From there, the game is getting them better at expressing their newly acquired capacity.
“The game is simple.
It’s about getting fundamentally stronger to obtain more force & then improving your ability to effectively express it.
There are a number of ways to acquire strength, but the method(s) that work best will always require you to pay for it.
Hard work wins.”
-Ray Zingler on X
It’s very straight forward.
Get stronger.
Practice getting better at displaying force.
That’s it. That is the whole thing.
I just described sports performance training in 8 words.
Yet we have gurus out there who will try to convince you that you need their “cutting edge” methods to improve.
Those folks don’t even know what they’re talking about. They’re lying to you and themselves.
They put random ingredients in a pot and call it a recipe and because consumers don’t know any better, they think it “must be a quality dish”.
It’s not.
It sucks.
Here’s a simple tip if you’re looking for a coach for you or your child.
The simpler they are, the better they are.
And not “most of the time”, in 20 years of paying attention, that’s a fact you can take to the bank.
Now don’t confuse simple with uneducated.
The simple guys out there are the MOST educated.
They are smart enough to know what works, and even smarter when it comes to knowing to remove the fluff.
Genius is masterful repetition of the fundamentals.
If we know what the game is and how to play it, this makes things easy on us as coaches.
Again, get them stronger, get them better at displaying it.
The word stronger is a broad term.
Therefore, I like to think about strength in the context of force.
Notice I never said, “get stronger at a specific exercise” it’s just get stronger (in the right areas).
In my post yesterday, I talked about the high box squat as an example.
Trolls and bros will complain all day long that “they don’t count” but who is counting? Especially in the world of sports performance?
Do kids get rewarded for below parallel squats in softball or lacrosse?
Of course not.
Do high box squats get kids stronger? Insanely.
Can we use the strength from the high box squats as applicable force?
Damn right.
Remember, the goal isn’t to become the best at lifting weights.
It’s simply a game of trying to access more capacity.
From there, it’s working to better and more effectively display (our newly found) force into the ground via sprint and jump training so that we can improve our speed, explosivity, agility, and overall physical resilience.
