🥇 The Athlete Development Journal

Developing speed, strength, power, health, and character, so your athlete gets the most out of their athletic career.

Listen to this episode in the car with your athlete. ⬇️

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Mind. More important than a trust fund

Giving your kid robust athlete development from the ages of 0 to 18 years old is more valuable than giving your kid a massive trust fund.

Once you get a big boy or big girl job and start a family (maybe somewhere around 25 years old), you have very little time to devote to your own health and fitness.

You’re building a career and you’re building a family, you don’t have 2 hours per day to devote to the gym.

I call these the “don’t screw it up years.”

If you can stay at a healthy bodyweight, keep muscle mass, and be able to run more than two blocks without being gassed, you’ve won this phase.

But, here’s the thing: it’s a lot easier to not “screw it up” if you build a strong base earlier in your life.

When you grow muscle the first time around, you add a bunch of nuclei. The more nuclei you have, the more efficient your body is at making more muscle.

The coolest part: when you lose muscle mass as you stop training, you don’t lose those nuclei. That means you can regrow muscle faster the second time around.

I’ve personally gone almost 6 months without training before (in the dog days of starting the business), and then within 1 month was able to deadlift over 550 lbs.

How?

I trained like a mad man from the ages of 10 to 23-years-old. I built such a wide and stable base of athlete development, that I could get away with things few others could.

Once your family is grown and you’ve established yourself in your profession, you can (and should) re-devote your time and energy to maximizing your physical development.

But, if you “screw it up” in the “don’t screw it up” years, it’s a lot harder to come back from. If you give your kids the gift of robust athlete development, it makes it infinitely easier to not “screw it up.”

As for that being more important than a massive trust fund, I’ll turn it over to Confucius:

“A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man wants only one.”

Body. “90%” is a lie… kind of.

One of the most distorted concepts in rehab is aiming to get back to 90% of your other leg.

We use it. It’s important. But, it’s a perfect example of real data being used to paint a fake story.

Let me explain more…

Most return-to-sport tests compare your surgical leg to their other leg. This is called the limb symmetry index (LSI).

If your quad strength is 100 lbs on your healthy leg and 60 lbs on your surgical leg, your LSI for that test is 60%.

Research has suggested that the threshold of “good enough” is usually between 85-95%. If your surgical leg does 90% as well as your other leg, then that’s good enough to return.

Does that make sense, though? Let’s imagine you tore your ACL 6 months ago.

Fortunately, we have a lot of information on you from before your injury. Before you got hurt, your quad strength was 75 lbs on both legs.

After the surgery, your quad strength on the injured leg is going to dip down drastically. It turns out, cutting into a muscle and replacing a primary part of the joint will do some damage and make you weaker.

But, let’s imagine you went to a physical therapist and he focused really hard on getting your injured leg as strong as possible.

You’re a hard-working, focused young athlete. Naturally, you always did your home exercises and worked your tail off at therapy. You did everything you were told to do.

At 6 months, your physical therapist tests you and… your injured leg was 90% as strong and powerful as your healthy leg! Woohoo!

Wait a minute….

Let’s add some context to that graph and look at it again.

The red line drawn horizontally shows how strong you were when you got hurt in the first place. Obviously, that target line isn’t good enough, because you got injured at that strength.

Yet, you’re not even at that line; you’re significantly below it.

How could this be??

Well, you took 6 months and did no targeted training on your healthy leg. If you don’t train a muscle, it’s going to atrophy and get weaker.

So, for 6 months your healthy leg got weaker, and weaker, and weaker. Now, your physical therapist is using that as the standard for return? Actually, he’s using 90% of that weaker leg as the standard?

90% of suck is 💩.

This is what I mean when I say context is important.

You need to be strong in an absolute sense and strong relative to the other leg.

You need to aim to be stronger than you were pre-injury before returning, not as strong as you were. You should be training the heck out of the healthy leg throughout the entire process.

You should be chasing a moving goalpost. That healthy leg should be getting stronger throughout the entire process.

Aiming for limb symmetry is important, but only in the context of having a healthy leg that’s strong enough to be a worthy comparator.

Soul. Light needs dark.

The struggle you’re going through right now is the only thing that allows you to feel joy.

You can’t know what light is, if you’ve never experienced darkness.

You can’t know what warmth is, if you’ve never experienced cold.

You can’t know what energy is, if you’ve never experienced exhaustion.

You can’t know joy, if you’ve never felt despair.

Let’s wrap it up with a couple important things…

1. This newsletter and podcast is completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, illustrating, recording, editing, and uploading. The best way you can support it and allow it to continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to ​gtperformance.co/newsletter​ and they can subscribe there!
2. Everything in these newsletters, podcasts, social media, and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or your athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.

Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!

Be >,

Zach

Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS