strength training

You are going to get hurt. You are going to have a season that does not go the way you planned. You are going to get passed over for something you worked hard for. You are going to fail a test you thought you were ready for. This is not pessimism. It is the reality of competing in anything long enough to matter. The question is never whether setbacks happen. It is what you do with them. Setbacks Are Not Detours Most athletes treat setbacks like detours on the way to their rea

Measurement shapes behavior. Whatever you put a number on, athletes will train toward. That makes your choice of metrics one of the most important programming decisions you make. Most programs measure the wrong things and wonder why the results on the field do not match the results on the whiteboard. Relative Strength How strong an athlete is relative to their bodyweight matters far more than absolute numbers. A 180 pound athlete who can deadlift 360 is expressing twice their

Sport does not happen on two legs. Sprinting is single leg. Cutting is single leg. Landing from a jump is single leg. Pushing off a block or a starting position is single leg. Yet most athletes spend the majority of their strength training doing bilateral movements and barely touch single leg work. That gap between how you train and how you compete shows up eventually. Usually as an injury. Sometimes just as a performance ceiling you cannot figure out. Bilateral Strength Does

Ask most athletes how they train for speed and they will tell you about squats, box jumps, and leg press. Vertical movements. Up and down. Those build power, but sprinting is not a vertical movement. Sprinting is horizontal. You are trying to move forward, not up. Horizontal force production is how much force you can apply into the ground behind you. It is the single biggest physical predictor of sprint speed. And almost nobody trains it directly. The Vertical Bias Problem Th

Parents ask this a lot. Coaches ask it. The athletes themselves usually just want to know if they are old enough to start. The answer is earlier than most people think and more nuanced than just an age cutoff. The Old Fear About Growth Plates The concern about strength training stunting growth or damaging growth plates in young athletes is not supported by current research. That idea comes from a time when youth strength training meant loading a twelve year old with a barbell

This was covered in the cornerstone articles and it deserves to be said again because most athletes still have not figured it out. Hard training without direction is just expensive fatigue. You pay with your body and your time and you do not get what you came for. Purpose is not motivation. Purpose is not a goal you wrote on a whiteboard. Purpose is understanding exactly why every single thing you do in a training session connects to where you are trying to go. The Athlete Wh

High school strength programs fail athletes not because coaches do not care. Most coaches care a lot. They fail because the structure, the priorities, and the measures of success are wrong from the start. Understanding why they fail is the first step toward finding something that actually works. They Prioritize Maxes Over Development One rep max testing on the bench press and squat is the measuring stick in most high school programs. That incentivizes athletes to chase number

Nobody talks about foot strength. Athletes spend years developing their quads, hamstrings, and glutes, and completely ignore the structure that is in contact with the ground on every single rep, every single sprint, every single jump. Your foot is the last point of force transfer between your body and the ground. If it is weak, force leaks. If it cannot stiffen at the right moment, power that your hips and legs generated gets absorbed instead of expressed. What a Weak Foot Lo

Power cleans and snatches look incredible. They are athletic, explosive, technically demanding. Coaches love programming them because they signal seriousness. Athletes love doing them because they feel powerful. The truth is more complicated. Olympic lifts have real value. They also get misused more than almost any other tool in athlete training. What They Actually Develop Olympic lifts train rate of force development. How quickly you can express power. That is genuinely usef

This is probably the most important thing a high school athlete can understand about their training. Speed training and conditioning are not the same thing. They do not even work the same energy system. Running them together kills the results of both. Most programs mix them because it looks productive. You are always moving, always working, always tired. Tired is not fast. How Speed Works True speed development uses your phosphocreatine energy system. That system is powerful

This is one of the most common questions we get at Güd and the answer is less complicated than the internet makes it seem. The right number of days depends on your age, your training age, your sport schedule, and what you are trying to accomplish. There are some clear guidelines that work for most athletes. The Short Answer Most high school athletes should be lifting three to four days per week during the offseason. Two to three days during the season. That range covers the m

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Everyone wants the shortcut. The bands, the fancy footwork drills, the 40-yard dash technique videos. That stuff has its place. If you skip the foundation, none of it matters. Strength training is still the most important thing a developing athlete can do. That is not an opinion. It is what the research shows and what coaches who actually produce athletes know to be true. What Strength Actually Does Getting stronger means your muscles, tendons, and bones can handle more force