Even if the functional guru bros try to tell you otherwise.
“We’ve gotten so advanced in Strength & Conditioning that we’ve forgotten the part where you actually have to get strong.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
I understand the dirty bulk days are largely over, though a bit on the unhealthy side, I do miss them.
There was nothing quite like piling in 10k + calories on the daily of healthy foods, protein shakes, Wendy’s Double Cheeseburgers, and $25+ meals from Panda Express, and then training my face off every single day.
I refused to take drugs, so using my teenage intuition, if I wanted to be able to get stronger and recover from intense bouts of training, I needed the calories to enhance my ability to recover.
I went from a skinny relatively strong teenager, to a teenager being able to bench in the 4’s, squat in the 5’s, and pull in the 6’s at around 190-200lbs.
Into my early 20’s, I went up to 250lbs. eating like this just to pack on as much mass as I could, because I understood this lifestyle was not healthy/sustainable long-term.
The point I’m making isn’t to try to convince you or anyone else to eat like this as I recognize, I lived on one extreme end of the spectrum.
The point I’m making is that a lot of kids are on the other extreme end, eating like rabbits.
A school lunch and 6 bites of mom’s dinner isn’t going to do it for you. Even if you have a huge (<500 cal.) protein shake before you go to bed.
What’s worse is not only do we have kid’s not eating in the necessary ways to yield strength and mass returns, we have coaches who very regularly undermine the concept of strength all together.
We are so ‘advanced’ in today’s day and age that we’ve forgot the part where you actually have to get strong.
We’ve got so much (skewed) research, showing how “strength is less important than we thought” and we “actually need <insert more palatable modality>.”
The problem is that a lot of this research is being performed on small subsects and genetic outliers.
I’m not saying strength is the be all end all. I’m not saying you have to squat ‘x’ amount of weight. I don’t care about any of that.
But what I do know is that strength is still MIGHTLY important, despite its lack of modern popularity.
