With only 2 percent of high school athletes making it to college to play sports, these numbers could leave many passionate athletes discouraged at their chances of making it. It is undeniable that these are compelling stats, but even more interesting is the number of athletes that want to be elite but aren’t really working up to their potential during training sessions, practice, and games. I liked to call this grey area in effort “The Workout Trap”. This is where athletes spend large amounts of time working out but aren’t getting any progression because they aren’t working out hard enough. Outside of the time spent, parents are spending an inordinate amount of funds on athletes to show up to training sessions to go half speed and get nothing out of the time spent because of effort.

As a Head Varsity Basketball Coach, I have witnessed athletes that had potential not grow because of lack of effort. The parents force them to go, and then when they get there the trainer forces them to train hard. It is truly sad and a recipe for athletic disaster. This gap in athletic effort causes athletes to stay the same as they get older, and to potentially to be outperformed by younger athletes. This can cause older athletes to go into a sort of athletic depression where they start to make up excuses for their lack of talent such as: I don’t want to play anymore, or I don’t want to go to college to play, and I’m just playing for fun.

Athletes need to understand what the health and fitness philosophies of the Principle of Progression and Overload have to do with their colligate and professional potential as an athlete.  The principle of progression is a training principle used to create a personal training program to improve physical fitness, skill and performance. The principle implies that for athletes to improve their fitness levels, they must continually increase the physical demands to reach an optimum level of overload. The Overload Principle is a basic sports fitness training concept. It means that in order to improve, athletes must continually work harder as they their bodies adjust to existing workouts. Overloading also plays a role in skill learning.

As a parent I would monitor effort this is the true determining factor of how much your child will progress. Finally, I would most certainly recommend that parents start their child out with the fundamentals of training, skill development, the link between diet and exercise, and attitude/body language management. 

  • Bouncin4Checks-list of Signs to look for:
  • If your athlete’s trainer is consistently telling your child to go harder, give more effort, run faster, jump higher…etc.
  • Not retaining information
  • If your athlete doesn’t think that they need to train to get better.

Editor’s Note: This article first published on November 30th, 2019.