They don’t ‘have time’ because we are teaching them to misuse it.
“Year-Round Sport without Year-Round Strength & Conditioning is like having an endless supply of toothbrushes, but no toothpaste.
You don’t have time?
Maybe that’s a sign there is a problem?
Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses (they don’t even exist) & take ownership of your time and potential.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
In order to have a great peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you absolutely must have bread.
You can have the sweetest, greatest jelly in the world, the freshest peanut butter that man has ever seen, and even the finest of china silverware to spread it, but if you don’t have bread, that damn guy with jif, smuckers, and plain white bread will beat you in a PB&J contest, every time.
Strength & Conditioning and Sports work the same exact way.
We just often choose to ignore this because of a lack of understanding from a macro societal perspective and/or because it’s easier to point to that one anomaly who has attained success without doing “that weights stuff” and assume that not physically preparing the body for the demands of sport is a good idea.
Ignore science and overprescribe sport specific stressors to the underprepared youth athlete lacking a base of physical preparation, the good ‘ol American way.
See when I say you can’t have optimal performance in sports without regular strength and conditioning, it’s not my opinion, it’s not just some meathead bantering. It’s a fact that has been defended in academia countless times.
And as much I say that, the inverse is also true. You can’t have optimal performance in sport by selling out to strength and speed training without practicing your sport, but rest assured we don’t have that problem in America.
I understand what the main objective is (to improve sport skill to improve outputs in sport) and I understand very few care about S&C. It’s viewed as a menial extra “if we have time”.
But the problem, again, and the reason we don’t have time is because we are expensing their time, overprescribing what we think we’ll have the most impact on their performance.
There comes a point in time when we start to see diminishing returns and if we’re not careful these diminishing returns manifest themselves in the form of mental and physical turmoil.
We have to stop thinking that buying more and more peanut butter and jelly or tooth brushes is the answer.
Strength & Conditioning is the bread and the toothpaste that are integral to solving the equation.
Even if you don’t want it to be.
