we are attempting to rush development and skip over fundamentals.. Strength, which feeds ALL other athletic qualities is going to become increasingly more important.
You can run from it all you want, but what it won’t be very fast.
