The average kid is absolutely not, though. Here’s how to fix it.
“You hear ‘athletes are just getting bigger, faster, and stronger these days!’
Yes, the 1% of the 1% are.
The vast majority are not.
The vast majority of kids especially, are weak, overspecialized, and burnt out.
They can’t even eat enough to sustain their current outputs.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
We need to change the phrase everybody always throws around to “an overwhelmingly select few athletes are just getting bigger, faster, and stronger these days!”
We as a people love love love to pay attention to the outliers.
“That HUGE 12-year-old!”
“That D1 kid at my school!”
“Can you believe how fast the NFL D Lineman is for his size!”
And yeah, if you watch a lot of Pro sports you will see that the 1% of the 1% are in fact becoming even bigger genetic freaks than they were years ago.
What about the average kid, though?
The millions and millions and millions of middle school and high school kids in the hallways at school and on fields and courts everywhere.
Are they collectively, as a whole, getting bigger, stronger, and faster?
Of course not.
If anything, they are overspecialized and weaker because all their time is spent on skill work as they work aimlessly to try to keep up with the 1% of the genetic anomaly’s.
But it never works and it never will work.
Notice how those “dudes” can do 1/10th of the work you’re doing and you still end up in the background of the photo when 247 sports of PG comes to do a write up on them?
For the average kid, do you know what prioritizing skill work over developing, sustaining, and enhancing a quality foundation does?
It hamstrings your ceiling of potential and leaves you feeling lost and burnt out. At about a 100% accuracy rate.
How do I know?
Just look at our average kids.
Look at the abysmal overuse injury rates.
Look at them, physically.
They are rail thin because they are playing at such high volumes and they can’t even eat the required calories to sustain what they are doing as is, much less an influx of calories to grow into this bigger, stronger, and faster athlete that they want to become.
The average kid will never be able to compete on a level playing field as the genetic elite. It just won’t happen.
For this reason, the average kid needs to control what he can control and that’s the foundational work: eating, sleeping, training, etc.
THAT is what will feed the skill work/performance.
We skip over it, and, well, look where we’re at.
