They care that you’re strong, fast, and good at them.
“Guess what!?
Sports don’t care about which bar you use or the ROM of your squats.
They care that you’re strong, fast, & good at them.
It’s the S&C’s job to program the simplest stimulates to yield the most favorable adaptations that positively impact sporting environments.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I always get a kick out of strength and conditioning.
No absolutes exist in any field, but this is especially true in S&C.
However, we still have Hardo S&C coaches vehemently defending their superiority on social media, because their way is definitely “best”. They then use a cherry-picked study on a small control to defend their biases.
On the other side of the equation, we have the low training age athletes (who, ya know, this whole thing is about) who don’t really care about anything other than getting better at their sport(s). They don’t know or care about the difference between box squats and weighted ab crunches, other than that ab crunches “might make them shredded.”
Like most things in life, we make the concept of getting bigger, stronger, faster, and better at sports way more complex than it actually needs to be.
The saddest part of the whole thing is we spend way too much time doing the wrong things.
This wouldn’t be that big of a deal if time was renewable, but it isn’t. It’s fininte.
All the time spent doing the wrong/unnecessary stuff is time that you can’t get back to do the right stuff. Remember that.
At the end of the day, it’s critical for coaches, athletes, and parents to sift through the bullshit and focus on the brass tax.
There are no barbells on any field.
There are no “speed gadgets” on any field, either.
Because sports are played without these implements (that do have performance value), how we go about using these implements is largely subjective.
Here is what I have found to work best knowing the objective isn’t to become the best “lifter” or “sprinter”, but to become “the best they can be at their sport(s)”:
Choose the simplest exercises in the weight room/on the field that provide the biggest bang for the athletic development buck. Then, perform them consistently, making adjustments when necessary.
Do you really think it matters front squat or back squat? High box or no box? Maybe marginally, but not nearly as much as people think.
The objective is to get fundamentally stronger and faster so that the qualities of strength and speed have the potential to positively impact sporting environments.
(Ball/Field) Sports aren’t lifting or track meets.
