It’s not about you. It’s about them.
“In the athlete training world, thinking that prescribing what you like doing is best for other people because you like it and it works for you is called theft.
Your job as a coach is not to project biases.
Your job is to serve athletes in the way they need to be served.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
In the athlete performance training world, you’ll typically find coaches falling into 1 of 2 coaching categories 1) what THEY were good at as an athlete or 2) What THEY like doing.
While this isn’t totally a bad thing, after all a hitting coach was hopefully a half decent hitter in his day & hopefully he enjoys the concept of hitting.. it can get really muddy when Coaches personal biases or preferences begin to dictate their training prescription.
Essentially what I am saying is most coaches think their way is the only way. They think their method can fix “IT”. When this couldn’t be further from the truth.
There are multiple ways to skin the cat, the kicker is finding the best way for that specific individual you’re working with to skin his or her cat.
Nothing pisses me off more than seeing the local speed and agility guru, who was likely a mid-tier former college athlete resting on his laurels of “I played college ball so trust me with the training, bruh” manipulating unknowing parents into thinking that because their kid needs speed, this bro is your guy.
But this is exactly what happens. We get these guys who may have ran fast back in their day or, my favorite, have “good footwork” so they sell people on this palatable terminology.
These dudes have no idea how to actually assess athletes. They don’t know what your kid needs. Hell they don’t care what your kid’s need. They give them only what they, themselves know as a “coach”.
This is bullshit.
People may look at me and say “Ray’s a strength guy”, this is untrue. I am a performance guy. I happen to live within the realm of reality and recognize that most of our modern youth athletes performance problems stem from a lack of strength. For this reason, I prioritize strength work with our speed work.
Let me flip the script on you. Imagine our modern youth athletes had an abundance of strength training under their belts.
From 8-15 they were dosed with well coached, methodically planned and programmed strength training.
Do you think I’d be selling MORE strength work on top of the abundance they are already receiving because I like squats?
Or do you think I would find gaps in their performance and prescribe modality in areas they lacked?
But see this is exactly what we don’t do every single day in the training world.
Most don’t pay attention to what’s going on or what the kids actually they need, they just feed them more (of what they already have too much of) because it’s palatable and easy to implement.
Adding more of ‘x’ doesn’t solve the equation.
