Ryzng Athletes

08/13/2026

One of the most common questions I get from parents:

Should my athlete be taking supplements?

Here's the honest answer.

Most young athletes don't need them. What they need is real food, consistent sleep, and proper hydration. If those three things aren't dialed in no supplement is going to meaningfully change anything.

Protein powder: Not necessary for most athletes under 16 who are eating real food regularly. If they're genuinely struggling to get enough protein through food, a basic whey or plant protein to fill gaps is fine. Nothing exotic.

Creatine: Most sports medicine organizations recommend waiting until adulthood. Not because it's dangerous but because the long term research in adolescent populations is limited. The gains creatine offers are largely achievable through proper training and nutrition at this age.

Pre-workout: Hard no for youth athletes. High doses of caffeine and stimulants are inappropriate for developing bodies and nervous systems. If your athlete needs a pre-workout to get motivated that's a mindset conversation, not a supplement one.

What actually works:
Sleep. 8–10 hours. Every night. This is where growth hormone is released and muscles are repaired.
Water. Consistently throughout the day.
Real food. Every time. Before anything else is considered.

Keep it simple. The basics done well beat any supplement on the market.

08/12/2026

What your athlete eats matters. When they eat it matters just as much.

Most youth sports families never get a straight answer on nutrition so here it is.

Before training or competition:
60–90 minutes out your athlete needs carbohydrates for energy and moderate protein for muscle support. Real food, oatmeal, rice and chicken, a turkey sandwich. Avoid heavy, high fat meals right before activity. They slow digestion and pull resources away from the muscles that need them.

During activity:
For sessions under 60–75 minutes water is enough. Longer sessions or back to back games, simple carbohydrates like fruit or a sports drink help maintain energy. Hydration is non-negotiable. Even mild dehydration measurably reduces performance.

After training or competition:
This window matters more than most people know. Within 30–60 minutes after activity the body is primed to absorb nutrients for recovery. Protein and carbohydrates together, chocolate milk is actually one of the most research backed post-workout options for young athletes. A real meal within two hours finishes the job.

The athletes who perform consistently aren't just training well. They're fueling well. You can't fully separate the two.

08/06/2026

Most coaches can run their athletes.

Sprints, suicides, conditioning drills, that's accessible to just about anyone who has ever played or coached a sport. And there's nothing wrong with it. Getting athletes moving and building conditioning is never a bad thing.

But there's a difference between running athletes and training them.

Structured, progressive training for speed, strength, and power is a specific discipline. It requires understanding how the body adapts, how to load movement progressively without breaking athletes down, how to teach someone not just to move fast but to move right. That knowledge takes years to develop and it's exactly why coaches who are serious about their athletes' development bring in someone who specializes in it.

Here's the thing nobody talks about:

You can run a kid into the ground every single day and they'll get more conditioned. But if you're not teaching them how to use their body, how to produce force efficiently, how to move with purpose and intention, all you're doing is making them better at moving wrong.

If you teach a bad swing a thousand times, the athlete will swing faster. But they'll swing faster wrong.

The same principle applies to athletic development. Reps without intention don't build better athletes. They build more practiced ones. And there's a big difference between the two.

Training with purpose means understanding the why behind every movement. It means progressive loading that builds on itself over time. It means teaching athletes how their body works so they can use it better, not just tiring them out and calling it development.

That's what we do here. That's all we do here.

And that's exactly why it works.

08/05/2026

Let me be straight with you for a second.

The off-season is not a break. It's a decision.

Every day that passes between the last out of this season and the first pitch of the next one is a day your athlete either used or didn't. And those days have a way of showing up, one way or another, when the season rolls back around and the competition lines up across from them.

Nobody is owed playing time. Nobody is owed a spot in the lineup. Nobody is owed an opportunity just because they showed up to practice during the season and did what was expected of them. That is the bare minimum.

Those things are earned. Quietly. In the work that happens when the season is over and nobody is watching and it would be a lot easier to just wait until spring.

Here's what I know after years of coaching and training athletes:

The conversation about playing time, about lineups, about why someone else is getting the opportunity your athlete thinks they deserve, that conversation almost always traces back to the off-season. To the decision that was made when the pressure was off and the choice was entirely theirs.

The athlete who put the work in during the off-season rarely has that conversation. They already know why they're in the lineup. They built it.

This isn't about guilt. It's not about pressure. It's just the truth about how this works.

The off-season is short. Shorter than it feels right now. And the athletes who treat it like an opportunity instead of a vacation are the ones who come back next season and make everyone else wonder what happened.

What's your athlete doing with it?

07/21/2026

Little wake-up call for baseball parents heading into tryouts:

They're watching you too.

Not in some paranoid way, just honestly. Any team with real culture is quietly evaluating the parents as much as the players. Because they know exactly what they're inheriting for the next twelve months.

The kid isn't the only one joining the team. You are too.

So when a parent is following their kid around the field between reps, giving them swing tips, telling them to "step it up," coaching them through the tryout in real time, coaches see that. They notice. And whether they say it out loud or not, they're doing the math: is this a family we want in our dugout for a season?

The best coaches would rather take the slightly less talented kid whose parents sit back, let the kid compete, and trust the process, over the more talented kid whose parents are running the tryout from the sidelines.

I get it. You love your kid. You want them to make the team. You want them to show what they can do. That impulse is coming from the right place. But between innings coaching, sideline instructions, and hovering during evaluations doesn't help your kid make the team. It flags your family as high-maintenance before the coach has even said a word to either of you.

Best thing you can do at a tryout:

Drop them off at the field. Take a seat. Let them compete on their own. Cheer, don't coach. Trust the kid to show what they've got, and trust the coach to see it.

The tryout is your kid's moment.

Let it be theirs.

07/17/2026

Fall ball is starting up and that's a great thing.

More reps on the field. More time in the box. More live at bats, more defensive work, more situations. There is no substitute for that and if your athlete is playing fall ball, keep playing.

But here's something worth thinking about:

Fall ball, like any baseball or softball, gives athletes more reps at the game. What it doesn't teach is how to move better within it.

Getting to a ground ball in time to make the play isn't just about reading the ball. It's about how fast your athlete's first step is. How explosive they are out of their stance. Whether their body is trained to react before their brain catches up.

Tracking down a line drive. Stretching a single into a double.

Throwing with more velocity and less strain on the arm. Hitting with more power from the same swing.

None of that comes from more reps at the game.
That comes from training the body specifically to do those things.
Speed. Strength. Explosiveness. Reactive agility. These aren't baseball skills, they're the physical foundation that every baseball and softball skill sits on top of. When that foundation gets stronger, everything built on it gets better.

This isn't an either/or. Fall ball and performance training aren't competing with each other. They're complementary. The athlete who's getting field reps AND training their body to move better is building something that the athlete only getting field reps simply isn't.

The game gives you the reps.

We give you the body to do more with them.

That's what we're here for.

07/14/2026

Something I've noticed after all these years of training athletes:

The parents who invest in their kid's physical development during the off-season aren't always doing it because they think their kid is going to go pro.

The ones paying close attention to their child's development are doing it because they understand what the process builds, discipline, work ethic, the ability to show up consistently when it's hard.

Those things don't stay on the field.They follow that kid everywhere.

07/10/2026

Some of the best players I've ever seen coached at the youth level are gassed by the middle innings.

Talented as hell. Hit a mile. Throw ropes. Cover ground in the outfield like they've got a second gear nobody else has. And then somewhere around the fourth or fifth inning, or the second period, or the second match, they shrink. The bat gets slower. The reads on defense get soft. The step out of the box loses its jump. Not because they got worse. Because they ran out of gas.

Conditioning is one of the most ignored parts of youth development, and it's costing the most talented kids the most games.

Talent gets you noticed in the first inning. Conditioning is what makes you dangerous in the last one.

Coaches don't just remember the kid who homered in the second. They remember the kid who was still moving in the seventh. The one whose swing looked identical in the ninth as it did in the first. The one who chased down the ball in the gap when everyone else on the field was too gassed to try. The one who won the wrestling match not because they were more skilled, but because the other kid was done in the third period and they weren't.

That's the difference between talent and impact.

And it doesn't happen by accident. It happens because somebody trained the engine that carries the skill. The lungs. The legs. The nervous system's ability to fire the same way in minute forty as it did in minute one.

Skill without conditioning is a stat sheet full of first-inning highlights and late-game disappearances.

If your athlete is talented but keeps fading, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

That gap is fixable.

— Jon · Ryzng Athletes

07/10/2026

Chances are... if you move better, you'll play better. Train accordingly.

12/24/2025