🦵Power Comes From the Ground
Watch a youth game this weekend.
You’ll see kids swinging as hard as they can with their arms.
Quarterbacks muscling the ball with their shoulder.
Soccer players trying to sprint faster by pumping their arms harder.
Everyone looks busy.
Almost no one looks powerful.
That’s not an effort problem.
It’s a starting point problem.
🧠 The Insight
Power does not start in the arms.
It starts at the ground.
Most youth athletes are taught to add power at the end of the movement. Swing harder. Throw harder. Jump higher.
But the body does not work from the outside in. It works from the ground up.
If the lower body does not create force, the upper body has nothing to transfer.
🏈 The Story
There is a diagram in Athletic Movement Skills that shows athletic performance like a set of connected gears.
Mental.
Lifestyle.
Physical conditioning.
Movement skills.
Technical and tactical skills.
All of them feed into performance.
But here is what most people miss.
The movement gear sits right in the middle.
If movement breaks down, everything else slips.
That is why you see strong kids who hit softly.
Fast kids who cannot change direction.
Big arms with no throw behind them.
They are skipping the ground.
🔁 The Shift
Stop trying to create power with the arms.
Start teaching kids to push into the ground.
Every athletic movement follows the same order:
Ground
Feet
Hips
Core
Shoulders
Arms
Hands
Ball
When kids reverse that order, effort goes up and results go down.
When they get the order right, power shows up almost by accident.
🧭 The Takeaway
Power is transferred, not muscled.
Smaller athletes can be explosive.
Younger athletes can hit hard.
Less “strong” kids can outperform stronger ones.
Not because they are special.
Because they are organized.
👊 Put It Into Practice
Add this simple drill this week.
Load and Push
Athletic stance.
Slight bend in the knees.
Small load into the hips like sitting back into a chair.
Push the feet into the ground and rotate the hips first.
Let the arms follow.
Do it slow.
Then medium.
Then fast.
The goal is not speed.
The goal is sequence.
When the sequence is right, speed takes care of itself.
🏅 The Locker Room
Most kids are not weak.
They are disconnected.
Teach them where power actually comes from and you fix more than one problem at a time.
❤️ The Parents’ Bleachers
If your athlete looks like they are trying harder than everyone else but getting worse results, it is probably not effort.
It is mechanics.
And mechanics can be taught.
Ask better questions on the ride home.
Where were your feet?
Did your hips go first?
Could you feel the ground?
Those questions build athletes.
⚡ BE THE CATALYST
This week, do not add more reps.
Add better intention.
Teach your athlete to push the ground first.
Everything else gets easier after that.
If this changed how you see athletic development, forward it to another parent or coach who is trying to do right by their kids.