#118 - Why Stronger Isn’t Always Better: Rethinking Performance Training for Young Athletes, Part 1

Welcome to The Factor Podcast, where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school, how to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills, and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real-world challenges of being a healthcare provider, from delivering top-notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective cutting-edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators, and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in. Welcome back to The Factor Podcast, where we bridge the gap between rehabilitation, performance, and long-term athlete development. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle, and today we're kicking off a brand new 2-part series with returning guest instructor, Matthew McKay. If you joined us for Matthew's previous conversation on durability over dominance, you already know this isn't about chasing max lifts, highlight reels, or short-term wins. Today's conversation is about something far more important: building athletes who can stay healthy, consistent, and competitive over the long haul. In this series, Matthew takes us deeper into what durability actually looks like in real-world settings, especially when you're working with middle school and high school athletes where habits, movement patterns, and injury risk are often set long before college or professional play is even on the table. In part 1, we'll focus on the foundation: why strength should be treated as a skill before it's treated as a number, how movement patterns communicate readiness, compensation, and risk long before pain shows up, and why traditional approaches to youth training often reward dominance while quietly sacrificing durability. This conversation challenges some deeply ingrained assumptions in sports performance, and it gives clinicians, coaches, and healthcare providers a clearer framework for developing athletes who don't just perform well today, but can still perform years down the road. Let's cue the intro music and dive in. Hi guys. Before we dive into today's episode, I wanna take a quick moment to let you know about something we're doing right now at Factor. See, every year December is our absolute favorite month. Because we run something called the Factor 12 Days of Christmas. It's not a sale, it's not a countdown of random discounts, and it's definitely not about buying anything and everything.

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Good afternoon, everyone. I am really, really, really, really excited about this one. This is My wheelhouse, I spent like a 13 years in strength and conditioning for specifically for high school athletes as well as professional athletes as well. Middle school down to peewee all the way up to professional ball. Two years I spent working with military staff out in Fort Bliss installation at 1501 or 1501st Company Combat Aviation Brigade. So again, just a period of experience. This is not some type of uh. Flex or anything. I just want to share my bandwidth of experience with you all so that you all can just kind of connect with me if you want to in different ways beyond this platform today, or I can be a resource to anyone that you know who is trying to get further into strength and conditioning. I know last time we talked about different ways to get into more the collegiate or professional sectors and internships and things like that, so we can continue to discuss those as well. So you You will see me look down here and there. I want to say this to start. It is not a lack of preparation. I geared up and ready to go, but I have a specific set of notes for this presentation that will be made readily available to you afterwards. So as you see me look down, that is just me making sure that I don't forget to give you anything. I've been working on this one for a while and I want to make sure I cover all the material. So again, it is not ill preparation, but I do not want to forget any of the small details I want you to have because these are things that I have learned through practice and experience. These are things that I have learned from Being at the high schools and middle schools that have— you got 12 sport teams and they have one small weight room with 2 racks and about 6 different plates. And when I say plates, I mean 6 different 45-pound plates and about maybe 20, maybe 30 10-pound plates. And you have to make that stretch across an entire team. Also been in spaces where you have more weights than you will ever use in your life. So I've been all around the world. Also been working with teams on the road where all you have are bands, bands and Maybe a couple of chains and a couple of different theraballs and things you use to try to program with that. So I've been very blessed now, I can say. But in the moment, I felt like almost a punishment in a way. But on the backside of it, going down the mountain is always easier than going up. So I do appreciate it, and I recognize that it was a blessing going for my long-term success. So we are going to jump into it now. I had the first presentation with you all, so I got all the Jitters and nerves out. So I feel like now we'll be able to just to talk and have a conversation with you all. So this is part 2. Part 1, we spent time looking at just more of the theory behind how to create a successful plan for an athlete beyond our care. And it was specifically geared to high school, middle school strength and conditioning coaches with the purpose being that a lot of the times from my experience in collegiate strength and conditioning, we get a lot of athletes who come in and I'll tell you what, bilaterally they can squat the house. And I mean, I've seen early, what we call early admitted students. So they'll do the AP classes in high school and they'll come to college at 17 because they graduated a year early. And I've seen 17-year-olds, I can name them. Zico from Jamaica, 17-year-old. I'll share this quick story. The first time I met Zico, I was at Clemson and he had about 405, 415 on the bar. And I said, hey, this is your working set. He said, no, this is the warmup. I said, no, this is your working set, it looks like. And he said, that's right, you're the new guy. Step back for me. And I stepped back out of the rack. I was preparing to spot him. And he took 4, I think it was 415 for a ride for like 12. And I said, ah, okay. And you're 17. So you get them early. But all that to say this, we start doing a little bit of unilateral work. And the body weight had Zico in a space where he was— Struggling, shaking immensely to do it. And so kind of in that moment, the lights start kicking on and, well, wait, wait a minute now. We can grossly move all of this weight and unilaterally, which my mentor and professor, Dr. Riddle, has taught me a lot about just as functional strength over gross strength, right? They can have a great relationship. So all that to say, I started to look at how many times we get athletes and they're incredibly grossly strong, but a lot of the injuries that we see typically come from Weak unilateral functional movement patterns. So, and that's just giving context to what the series was built around. So now we are in phase 2, and our goal is still the same as it was in phase 1, to build durable athletes for long term, especially again in that middle school, high school vein, because we are building them so that when they go to college or professional ball, whatever they decide to do, they are able to fully enjoy it. for whatever their experience is supposed to be. We don't control that, right? So we want to make sure that we get in a space that we can contribute to their long-term development. So this is something that I'm really passionate about. So let's get into it. Again, it's just a little bit of my collegiate experience, and I put those up there versus the high schools. I think I had the high schools last time, so I'm just kind of showing that I've been at these levels. Again, it's not for any status or anything like that, because you can line up 100 other coaches that have been further than I have and that have Been coaching as long as I've been alive at 35 years old. I can name 4 or 5 right now who have been in strength and conditioning for 40-plus years. So again, this is to show the transition, how we're trying to prepare them for these spaces. Okay, so now we'll get into it as far as our material for today. So primarily, I just want to cover the exploration of movement as a communication tool. Okay, not just a checkbox, but an actual communication tool. So we'll also look at discussing strategies to build developmental strength. We're going to examine the biomechanical advantages of unilateral training. And it's not to say that we're going to stop bilateral training at all, because we need both. But I think a lot of times at the earlier levels, we get so focused on getting them to the next level that we forget that, well, once they get there, they need They're, they're tools. I like to say it like a book bag. If I can give my niece Zoe a book bag, great, so she can go to school. But if the book bag is empty, did I do her any real justice? No. I need to make sure I'm packing the tools in that book bag so that when she gets to school, yes, you've made it to school and you have the tools for you to be successful there. Don't just give them a bag, fill the bag up. And again, we'll talk a little bit about effort-based stagnation versus complacency in our performance. So the first thing I want to talk about today will be this concept that communication and movement— so movement is literally just a communication channel that just tells me what their physiological readiness is. That's all it is. Again, movement, or a warm-up specifically, is just a communication tool to tell me about their physiological readiness. All right. And so 3 things I want us to take away. And again, you'll have all the notes that I'm saying readily available to you all. I didn't want to cram the slide full of notes. Okay. But the 3 things I want you to take away: look, listen, and learn. So we talk about look. I want us to be in a space where we are looking for patterns and we'll get to that at the end. But the biggest thing is athletes speak to you Way before they open their mouth. Athletes tell you everything you need to know way before they open their mouth. So in that space, we have to understand that the warm-up will reveal what the main lift will look like. Again, the warm-up will reveal what it looks like because you warm up— when you warm up how you train, you train how you warm up, and you perform how you train. So it's all one interconnected circle here. So the biggest thing is when we're looking, what are we looking for? So look for posture and alignment. And this is while the warm-up is taking place, while you're calling out your shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge, while you're calling out your reverse lunge, while you're working on your just high knee tucks, high knee pulls, whatever the movement pattern is. You are— I have successfully, and I would encourage you to do the same thing. You're going to be looking at their posture and alignment. The biggest thing for me is look at their momentum tempo. If everyone is sluggish and slow in that space, at that point, What I have found very successful is to on the spot, in the fly, or on the fly in the spot, go ahead and start to regress or change those movement patterns that we have for today, or decrease the intensity that I have on the paper. The paper is just a guide of where we theoretically should be. If we have 75% on that paper for everyone today, and their movement tempo is extremely slow and everyone's moving sluggish, that needs to change immediately. You don't have to stop the warmup. You need to make those quick mental notes on how to do that because again, we are developing these student athletes to go and perform later on. So also things to look at, look at their joint guarding or muscle guarding. All right. And so in that space, that transitions us to the next piece, which is listen, because the warmup tells you everything the athlete is trying to hide. Right. And so this is not me in any way insinuating that your athletes that you're serving are not honest people. I am not attacking their character at all. What I am saying is— The warm-up is where you'll find that the honest athletes are the most physiologically honest. And what do I mean by that? We're going to be listening to things like their breathing patterns. So do they have labored breathing in the morning? Are they holding their breath to complete certain movements? If we're working on an RDL and reach movement, are they holding their breath and doing that? And we can go down the rabbit hole about what that could mean for diaphragmatic breathing, but this presentation is not for that. Other things to listen for, listen for self-talk. Are they encouraging themselves? Are they hyping themselves up? Are they being encouraging to their teammates? Also listen for the other things that they will say about themselves, like, man, I feel tight today, or I don't feel as explosive. And this is while the warm-up is going on. So again, this is a communication tool. Movement is the physiological readiness that we'll assess before we start to lift weights. Also, when you're using the barbell warm-up pattern, listen to the barbell. If the barbell is racking back into the, the J-hooks extremely hard and extremely fast, one thing that tells me is that it is an uncoordinated movement or the weight is too much. Again, if you're squatting heavy, 400+ pounds, even then it'll be more of a quick thud versus a lot of, for lack of better terms, clinging around. So in that space, short-term loud bar is typically going to be poor bracing. Controlled bar is typically a clean, crisp bar. And so to move away from this, the biggest takeaway is that elite strength coaches identify patterns, not just observe movements. So when we get to program strategies, I want to look at a couple of things. And I'm not going to read every bullet point, but I do want to hit the highlights of what we're doing because I want to make sure I serve you all well. And this time and cover all the information that we have. So this one I've had some debate on, but I do feel strongly about it and I want to explain it. So number one, strength is a skill before it's a quality. So I want to make sure I address that. I am not in any way saying that you can't meet an athlete, 14-year-old high school student that isn't already strong. I'm not saying that. I have seen high school athletes who went on to play ball at LSU and Oklahoma and everywhere else. I mean, squat 315 for 6 reps, and they've been lifting weights for a year and a half, right? They're genetically gifted. So I am not saying that. What I am saying is the quality of that 315 squat I watched them do wasn't what it should be, right, to move that much weight. So what I am saying is about the strength and quality is this: an athlete needs movement literacy before they need load. So am I saying that if you have a genetically gifted athlete that they should only do body weight for 3 and a half years because it's their first time lifting? Absolutely not. What I am saying is, again, strength is a skill. It is a developed skill that we sometimes come into the weight room with and sometimes we don't, but it is a developed skill. Okay, the biggest takeaway from that piece is you can't develop strength on top of dysfunction. I see a lot of people bench press at a very young age and they're bench pressing to lift as much weight as they can. Right. And in that space when they're bench pressing, you got the hips slinging up to the ceiling or you may have the extreme arch in the thoracic cavity. And that's not a good recipe for success for that athlete long term. They're going to hurt themselves. So again, you cannot develop strength on top of dysfunction. So the next piece, strength progression must match training age. Getting back into this, we're going to look at this idea, this concept that we must match our training age. So you'll see sometimes like really, really good athletes that are young and they come in again. I want to harp on our genetically gifted population, not to dismiss those who are developing, but a lot of times we see those outliers and we program just for them because we know that if I train such and such, I'll make up a name, Marvin Johnson. And I can put my name on the back of his and I train them in that space. Well, yeah, you forgot about the other 150 athletes you're serving. So as far as that goes, if this is their first year of training, do not be afraid to regress the movements. Do not be afraid to make sure that although you are strong, I want to make sure you're extremely functional in your strength. Okay. And the last piece is true strength comes from owning submaximal loads. And what I mean by that is the key takeaway from that. If you can't own the 70%, then we should not be touching the 90%. So if you cannot completely own a 250-pound squat through your reps, correct technique, correct breathing patterns, no pain, no dysfunction in your squat, it doesn't matter if you can squat 295. It doesn't matter. Okay. I'm not saying we can't have a max day because we need those numbers down the road for annual programming or linear. Triphasic programming. What I am saying is we cannot own the 70%, then we have no business putting them under load at 90%. That is our job. And I use that 90% for a reason.

Our—

my first job, we were in the weight room and our staff wasn't strength and conditioning certified. I was the only one. And I walk in and go, I was going to be a defensive line coach. And I seen the current coach had the young man squatting 4 by 8 at 90%. If you heard the story before, I apologize, but I want to respect the viewers that may not have. 4 by 8 at 90%. And I made the comment, Coach, this is a pretty tough workout. I'm not sure if 4 by 8 at 90% is the goal. And he looked at me and said, aren't you certified in this? I said, yes, sir. I'm just personal training. Aren't you working with Coach Scott Austin, strength and conditioning at Jacksonville State? I said, yes, sir. That's where I go to school. That's my major. And he turned around and gave me a huge manila folder on my chest and said, it's yours. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I asked for. But it didn't matter. It's what was required for the job. So that's why I always use that 90%. When we started to regress the weight, the 70% looked worse than the 90%. And that's not a knock on the athletes. It's just what they were being told to do. So if you can't own 70, we shouldn't be touching 90% at all. So the next piece, easy framework that we can utilize to get this done. All right. So 4 Ps. Patterns, positions, progressions, and performance. So when you're working with your athletes and we're developing strength, okay, look at the patterns. And when I say patterns, I'm specifically talking about teach the movement. I don't care if we have to go back to just using body weight or empty barbells, empty trap bars or hex bars, depending on where you're at. Whatever it might be, teach the pattern and cue it, slow it down. I am big on tempo work in the beginning. Okay, anybody can do anything off of adrenaline or excitement. All right, but tempo tells me that we are developing tensile strength to be able to support ourselves under these developing loads. Okay. One coaching cue I love to use in those spaces, and you can use this as a practitioner with your patients. I'm not telling you doctors what to do. I'm just sharing a coaching cue that has worked for me and worked very well, which is make it clean. Okay, make it clean. And so in their mind, it triggers what is clean to them. And so for me, if I can see what they think is clean, it helps me to clean up what needs to be cleaned. Not a wordplay, just literally, if they think that clean for them is slow, but I see like a lot of collapsing of the knee, well, I can address that there. So if I'm just emphasizing bigger, stronger, faster, then I'm going in the wrong direction too fast. So again, make it clean. All right. For your patterns.

All right.

The next piece is positions. Once the pattern is stable or clean, at that point, can they maintain bracing? Can they maintain— can they do it with joint slack, right? So can they control eccentrics in their movement? Now we've cleaned the movement pattern up, right? If it's a front squat, we've cleaned the pattern up. Now can we still maintain that clean effect through an eccentric pattern, an eccentric loading pattern going up and down or whatever it is? Okay. So the next piece I want to talk about is RP progression. So with our progression, once the pattern is stable and we've moved on, so progression, so rep quality. Again, that goes back to something you hear me say all the time. I don't care how much you lift. I care how you lift. Because if we take care of the how, the how much is inevitable, right? It's almost like fuel in a car. If you put the right gas in your vehicle, You can go as far as that car will go. So if your car gives you 400 miles to empty or 480 with the right fuel, it's going to go. If I go put water in that gas tank just because it's going to make the car take off faster or whatever this theory might be, we're not going far, okay? It's going to be a really fast takeoff, and eventually that motor is going to sputter because it's got bad gas or water in that gas, and it's not going to last long. So again, as we progress, we want to look at rep. Quality bar speed, right? If we have 225 on a bar and someone is able to press it, but it's significantly slower than it is at 215, what? Go down 10 pounds. Okay, so these are just simple things we can do about the progression of this of this clean pattern that we've already mastered. Okay, and the last piece is performance. So the biggest thing is that true performance, and I do mean true performance, is. The outcome is not the method. Okay. And I know that may sound like an oxymoron because we're talking about performing reps well. When I think about performance, I'm thinking about on field, right? On the court, whatever the case may be. Tennis court, basketball court, softball field, baseball field, hockey rink, track, whatever their sport is. That is the performance piece. I am— that's the outcome that we want, not the method. So if our method is, well, they do this squat pattern horrible, But they play well. Again, I am not saying go change everything about them, but if we are putting them in a place where their patterns are poor, they may not get hurt with you with the first season in college where there's the ACL. And I promise you, if you track it back to what they were doing, if you could all the way back to high school and middle school strength and conditioning, there's a huge correlation that we will find, which would be no one took care of the movement pattern. Since Zico was strong, As a 12-year-old, let him lift. Since he was strong as a 14-year-old, let him lift. Again, I'm not taking the ability to lift away. I just want to focus on how can we clean that pattern up. So with your genetic outliers, I had a student who I met at 12 that was bench pressing 225 pounds at 12. A genetic monster, right? Well, they're not going to lose the strength. They got it already. And this was the first year this kid had ever worked out And that's honest to God. So if they're that strong coming in, I never have to worry about them losing strength if I do my part and take care of their patterns, their progressions, and their positions, and it all transitions to their performance.

That wraps up part 1 of our conversation with Matthew McKay. If this episode challenged some assumptions you've held about youth performance training, that was intentional. Stronger isn't always better, especially when we're talking about developing athletes whose bodies and movement patterns are still evolving. In part 2, we'll take this conversation from theory to application. Matthew will walk us through practical strategies, including how unilateral training can expose asymmetries, how movement can be used as a diagnostic tool, And how to support consistency and resilience without pushing athletes towards burnout. Make sure you're subscribed to The Factor Podcast. Part 2 drops in 2 weeks. You won't wanna miss it. Be sure to check out today's show notes for some incredible offers, discounts, and freebies during our 12 Days of Christmas event going on now through the end of December. And if you found this episode valuable, we would really appreciate you sharing it with a colleague, coach, Or even a parent you know that works with young athletes. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R-store.com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course Scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.