But it does hold the keys to everything else we care about in sports performance.
“Strength isn’t the ‘be all end all’.
But building it is wildly more effective for youth athlete development than putting a bunch of nuanced training on kids who can’t perform push-ups.
IG & ‘elite’ club organizations push dessert training over meat & potato and it shows.”
-Ray Zingler on X
I will never claim that Strength is the be all end all for athletes.
If this were true, the world’s strongest powerlifters, weightlifters, and strongmen would be the best athletes in the world. I am not implying they aren’t impressive athletes in their own rights, I’m just saying you just don’t see them dominating fields and courts in team sports, for a reason.
Strength, like sport skill, speed, mobility, durability, & etc. is just a piece of the athletic performance puzzle, albeit a very important piece.
And the reason I push strength very hard is certainly not because I value it over any of the other qualities. If I’m being honest, I care more about speed than I do barbell strength.
But I recognize that in order to attain that speed that I and every other parent, kid, and brother are after, we have to pay the man.
And in this case, “the man” is strength training.
For young athletes to improve their speed, agility, durability, & etc. to impact the construct we all care about most (ability & performance in sport) we must prioritize (relative) strength training as it is the foundation that everything else feeds off of.
In the context of a (heavily) simplified pyramid, it works like this:
General Strength & Conditioning > Speed & Agility > Sport Skill
However, in our modern world we’ve flipped the pyramid upside down, and in many cases left out the most important piece, as many pyramids look like this:
Spork Skill > Speed & Agility > Making TikToks at Fitness Center
We must prioritize the consumption of the main course so that we can enjoy the desserts as the dessert(s) in abundance and by themselves will eventually make us sick.
And to take it a step further, many of our kids who are ignoring the most critical, foundational component, are attempting to utilize nuanced “training methods” in hopes of improving.
This is akin to a 16-year-old getting behind the wheel of a 16-speed manual big rig for his driving test and expecting it to turn out favorably.
We MUST start prioritizing the foundations we are ignoring if we want our kids to be able to access their true potential.
