Strength By Fitness
Fitter kids rapidly become healthier kids than their sedentary peers, something which provide long-lasting benefits throughout adulthood too. Welcome to another fact-based Strength By Fitness article
Fitter kids rapidly become healthier than their sedentary peers.
Those fitter and healthier kids eventually go on to become fitter, healthier adults with a higher quality of life, a higher physical, work, and cognitive capacity and performance too. Not to mention vastly better health trajectories in body, mind, and mortality across all of life.
Assuming they maintained their healthier habits and weekly fitness routine as adults.
No matter when you embrace a healthier life, you are going to change all these trajectories, aging process, and your quality of life for the better, but while it is never too late to pick up a healthier, fitter life, the earlier you start, the better off you are.
Ergo, as adults, we need to get back to promoting regular sports and health-friendly non-competitive habits in food, exercise, and daily physical activity for all kids around the world in a much better way than what is currently happening. Peoples home environment, support and encouragement matters greatly for adherence, and this holds true not just for kids, but adults too.
Make your home environment health, food, and fitness friendly.
When Injury free Performance is the main exercise pillar.
- Physical Capacity 99%
- Strength 99%
- Explosive Power 99%
- Athletic Performance 99%
- Health Outcomes 100%
- Lean Muscle Mass ( Hypertrophy ) 98%
- Healthy, Active & Fit Older Age 100%
- Mobility 99%
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you should strength train, every week, all-year-round, for the rest of your life. Play many different sports as a child, walk, run, climb, wrestle, swim and jump.
Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness
Kids should not specialize too early in a misguided effort to achieve a future elite-level pro sports career. Play, train, and compete in as many fun sports as you can find. This builds a much better foundation and leads to better adherence, progression, health, and sports performance, too, if they ever make it to a pro sports career.
Overuse is, of course, a concern. Some adults, and kids alike, can absolutely do too much and push too hard because they fall in love with doing so.
On the other hand, 99% of humanity just isn’t exercising enough. So, do not approach the subject of youth sports and exercise for kids and teenagers with a basis of fear.
Regular sports, exercise, and physical activity are nothing but beneficial, and while acute injuries do happen, those injuries are even more likely to happen to sedentary kids and adults alike, not to mention the subpar health outcomes over time, in body, and mind if you do not exercise on a weekly basis. If anything, it is that cataclysmic divide in outcomes over time you should be fearful of, and the losing side is the sedentary team that doesn’t exercise, and doesn’t eat healthy, nutritionally rich food on the regular.
RFitness Capacity focused Training Walks All Over Hypertrophy as The No.1 Fitness & health Pillar
For us natural, healthy minded fitness folks the hypertophy difference after 10 years of strength training for either hypertrophy on one hand, or strength, health & performance on the other hand will be extremely low.
So how do we train for, and enable vastly better health and fitness from an early age?
First of all, allow your teenagers and kids to strength train in a safe, supervised way.
Enable and encourage them to run, to swim, to explore wrestling and traditional martial arts. And do not fear plyometrics of any sort.
Allow kids to explore team sports, be it ice hockey in the winter, soccer in the summer, American football, track and field, or something else. And don’t settle for one thing; include it all.
And of course, do not lose track of the importance of fostering good and regular sleeping habits, a say no to alcohol culture, and healthy, nutritionally rich, higher-SPC food habits.
This entire paragraph might read as “easier said than done” to a lot of people. But that’s indoctrination, and habits, good folks. Bad indoctrination and bad, unhealthy habits.
It really isn’t hard to foster healthier, fact-based food and fitness habits. Kids don’t do what you tell them; they do what you show them.
So lead by example.
Regular sports and exercise are no different. Be positive, enable exercise, sports, and fitness by supporting both play and structured exercise. It’s not about being the best in the world or going bust, and doing nothing.
That’s the troublesome mindset that prevents people from living a healthy, fit life, for all of life. Instead, embrace that doing something beats doing nothing a thousand times over.
Not to mention that the person who does something on the regular has all the chances in the world to reach ever higher peaks, the person who sits on the sidelines will face nothing but steady decline.
Our outcomes are nothing but the consequence of our own chosen habits.
Enabling a healthier life from a young age comes down to the mindset and example of the adults.
Be that example.
And to make it easier for you, much easier, adopt the Strength By Fitness, big pillar approach.
Great health, fitness and body composition outcomes has nothing to do with obsessing about miniscule details, its not about cutting out health and fitness friendly fruits because of some sort of horror fantasy about fructose.
Fact-based big pillar choices builds world class athletes and super fit, and incredibly healthy people. In fact, adherence to those fact-based big pillars make up 99% of the results, no matter who you are. And this makes it much easier to achieve incredible outcomes over time.
Easier doesnt mean effortless, nor that you can exercise and eat well for 4 weeks and undo 20 years of lacklustre habits. But it do mean that its not hard at all once you have established good, fact-based big pillars thats possible to maintain in your way of life puzzle.
The Power of Plyometrics.
Regular plyometric-based exercise shows improvements in explosive lower body performance, such as jump & sprint performance.
When we lift weights in the gym, in a proper, strength and performance-focused way, we do it with a bigger load and a more explosive contraction. If this is a traditional 1 to 5 rep set, or an 8 to 15 rep-pause set, or even a full-blown 3rm cluster set taken to 20 reps, doesn’t matter. Bigger loads with an explosive contraction taken through a full range of motion build strength, explosiveness, great athletic performance, and health.
Most of the time, the educated athlete and trainer will push for a slightly controlled negative. No, this does not provide any additional benefits for strength and lean muscle mass, but most who lift very heavy do it to lower injury risk and bad wear and tear over time in muscles, but more importantly, tendons and insertions.
It’s a great compromise of max performance progression and the need to stay injury-free. The best compromise, in fact.
Good technique is also a staple, not because it leads to better performance, but once again, it slightly lowers bad wear and tear. Most educated and experienced people do not chase perfect technique; however, that has no additional benefits, and can actually lead to a lower performance capacity and progression.
Plyometrics, on the other hand, is all about explosive impact and contraction. What this means is that a depth jump isn’t about falling slower; that´s impossible. Instead, it’s about learning how to brace for the impact with your muscles and to use the kinetic energy to explode into the next athletic and explosive contraction.
The thing is that both of these exercise worlds work the same, and can therefore coexist perfectly. That slightly controlled negative I talked about earlier? It does not provide any performance benefits; it’s there to create lifelong injury-free adherence.
You can dive bomb your strength training sets, and strength train with a more plyometric approach. Contrary to what many believe, this will not result in worse progress at all; strength, lean muscle mass, performance et cetera, will all progress as good as is possible. One can easily make the point that actual sports performance will become vastly superior.
But injury risk and bad wear and tear will also accumulate faster, and bigger.
This leads us to the same careful need for a compromise when it comes to plyometrics. Healthy athletic bodies, and performance doesnt thrive with a super strict hypertrophy obsessed bodybuilding approach. It needs explosiveness, speed, force and load. But you cant train like that all the time, you need proper recovery, and a lot of easier, and kinder exercise too.
This real life consideration doesnt change no matter if we are talking about rows and barbell squats, martial arts, olympic gymnasts, ice hockey players, or whatever it is. So, you cant do hard plyometrics or dive bomb your gym weights every set, all-year-round, if you do, its just a matter of time before your body breaks down.
In many ways its like running, you need a good, fact-based mix of volume, speed, and effort, the individual ratio will vary, in part based on your capacity for recovery, but everyone benefits from a solid mix of hard, and explosive training, enough but not too much hard volume, and neither too little or too much easier volume.
The key to remaining injury-free is keeping the focus on Lower per session & weekly plyometric volume.
This is also why all athletes should strength train, and all powerlifters need to learn to embrace doing enough weekly aerobic exercise.
Learn to lean into jumps; explosive jumps are incredibly beneficial, but for the sake of your injury-free longevity, keep the weekly volume low enough that your body can recover in full.
Lift hard, explosive weights, in exercises where it is safe to play like that, but respect the signals your body is sending you, and learn when to ease up and train lighter, stricter, and easier for a while.
Strength By Fitness often talks about the need to raise not just our performance roof, but also to raise our performance floor. And this is exactly what this is.
Explosive big load gym lifts, that’s the performance roof, strict, bodybuilding style sets will lift your performance floor. Do both on the regular..
Plyometrics, like all explosive, highly intense sports and movement patterns, represent your performance ceiling.
Remember to ease up on the regular and do lots of easy to recover from weekly exercise too. That is how you remain injury free and steadily becomes fitter and better for decades to come. No one, not even I can train hard and explosive all the time without running into issues, unless we implement periods of easier effort exercise with less impact trauma on our bodies.
Do not allow your ego to turn a blind eye to this simple sports and exercise reality.
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Complete view of Higher-SPC, High-protein foods & fitness outcomes.
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Higher effort exercise requires better, and more recovery In order to progress without injuries coming in tow.
Coach Mike, Strength By Fitness.
Outcomes from the plyometric study.
Vertical jump performance involving squat jump and countermovement jump, standing long jump performance, and sprint performance involving 5 m to 30 m distances all displayed moderate improvement across the board by implementing a good approach to plyometrics. This involves not doing too little, nor too much of it.
Fitness plans with more plyometric sessions generally had better outcomes, but we are still talking about a couple of sessions per week. Remember, just like with intense and heavy-loaded explosive strength training, martial arts, and sprint training, you need adequate recovery and lots of easy volume in between the hard reps and sets in order not to break down.
Weekly consistency and a good, healthy, fact-based balance between going really hard and easier is what builds amazing progress over time.
Biologically speaking, we can see that regular exercise provides a multitude of positive adaptations and improvements in neuromuscular function.
This includes increased motor unit recruitment, intra- and inter-muscular coordination, and improved usage of the kinetic energy our movement pattern creates.
Remember, you become how you train. If your body is not used to moving weights fast and hard, it will never be able to move hard and fast. If you never head-kick on the regular, you just won’t be able to all of a sudden head-kick fast, hard, and effortlessly.
One study displayed that 8 weeks of plyometrics enhanced muscle fiber force, diameter, and calcium sensitivity.
This tells us ( when combined with all the other studies and real world outcomes we already know of ) that regular exercise ( not just plyometrics ) facilitates neural adaptations and favorable physiological changes at the muscle fiber level.
So what do we have?
What we can say with no hesitation at all is that running is not enough, martial arts on its own is not enough, neither is yoga, soccer, ice hockey, swimming, canoeing, or mountain climbing, track and field, iron man, biking, strength training for hypertrophy, or whatever it is you are into.
They are all great, all on their own. But when you combine multiple sports, activities, and fitness modalities, the outcome is bigger and better than its individual parts.
In order for your body to excel at your chosen sports, not to mention to be fit in general, you need real muscle strength, and you need explosive power, as well as muscular endurance, and a high cardiovascular capacity, no matter if the topic is sprints or endurance distances.
This is why both younger people and adults alike need both aerobic training and strength training, both of which will increase their cardiovascular fitness, improve insulin sensitivity, and help keep excess body fat at bay.
But this is not enough; bone health requires strength training and plyometric jumps, such as depth jumps in the gym, or jumping, spinning kicks, and techniques in martial arts. Good joint and muscular health and capacity also greatly benefit from these weighted fitness modalities. But the benefits of loaded exercises extend far beyond these traditional benefits.
Today we know that endurance and loaded resistance training offer greater benefits together across body and mind, from mood to cognitive capacity, heart health, disease and injury risk, metabolic health benefits, and quite possibly even more from strength training than aerobic exercise.
So at the end of the day, it’s not about an either-or; all available evidence makes it perfectly clear that a combination of strength, aerobics, plyometrics, and sports offers far more benefits for health, ageing, mortality outcomes, and lifelong fitness than either can achieve on its own.
As such, both cardiovascular exercise, plyometrics, and strength training need to be included in national and international guidelines for both adults and younger people.
And with that regular fitness approach in place, everything is made even better and more complete by adopting healthy, nutritionally rich, higher-protein, higher fiber food habits ( higher-SPC foods in short ).
a High-protein, and higher-SPC intake universally PROVIDES better fitness progression, health, body composition, cognitive and exercise recovery outcomes
This public article will shortly be followed up by an in-depth article taking a look at the two studies I have quoted in this article, but that article will be exclusive for our clients and paid readers.
You can sign up for a paid reader subscription for only $9 per year, and get access to all our current and future client and member-exclusive content here at Strength By Fitness.
Cited study.
The Era of Resistance Training as a Primary Form of Physical Activity for Physical Fitness and Health in Youth Has Come.
Chaabene H, Ramirez-Campillo R, Moran J, Schega L, Prieske O, Sandau I, Negra Y, Behrens M. The Era of Resistance Training as a Primary Form of Physical Activity for Physical Fitness and Health in Youth Has Come. Sports Med. 2025 Sep;55(9):2073-2090. doi: 10.1007/s40279-025-02240-3. Epub 2025 May 26. PMID: 40418528; PMCID: PMC12476322.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40418528/?s=09
Children’s Sprint and Jump Performance after Plyometric-Jump Training: A Systematic Review
Han Wu, Shuai Li, JinYu Lai, Wei Bian, Rodrigo Ramirez – Campillo, Eduardo Sáez de Villarreal, Qi Zhao. (2025)
Children’s Sprint and Jump Performance after Plyometric-Jump Training: A Systematic Review. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (24), 52 – 74. https://doi.org/10.52082/jssm.2025.52
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Maintain that nutritionally rich, high-protein, higher-SPC food intake, and fitness habits for life, Health is a habit, not a 4 week diet and exercise plan.
Cited study.
1. The 2005 high-protein study.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16002798/
2. Genetics matter but habits own the driver’s seat.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167494323002601?s=09
3. Effect of resistance exercise on body composition, muscle strength and cardiometabolic health during weight loss .
https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/11/3/e002363?s=09
4. Trends in nutrition and health between 1900 and now.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213434423000221?via%3Dihub
5. Capturing what counts in muscle failure and sarcopenia.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40885204/?s=09
6. Low SPC, UPF and high-protein.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-025-01247-4
7. High-protein myths.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002916525002540?s=09
8. Non exercise, physical activity and its impact on health and mortality.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.072253?s=09
9. Health outcomes improve for every 3% of additional plant-based protein you consume.
https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)66282-3/pdf
You can also read this article over at Medium if you are a paying Medium Member.
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