Arizona High School Sports - SportZine Magazine

    As a coach in the sports performance field, I am often approached by athletes that want to know what supplement or shake they should be taking to gain weight, improve performance, or feel better. My answer is pretty simple and direct: NONE.
    (Joe Marsit is the Center Director at Velocity Sports Performance in Scottsdale)
    The nutritional supplement industry is an explosion of fancy marketing, great gimmicks, and wonderful claims of success. The truth of the matter is if any of these products worked as well as they claimed, America wouldn't be facing an obesity crisis, we'd all be bouncing off the walls with energy, and we'd all be lean, tan, and smiling pearly whites.
    As I teach many of my students in class, if the answer was as simple as a pill in a bottle, there would be a lot more people healthy and happy.
    One important thing to remember about supplements is the industry is not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration the same way other food products and medicines are. What this means is there is very lax control over the bottling and labeling of products sold as nutritional supplements. Oftentimes, supplement products contain different amounts of ingredients listed on the label, and may even contain substances not listed on the label.
    Each year, there is a handful of professional athletes that test positive on their screening test and the source of the positive test is traced back to a substance in the supplement regimen that was not listed on the labels. Drug tests do not allow forgiveness for not knowing what you were taking, so many of these athletes face thousands of dollars in fines and time off in suspensions for a supplement that may have even been cleared as OK by the drug hotline.

This time around, we’ll discuss how the training facility you choose will play a big role in you getting the most out of speed and performance training and why consistency is so important.

On a regular basis, we’re asked by parents and athletes what they could do to be faster and more athletic. Our response to them is very simple: The key to becoming a faster athlete is to consistently train in an athletic fashion under conditions which allow for optimum training results. Improvements in speed and athletic ability are analogous to any other sport skill. If you want to be better at a specific sports skill, you must practice that skill repeatedly.

For any high school athlete, the most difficult situation to remedy is the return to competition following a major knee injury. In this issue, even though we’ll be focusing in on some of the challenges facing female athletes, the guys should note that these same devastating, and in many cases preventable, injuries are also on the rise for men.

Lost practice and play time, coupled with the injury, may produce the gap that denies you the ability to receive a collegiate scholarship and move to the next level.