It’s leveraging your perceptions to get to your dollars. Shady Sales 101.
“Most speed & agility training you see being ‘coached’ by ‘trainers’ all over America isn’t actually speed & agility training.
It’s non-compounding, directionless conditioning via closed drill circus acts that do not transfer to the reactive nature of sport.
It’s garbage.”
-Ray Zingler on X
I hate to beat the proverbial dead horse here, but it’s important to talk about.
And continue to talk about.
Especially during a day and age where we get further and further from true youth athletic development with each passing day.
Every time you turn around there is a “new thing”, from light up buttons to “ankle bands for quick feet”. (Which do far more harm than good for speed development.)
Because we’ve created an entire industry around the buzz phrase “speed & agility”, equipment manufacturers and charlatans branded as “trainers” will throw any and everything under the sun at you. Most certainly not because they care about you or your kid’s actual development, but because they know that most poorly informed consumers’ are eager to chase shiny red balls.
The levels of why “speed & agility” is bullshit are abundant, but to help those who have made it this far into the post, I’ll touch on the 2 main reasons why you should save your money.
Speed is a product of force. What this means is that in order to run faster, you must apply more force into the ground more efficiently. And how you “gain access” to more force is through the practice of getting stronger (strength training).
While doing all the drills at speed & agility with “quick feet” “look fast”, they aren’t helping kids improve running speeds.
It’d be like having a drag car that you desire to run faster at the drag strip, but only making modifications to the car’s exterior paint color.
Even a commoner knows that won’t do anything for speed. To get the car to run faster, you must increase its horsepower.
And then to take it a step further, the speed & agility gurus love to talk about “sport specific” training. It’s because they know consumers’ love that phrase, too.
I’ll tell you straight up, the only way to get true sport specific training, is to play and practice specific sports.
“Training” closed drills (where the athlete knows the steps to take and the outcome of the drill) will never transfer to the highly chaotic, unpredictable, reactive nature of sport.
It’s going from flying an airplane in a video game, to flying one in real life. It doesn’t transfer.
