#119 - Why Stronger Isn’t Always Better: Rethinking Performance Training for Young Athletes, Part 2

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 and happy New Year. It feels really good to be back behind the microphone with you. Our entire team took a little time off over the holidays to reset, reflect, and plan. And I'll just say that 2026 is shaping up to be a huge year for Factor and for our podcast network. We can't wait to tell you about all the exciting things we have in store. More conversations, more depth, and more opportunities to bring you practical, forward-thinking education that actually moves the needle. In your practices and with your patients. If you're new here, I'm your host, Jessica Riddle, and this podcast is where we challenge outdated thinking and explore smarter, more sustainable approaches to rehab, performance, and overall patient care. Today, we're kicking off a new 2-part conversation with Matthew McKay, a strength and conditioning coach with over a decade of experience working across high school, collegiate, professional, and military settings, and he also happens to be a chiropractic student at Texas Chiropractic College. So he really brings a unique blend of performance coaching and clinical perspective to this conversation. In part 1, we challenged the idea that stronger is always better when it comes to training. Today in part 2, Matthew will walk us through the utilization of movement quality, unilateral training, and thoughtful programming To help young athletes stay healthy, consistent, and in the game across seasons, not just perform well in the short term. And if this topic resonates with you, I encourage you to check out our show notes for a few additional resources to extra trainings, certification programs, and even an update on some live in-person hands-on courses we have planned for the year ahead. You'll find that link again in the show notes. So be sure to stick around after the show and check those out. All right, let's jump into part 2 with Matthew McKay.

For our next slide, I kind of want to talk about just training age and what this could look like in these spaces. So if you have a first-year student who is getting ready to live with you, and what I mean by first-year training age is you're consistently working out. The goal should be movement fluency. Me personally, and we may have different opinions, and that is fine. I love to learn. I love to get you all's feedback as well. My goal is not to make them increase their squat by 50, 60 pounds by the end of their first year. I want to make sure their movement fluency is where it needs to be. So what a progression could look like. I know our last presentation we talked about having a space where we could show a couple of examples. I would never do you the disservice of giving you a cookie-cutter program. Just have your basketball players do this and they'll be perfect for strength. I haven't seen your athletes. I don't know if they ever had a movement screen done, and if they did, what was it? Was it an FMS? Was it an SFMA? I'm not sure. So I think it'd be doing you a disservice to give you a cookie-cutter program to go and put into your space, and now you wind up hurting your athletes. And that's not fair to them, their parents, you, or their future. So what I will show you is a couple of examples. So when When we're looking at the ability to go through this, so goblet squats, you progress that to a double kettlebell squat, and then you go that into a front squat. So goblet squat, the kettlebell, and then you progress to the kettlebells in a front squat position, and then you progress that to a barbell position up front. If you're doing a trap bar deadlift, you start there. All right. A lot of times we want to teach everything to do in the beginning. We're going to teach how to deadlift. Day 1 to a first-year athlete that's just trying basketball for the first time, and we destroy their back. So being in a chiropractic program, I've learned a lot. Things that we wind up dealing with later on in life come from things that we didn't do properly in the weight room earlier. So again, progression, progression, progression. Push-up progressions, push-up regressions into the barbell bench. So you can use body weight, you can use eccentrics. You can use bands across the back. So just different ways to make sure we're using what we talked about last in that clean movement progression. My biggest successful tool I've used to help me out has been slow eccentrics, especially for pull-ups. I'm not worried about you swinging back and forth and doing the pull-ups. Just again, let's go to a hang. And if we can't pull up, let's pull ourselves up and just go to a slow eccentric letdown. Because again, these are young athletes that we're training. We're not having to win a championship every year. Okay, that would be great. As someone who has done that, I enjoy it. But at the same time, it is not about me at this point. It's about serving these young people that I'm blessed to be able to serve. So now you may have someone who is second, third year training. So they may be coming into high school and they've already played sports, 6th, 7th, 8th grade and all those things. So again, the goal here should be progressional strength. Again, it shouldn't change. So Again, using RPE scales, introduce controlled intensity. So now we can start to focus on adding a little more weight to what they're doing. Light velocity-based exposure. So maybe some plyo jumps, but we're certainly not trying to have them jumping around with kettlebells and whatnot, but light bodyweight plyo jumps, maybe some band-resistant jumps. And again, the focus here is controlled reps. Okay, we do not want any sloppy reps. So being conscious of time. The last thing is you're dealing with some of these athletes that you get. Maybe you go to a new institution and you're picking up some of these athletes that are juniors and seniors and they're, they're geared for it. They are geared for it. They're ready to go. Great. Well, at that point now we're focusing on performance readiness. So heavier exposures, microdosing intensity, sport-integrated progression. So things that are specific to their sport, not what we see on Instagram. And I'm not saying that everything on there is bad. What I am saying is I hope that we continue to trust valid resources that we use. And again, at that point, we're focusing on quality heavy reps, not ego reps. Quality heavier reps at that space. Because again, at this point, they're trained for it. They're geared for it. But I'm not doing the ego rep. I don't want to see your nose bleeding when you're squatting and all those things. I couldn't care less about the ego. I want to make sure that you're lifting correctly. So getting further into unilateral training, we often hear the phrase that speed is king. So with speed being king, it has to come from somewhere. So in that space, now I'm thinking about the one thing that makes speed happen and it's unilateral movement. No one can run with their feet tied together. Anyone that would argue that or speed isn't necessarily unilateral, well, I, in my opinion, I think a lot of us have either tried or maybe seen at maybe a family function or a carnival or something like that where you do like a sack hop where you put the sack on and you race other person. Well, that's the only way you're moving your feet non-unilaterally. That's not grammatically correct before this presentation. That's the only way you're doing that in a non-unilateral pattern at the same time. Running is a unilateral pattern. So for me, I have seen a lot of times unilateral. Transitions into speed, and speed is king. So I believe half of the truth is a whole lie. So we can't just rely on the back half, which is speed is king, because speed has to develop from somewhere. So when I think about biomechanical advantages, and again, these are not the only four. I promise they're not. These are just the four I kind of wanted to touch on. So unilateral training improves pelvic stability and hip control. The biggest takeaway from that is if you cannot stabilize the pelvis, you cannot transfer. Force. Without our pelvis area, we don't connect. We have feet, we have shins. We can get into the nitty-gritty. We did the tibia, the fibula, and all— we can get all those things. But if you don't have a pelvis, then you don't connect. So if I'm transferring force from the ground up, it has to go through the pelvis and up the body. All right. Even if you're swinging a baseball bat, you're using your hips. If you're swinging a golf club, you're using your hips. If you're running, you're using your hips, your pelvis area. If you are a high jumper, you're using your hips. Long jumper, you can't do anything without them in this space. So if you don't have a stable pelvis, you can't transfer force properly. So unilateral training exposes and improves hip asymmetries. For me, the biggest takeaway is that is let's understand what's the mask and what it magnifies. Bilateral lifts mask weakness. And unilateral lifts magnify weakness. Okay, what I mean by that is I too was someone who I would say is grossly strong, and for the longest I relied on that gross strength. As I started to compete MMA, I realized, oh man, initially in the beginning I was younger and I was stronger than like a lot of kids, but when I got into the space to start competing, no, no, when you have one leg that is being held on to, and now you only have the other one to use, and you realize, I am weak, right? So again, but grossly, I was extremely strong. So we will see this with a lot of our athletes. So again, use unilateral lifting progressions not to belittle them, not to break them down, but to identify what is weak. Is it their adductors? Is it their external rotators? Is it the glutes? And most of the time, a lot of our issues are the glutes. We have weak glutes, so we have to use other muscles to Use different compensatory patterns just to complete lifts. Something Dr. Riddle has done an amazing job in instilling in me and teaching me, Dr. Teter as well. So if I'm only using gross movements in a weight room, I truly in my mind don't know what's weak. Okay, if I'm going to be completely honest, I'm guessing at that point, or I'm assuming since this number is high, then everything else will be high too. And I think that's not fair to the athlete. They're relying on us to do our job, and our job as a strength and conditioning specialist. A doctor, clinician, whatever your background and role is, it's our job to identify those things because they're coming to see you either because they don't know how to do it or they expect it to be done at a higher level than they already know how to do. So the next piece is unilateral movement builds true multiplanar strength. And here's why. When you get into a unilateral movement pattern, you have to recruit smaller muscles for stabilization. So one example would be intrinsics of the foot. Most of us squat and a lot of people squat. have squat issues, and that could be due to decreased or lack of dorsiflexion or a lot of different things that we can get into the rabbit hole about. But just for time in this presentation, you go and start to do a single leg squat and you start to see the person's foot, the foot's, the toes are moving a whole lot, the foot's shifting back and forth because they're using those smaller stabilizing muscles because it's a unilateral movement pattern. One last thing, lower axial Loading can lead to a higher movement quality. So if I'm just putting them on under a barbell into just, again, a bilateral squat for a heavy rep or for them to push for one more kind of deal, which you have those days in the weight room and you need those now and every now and then. But if that's all I'm doing, I don't have a lot of movement quality because I'm just relying on this bilateral movement. But on the field, when they go to take off and sprint, they're going to use one leg at a time. Okay, even into a long jump, there's a sprint before the long jump, right? A high jump, whatever the case may be, a vertical jump, non-counter movement jump. That'd be the only time that you're going to just go into a bilateral movement pattern for jumping is if you're just doing a straight up vertical jump. So the loading pattern for me, I don't care how much you lift, I care how you lift. And I've said that before, and I know that it works and it's truly king. So when I think about planes of movement, I think about the frontal plane instability. So when we look at lateral shifting, lateral deceleration, lateral shuffling, that is where you'll see a unilateral pattern movement or unilateral strength strategy that's going to help stabilization in that plane. So when I think about power in the sagittal plane, for me, sagittal plane power, we're looking at sprinting and posture control. Okay. Because again, we're going to sprint in the sagittal plane. And so when I think about The last piece of it, so for rotational control or creating power in a rotational movement. So again, quarterbacks, pitchers, golfers, anything in that space, even water polo, when they come out the water and they turn and throw a ball, some of the, some of the same movements, some, as a quarterback or a pitcher or an outfielder throwing the ball back to the shortstop. So we have to have control in that transverse plane. So Unilateral training allows us the opportunity to develop all 3 a little bit at a time at once, because you're going to have to tap into those planes because we're not going to do everything statically. So once you start to do a single leg squat, again, you're going to get a little bit off balance and you're challenging those again, stabilizing muscles to stabilize you so your agonist at the time can perform its responsibility. So, Matt, you've done a lot of talking about all these different things. So When are we going to talk about application? Right. I'm with you. I understand. So here we are. So I want to give you all a couple of things before we close out. We have 20 minutes, so I'm going to make sure I finish this in time, but not rush through it either. So our applied STIR framework. All right. So you can think about a couple of things with STIR. So STIR is going to create durable athletes by building strategy before strength, strategy and stability before strength. Okay. All right. And what I mean by strategy and stability is that as we're going through these slower movement Movement progressions for the athletes. And we are starting to stabilize. We're seeing the stabilization. What they're doing is creating the strategy in their head. Okay, for me to do this, I need to keep my posture up like Coach said, or like Doc said. I need to make sure if I'm doing a lateral lunge, I need to make sure that my hips are stacked under me. So all these things, they're creating the strategy based on what we're doing and creating stability in there. So STIR. STIR is also going to teach athletes to produce force efficiently across all 3 planes of motion. Okay, we just talked about that a second ago. And the last thing, so STIR is going to build long-term performance by eliminating asymmetries that lead to injury and inconsistency. So what do we mean by STIR? So the S, we're going to talk about stabilization. So here it's okay to start introducing the single leg patterns. Okay, single leg lifting patterns. So isometrics, step downs, split stance holds. Okay, and these are just 3 options. These are not the only options. This is just a An acronym that you all can start to use and plug and play what works for your athletes. That's why I said earlier, I'm not going to give you a cookie-cutter deal. But if you do want to spend time with me outside of here, I will gladly— as I'm finishing up Tri 7, I will gladly spend time with you and look at what you have, look at what you presented, look at what you— what your goals are for your athletes and help you create a program block that would serve them well. So again, just take the components of this. That's the first piece of it being the stabilization. Our next piece is going to be training. So at this point, we want to start to develop strength, okay? Because now we know that we can move the patterns how we need to because they've been stabilized, okay? So now we want to look at things like split squats, reverse lunges, single-leg RDLs, because again, we, we're moving in a way where we know that they've created the strategy that enables them to be stable in these positions. So now let's train them in these unilateral movements to make them stronger. So the next piece is integration. So in this integration model, we want to start to blend unilateral strength with the movement. So multidirectional lunges again. All right. So we can use body weight, lateral step-ups. We can use resisted bounds in that. Hook your bands to a rack. You can hook them to a fence outside if you're outside getting ready for a warm-up. Whatever the case may be, we have the space and ability to create that. But your I is going to be integrate. So integrate the stability. Integrate the strength that we've now acquired through our programming into movement patterns on the go in the sense of what is going to mimic their sport. And then react. When we look at react, now we want to start to look at things such as layered speed and reactive elements, because at this point of our STIR, we've done it all. We've stabilized, we've got strength. Now we've added some integration of movement patterns. With everything we've just picked up as far as our strength and progression. So now let's layer it. So speed, back to the same phrase, speed is king. All right. But we cannot forget that every king has to have a crown. So we have to use lateral development as well as our bilateral development to create the crown. Bilateral, unilateral together creates the whole crown. All right. So start thinking about things like single leg hops, lateral bounds. The top one is one of my favorite. Deceleration drills. If you like to know how that goes, I can certainly spend time with you outside of here. Videos, whatever you need to look at that. The CHPP has a clinical human performance practitioner model, has a great model that we— you all can utilize as well to show you different methods of speed and deceleration. So again, deceleration is king. If you have all that power going in one direction, you cannot. And also make sure your larger, heavier athletes Focus on deceleration. The simplest way I can convey it that I conveyed it to athletes I was blessed to serve is big trucks need big brakes. It's that simple. You cannot put Honda Accord brakes on an 18-wheeler. It's going to go bad every time, all the time. Okay. All right. And so just again, layer these movements now that we're into our reaction phase. So scenario 1, this is my cousin Samaria Diaz. She pitched at New Mexico State and then wound up finishing there and Transferring over to pitch at Oregon. So this is hers. We did some work with Samaria. So she had a lot, just some hip coordination issues, just weak hip coordination in this space. And this is just translating to what you all may see in your athletes. So the signs, a lot of knee valgus, hip drop, and excessive rotation. And this was not me diagnosing her because I am not a licensed doctor. This is not me doing anything. This is me working with her just on how to improve some strength and conditioning phases that she was needing to touch on. All right. Things I utilize to help out with that. So a corrective unilateral sequence, this is not the only way to do it. This is just me sharing what I have done that was successful. So step downs. All right. The set and scheme, as Dr. Riddle has taught me a lot about, it depends. It depends on the athlete. And so many times we want to know all the time, how many should I do? How much should the weight be? It depends on the athlete. So just take this as a progression that I use that. was very successful. So step-downs, split squat isometrics, okay, single-leg RDL progression, and lateral lunge with control. So sometimes that was just body weight or holding a plate to our chest and doing that same work. And I did this same work, this same framework with other athletes as well. So here we have Josh Robinson, somebody who's near and dear to me. He played at Mississippi State, right, I think one year with Dak Prescott. Then he went ahead and went to the league, played for the Colts, and Josh is a powerhouse straight out of Louisiana, can lift a house, but just kind of force production was asymmetrical. So his right foot wasn't as quick as the left, believe it or not, but he was a phenomenal athlete. He still is. So we kind of seen symptoms like the right foot would kind of slap versus just tap in our ladder drills. The right foot had a lag in comparison to the left. Well, now again, this is a Division 1 athlete and professional athlete, so he's obviously different from a lot of people, but looking at— What his asymmetries were, that was that. So one leg ladder, the one leg loads deeper. So when we do like certain explosive drills or use certain drills for the ladder, when he would land, it would take him longer to get off one leg than the other leg. Okay. And so just uneven or unilateral jump height was uneven in that space where if he jumped— what I mean by that, if he jumped off the left leg, it was significantly higher than the right leg. So again, just symptoms you may see with your athletes too. And if you see it, use— it's our job to use our knowledge to change what they're doing. We don't have to give them an 18-page dissertation about why we're changing what they're doing. We just make the changes, help them understand why we are in a brief note, and then spend more time coaching the change versus trying to again give them an 18-page dissertation. Okay. And so for training, so rearfoot elevated split squats, you can use that for training with people who have Asymmetrical force production. So lateral step-ups, again, single-leg pogo jumps, because that is definitely going to take care of anything that is causing that ailment, right? So if we're having that and we start to see pain, as strength and conditioning coaches, we don't treat pain. We can't treat it. So at that point, you would need to refer them to the chiropractor, the athletic trainer, the team doctor, whoever that would be in that space. And if you're at a high school and they don't have A staff such as that, then you go ahead and let the parents know they're having what this issue they need to go get looked at. Okay, it is not our job to treat pain. Please, please, please, please, please do not do that. It is our job to work in a team with the athletic trainers and with the occupational therapists, physical therapists, whoever they have on staff to strengthen these areas that are weak and stretch what's tight. But again, we do not do that. And the last thing is. Split stance sled pushes. I can post a video about what those look like. So again, this is just 2 scenarios, and you'll have access to this presentation, Scenario 1 and Scenario 2, to look at what these progressions look like. Okay, but again, that's just going back to our STIR method. So I want to finish in 50 minutes to leave time for us to answer questions if any come up. Everything I said in this you can take to the bank. You can take this to the bank, and durability isn't an accident. It's an intentional, purpose-driven choice. If you want to build durable athletes, it doesn't happen on accident. It doesn't happen just because they're genetically gifted. You have to make the choice as their strength and conditioning specialist, as their clinical human performance practitioner, as their chiropractor, occupational therapist, whatever your discipline is. Am I making this person durable? Even if it's not for just athletics, Okay, if it's— I'm dealing with the 75-year-old woman who really wants to live till 80 and she doesn't want to stop her once-a-week Zumba workout, but she's in pain, or— well, we refer her. And once we get them back, once we figure out what's going on, and now it's our job to go ahead and step in and fix those things that were weak, right? So again, it's not just for athletes, even though this is an athlete-driven presentation. We want to make sure that we are just remembering that their durability, since we signed up for the position and the job, it's on us. It's very doable, very possible, but we have to make the choice as the people in the driver's seats to be intentional and purpose-driven in our choices that we make for them. So thank you so much for your time today. Yeah, sorry if I went a little bit fast. I apologize, but I did want to make sure I had time in the end to answer any questions you all may have. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Matthew. We appreciate you being here today, and it's been a great presentation. Everyone, please be sure to Go ahead and utilize either the chat feature there or the Q&A segment to input any questions. I have had a few questions that have come in so far.

Yay!

So I want to be sure to go ahead and, and get those up and asked here. So again, if you have any other ones, please be sure to put those here in the chat. I'm also going to be sharing a link to the CE form. So if you would like to receive CE credit, I'm putting that in right now. We will need you to fill out this form in order to do so. And then once we can verify that you were here for the full time, we'll certainly be sending those out via email as well by tomorrow. So a few different questions or thoughts that we had here. So we had talked a little bit about those athletes that might be in a place where they've been going really hard, but they need to dial back and focus more on movement quality and durability. How do you start having that conversation conversation with those athletes, especially when you have that individual that's incredibly driven, they're used to performing at a high level and just pushing themselves to the limit. What does that conversation look like?

Absolutely. So the first thing I do in that space is have a sit-down with that athlete and ask them, what are your long-term goals? And write them down on paper. And when they write them down on paper, I'm a maybe old-school person in this. When you write stuff down on paper, it helps you figure out if this thing can really happen or not. So if they tell me that, hey man, I really want to be a collegiate quarterback, I don't care if it's D1, D2, D3, or NAIA, or if it's I want to play Division 1, Power 5, or I guess now Power 4 ball, let's sit down and let's talk about it. So write the goal down. You want to go play at these schools, okay? So say you want to go play at the time when I was at Clemson behind Trevor Lawrence. So you want to go compete for his job and your shoulder's always hurting. You have a chance to do it? Probably not. You want to go play running back at Georgia, right? That's going to be tough if you're constantly having these knee issues. And if I'm telling you and teaching you that the knee issues are coming from us loading too much or us needing to have a deload or regression, you wrote down on paper what you desire. Because my only desire from you is to See you do well in life. Strength coaching you is a byproduct of our relationship. My goal is to see you be well in 20, 30 years when you're 48 and going to, to the boat, when you're 50 and going to hang out with your kids or grandkids. Can you still do those things? That's what I care about. But when they write it down on paper, that's our job too. In some roles, if you do have kids, be the parent. Or if you don't, be the adult and teach them. What you're saying is this: you want to go to USC and play quarterback? That's fine. Here's what you're going against. And if you're always hurt, or you're hurt when you get there, you give yourself no shot at even staying on the roster, let alone competing for the starting role. So when I put it in that aspect for them, the conversation is typically a one and done because they can see it.

Well, and it's interesting, my— our son is 12 and he plays baseball. And there's a lot of discussion. And those of you that may have young baseball players or have been in that community and in that world, there's a lot of discussion at games around pitch count and around making sure that you're protecting those young athletes, that you're not getting into a situation where you're having a Tommy John surgery before they're even in high school sometimes, which unfortunately is becoming more and more the norm as you have athletes that are single sport athletes playing year round. How do you also then kind of have that conversation as a member of this team that is taking care of young athletes. How do you speak to the coach? How do you speak to those people that are making the decisions about which athlete goes in for specific things about when that athlete does need to dial it back a little bit, especially if you're dealing with a coach that may be a little old school in their thinking where it's like, rub some dirt on it, you're fine, just keep going. And more is better, so to speak. More reps is—

Yeah.

Doesn't always equal better, it sounds like.

Absolutely. This is a tough conversation. I remember we talked about this in part 1 about standing up to the coach for the betterment of the athlete. This is where you help the coach understand, just as an adult, just you two in the room, or you, the coach, and the parents. And I say this respectfully, but I do say it with this tone for a reason. You're done playing. You're done. You've won all the championships you're going to win as a player. Your sole goal now is to develop these young men or young ladies that you— or the— if they're kids, develop them into good young men and young women. And then hopefully from there, their next coach develops them into good men and women. So let's break— I typically have that tough conversation breaking it down to what is our sole purpose of being here, and it's to care for the athletes. The first or original definition for a coach was A person that takes care of a special person in between one place and another. That's your job as a coach. If I'm taking care of that person and they're just kind of wimping out, I am going to push you because me pushing you is going to teach you the lesson that whether you leave here and start playing ball tomorrow, academically, you got to push yourself when you don't want to. You want to start a company? You want to be an entrepreneur? You got to push yourself when you don't want to. But again, am I taking care of this person? From this place I have them to here. And so sometimes you have to tell a coach they're not going to play because they're about 5 pitches off of a UCL. All the championships you have won as a player are won. And it's great to win rings as a coach. I promise you it is. But that should be secondary to the job of you taking care of them. And again, taking care of young athletes is pushing them because we're all going to hit something one day that's tougher than us.

Mm-hmm.

And the last thing we want to hit that wall and then don't know what to do. And we're all getting bad, sad phone calls. So push them, but push them is not throwing them off the ledge. So you talk to the parents and say, hey, medically, I would not let my child pitch this weekend. They pitched the last 5 days and in 5 days they had 3 games. I won't let them pitch. I'm not judging you if you do. If your child says they're good, you know your child better than me. I see your child for a couple hours a day. They live with you.

Mm-hmm.

But if it was up to me, I wouldn't. And if that means pulling them, put on a different team, that would suck, but that's what I would do. And at that point, you pull back. And if you watch them play the weekend, they play fine, that next Monday you pick right up strength coaching them the same way you would. Nothing should change between you and the, the student or their parents. I've had parents tell me sometimes, ah man, he's just whining, he's okay. And sure enough, he goes in that game and throws for 300, 400 yards. They know them better than me. But if you're seeing something clinically wrong, it is now your responsibility to stop. Stop the parent, stop the aunt, the uncle, the coach, the whoever. So just have that tough conversation and do it with your, with your students in mind.

Absolutely. And everybody, please do use that chat. You can ask some other questions there. One that we did receive was talking about the unilateral control aspect that you focused on. Could you describe a time potentially when you were doing some unilateral training with an athlete and it revealed a limitation that maybe changed the course of their development at that point, that athletic development, something that you picked up because you focused on that unilateral training and said, okay, we have something going on here that we really need to address?

Absolutely. So one of them I like to use is what we call just a Peterson step-down. And so I use it one day with— was that baseball? So using with baseball and the pitcher was just kind of having a little bit of issue with what I would call power development. I played a little bit of baseball. I am not a baseball guru. My dad and my uncles, they all played baseball. I started out as a catcher and knees bothered me a little bit, so I went to outfield. So I have a hand in it, but that's not my deal. But again, I know how to train for it. So the pitcher was having a problem with just force development. In comparison to what he used to do the season prior. So I just started from the ground up, started to look at everything, and he could squat the house, he could bench the house. And I noticed that he was punch pitching. So most of the time in high school, you see pitchers, they kind of get wound up and they go here, and that's where they stop and they just punch their ball out. Versus college, you'll see them kind of stand up. And this is— they Sorry about this one. No, show it. A lot of times they'll get set and they'll stand up in that space, and when they set, their arm is all the way back here now before they even rotate the hips. A lot of times in high school you'll see them get here, they stop it here, and they just punch the rest of that pitch through. So a lot of time in college you'll see them get set, close, and they're here, their arm is still way back here. That's all arm now. So we see like a lot of power leaving him And so we noticed that long stretch was coming from the low extremities. And so Peterson step down is where you're on the box and you're stepping forward. It's very a million ways and variants to do it. But when he went to step off the box, you go down and you just tap the heel to the ground. And when he went to do it, this outlook going down.

He was shaking like a leg was shaking.

Yep. But we went back and just for kicks and giggles. I put 325 on there, he squatted it for 12. And I asked him, you see the difference? He said, yeah, I feel weak with no weight. I said, right, because we're weak. So we wound up addressing that issue. So we started to program more unilateral movement for him, but we did it with a kettlebell because he was still genetically gifted. So we did Peterson step down with the kettlebell here so we could still get the same, close to the same intensity of weight, but training that movement pattern. Sure enough, This turned to this, which turned to this. So we didn't get rid of bilateral squats, but in that space we went back and addressed the issue, and he was able to get back to pitching to where he was the year before. I mean, long story short, he took the summer off. I was in that space, he just kind of relaxed a whole lot and didn't do much because he was playing 3 or 4 sports, and he was kind of at that point where I'm either going to play one sport or no sports. So he took the summer and just relaxed, and it's kind of where the drop-off came, but I'm glad Because had we not seen it, we just would have praised the genetically gifted athlete who had an offer from all but 2 SEC schools and lost track of. Well, he'll go there and keep pitching, or he'll go there and batting practice one day and take off to go down the line to first base, and he'll tear all the doggone at-bats right on up, right? So I have seen unilateral work change the life of even offensive linemen, right? So they're strong here.

Mm-hmm.

But if you're pass setting, and kick blocking and you get a right hand on somebody and they're just right around you because you're not strong enough, you're not laterally to stick someone out here and hold them. But you can bench press. So translating that to position specific, you can run block all day and that's fine. Well, that's cute because when you get to college and got to go pass block somebody that's bench pressing 405 for sets of 6. Like Mickey Mouse.

Yeah.

You have to have the shoulder stability to get your hands on somebody and stop them. But again, if you're pass blocking, you're good. But the rules of it is in college is this: the athletes that can do it right every time are starters. The athletes that can do it right sometimes are backups. And the athletes that struggle to get it right most of the time get cut. So you have to make the choice. What do you want to do? If you want to get cut or be a scout team player, then just get it right every now and then. Get it right half the time, you want to be a backup.

Too good. That's good information for sure. And someone else was asking a little bit about, and this is, I think, very relevant. The majority of our viewers right now that have logged in, the majority of those that will be listening on the podcast are healthcare providers. So, as a healthcare practitioner, you have a certain intake form that you do when you have any patient come in your practice and you ask a lot about health history. You mentioned assessing the training age, and kind of understanding when you have that athlete in front of you, what their true training age in that coaching setting. But then if we're speaking to healthcare providers that are treating athletes and wanting to understand some of this methodology around how they can help them with performance, beyond resolving whatever ails them, how would you recommend they question the parents or the athlete to really get a good assessment of that true training age of the athlete so they know where they're starting at? Because as you mentioned before, you have genetically gifted athletes that are 12 years old and benching 250 pounds.

Right.

So you can't necessarily, based upon the age, height, weight, and the patient in front of you, gauge their true training age. How would you approach that? Either in a questionnaire or even in that initial intake conversation?

In the initial intake conversation, I would make sure I put it on paper too. That's one thing is like clinicians, I say you all because I'm not quite there yet. I'm getting there. You all have the power to create what you want in that space. So you can put questions on the intake form such as in the last 3 months, how many times have you lifted weights? After that question, do you feel Bad, or maybe different terminology, or, or how do you feel if you don't lift weights for more than 3 days in a row? And so it kind of gives you a gauge of their training age. If it's in the last 3 months, and you can put your own bar, 1 to 2 days, 5 days, or 10 or more days, you're kind of getting their training age, essentially what they desire from it. If you see the next question, which is If you don't work out for 3 days in a row, how do you feel? And it's the happy faces, small sad faces in between. It's kind of letting you know before you get to that final question of how long have you been consistently lifting weights? Because sometimes we put that down, man, people make up numbers because they don't want to look like, oh man, I gained— I know the doc's going to say I gained 10 pounds and I got to lose weight. So I'm just going to put I've been training. And we sometimes kind of stretch the truth. Which is lying. So we can kind of get, especially on the initial intake, if I know that you lifted weights X amount of times in the last 3 months, if I know that you say, I feel like I'm a failure or I feel bad or I kind of feel whatever it is if I don't lift 3 days in a row, that's telling you this is someone who wants to do it. You can put lift weights or run, whatever the case may be. I mean, it's kind of telling you upfront this is someone who desires to be physically active and physically fit. And if they play sports as well, that's a good indicator for you too as a clinician. If they play high school sports and they are telling you the last time I lifted 3 or 4 days in a row at all has been 2, 3 years and they're a sophomore in high school, it just told you right there what they're not doing in their training programs. You're at a high school and they lift once a week. There you go. You have to start with developmental patterns until they show you that they can handle the rest, because if not, it's just kind of going to, going to be for waste. It'll be like a nuclear engineer telling an 8-year-old a formula.

Yeah.

They're not going to remember it. Tell that to a master's student, they might remember it. So I would— if you don't remember anything of that, I would definitely ask, what's the last time you have worked out for more than 3 days in a row? How do you feel when you don't work out? And then ask, how long have you been training? Because it gives you everything you need in that space in 3 questions.

I love that. That's really concise too. I think so often we're hesitant to put any more questions on that questionnaire because usually they're so long to begin with. But I think keeping it really concise like that gives you a good idea. And especially if it's open-ended or checkbox about I've lifted in the last week, the last month, the last year, etc. That might be helpful. I have one more question for you here. I know there's a lot of, a lot of our viewers that are having to hop off. We really do appreciate you guys hanging in here. But I thought this was a really cool question. What are some key movement patterns during warm-up that are often overlooked, but could be highly diagnostic from a movement standpoint? Like this is if you have on your strength coach hat, not your pain—

Oh, yeah.

What are some things that you can let our practitioners know that they could kind of pick out even in that warm-up that their patients are doing to kind of have some red flags pop up to say something's going on here?

Absolutely. Absolutely. One of my favorite is the RDL and reach. I can demo it if that works for everyone. So the RDL and reach movement pattern tells me a lot. Doing a little bit So with the RDL and reach, we're going to complete an RDL, we're going to reach, and you're going to go into a single leg pattern.

So is that short for RDL, so Roman deadlift and reach? Yes, ma'am.

Okay, so in that RDL and reach pattern, what we're going to do is complete an RDL, we're going to reach. So there it is. So I haven't done them in a while, as you can tell, but here we go. So as we RDL, so the reach happens kind of before the RDL, so we'll reach And we'll RDL, take 2 steps and come back up, go back into it, RDL and reach. So in that space with RDL and reach, what I can wind up looking at— and again, coming from this side, we'll take our 2 steps, we'll go up, RDL, and reach and get flat. So I can see in moving in that, one, do we have movement efficiency, movement economy, which mine needs to get better in that space. We're looking at movement economy in that Also, is one side worse than the other? And this is why it is so important if you have people who want to volunteer and work with you in strength coach settings or practical settings or practitioner settings, let them do that.

So interns may be taking on preceptors. What about even like students that are enrolled in exercise physiology courses or who are studying to be strength coaches?

Absolutely. And you give them the role of, hey, when we go through RDL and reach through the warm-up, when we go through shuffle shuffle lunge lunge, I want you to just go down this roster and identify people who are unbalanced, who are struggling to complete the movement. And then as we get into the lifting pattern, I can see the names on it. So as I'm looking through it after the lift, The next day when we go through it. Now I'm doing what I've been taught for a while, but also certainly enhanced since being here. Maybe they have weak intrinsic foot muscles of the foot. They might be strong as an ox, but in that space, in that movement pattern for the RDL and reach specifically for me, how do you move? And if you're completing the movement pattern, I'm fine with that. But if you're having to compensate to do it, or as I initially started before I started moving around a little bit more, Kind of surfing to do the movement pattern. Well, now I'm looking at your hip, I'm looking at your knee, I'm looking at your foot. Are we just too top-heavy? Do we need to cut over the break? Do we pick up 10, 15 pounds? We pick up realistically 8 to 12 pounds and see how that looks. So RDL and reach for me for sure. Shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge is literally just 2 shuffles and then you lunge right, back up and lunge to the left. I want to see, do we have the same depth of lunge on both sides? Because if I can lunge all the way to the ground on the right, And the left would take a contract.

An act of Congress to get you down there. Yeah.

Yeah. Now I can see what imbalances that we have in the lower extremities. So the shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge is for lower extremities specifically. The RDL and reach is more of a global movement assessment I like to look at. And for upper body, for those, I just kind of use bands for that. And so with the bands, I'm seeing, are they labored and doing any kind of, like Dr. Ruda taught us, sore movements with the band? Is it easier for them to get one arm up than the other one? And so we start to look at who do we send them to, the athletic trainer or the PT or chiro or whoever else to figure out what is the issue going on there. If there's no medical issue, then it's back to us to figure out, is it just scapular dyskinesis? But those 3, sore movement with the band. For upper extremity. Lower extremity by itself is just shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge. And then for global assessment, RDL and reach. RDL and reach tells you everything you need to know as far as a global movement pattern. Love it.

And do you also kind of look at things like how they may be holding their breath or their facial expressions sometimes? Because maybe they can get down into that lunge, maybe they can do the movement, but the way they're having to squint their face, maybe indicating they're having some pain, or maybe if they're holding their breath, they're having a really hard time focusing on those muscles.

Absolutely. And that— I'm glad you said that. That goes back to the beginning of the slide when I said to look, listen, and learn. To listen, I'm listening for labored breathing. I'm listening for different breathing patterns. So I'm okay with having music on during a warm-up, but don't have it blasting so loud that all the things you should be listening to You're not hearing. All right, because you'll hear athletes do a shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge. So when I, when I do a warm-up, it is 20 yards. The first 10 yards is the movement pattern. So we'll do the RDL and reach for the first 10 yards. When you hit that 10 yards, you'll jog 10 yards to the other, other line where we start at. So we're getting everything warmed up. So athletes talk. They'll go into an RDL and reach and they'll say to their teammate, oh, I'm tight this morning, man. How about you? You know, or they'll say things like, man, My back hurting a little bit. So they're talking to each other, but if you're listening, you can hear everything you need to hear. I listen for breathing for sure as they're doing these movements. That's why as a strength coach, it drives me crazy to hear or see coaches standing on the sideline while they're doing it. You need to be walking amongst the lines so you can do the look and listen and learn.

Good point.

Because you'll never hear from this if you're 20 yards away from the warm-up just calling out The movement pattern, they could have did this on their own, man.

Yeah.

You have to look. And the only way you can listen is to be present. So walk the lines. That's why you always high-five the guys, chest bump. Coaching female athletes, same thing. High-five, go jump up, back bump, whatever it is. So you're present. But I'm also listening to what— again, movement is just— the warm-up is just a communication tool to tell me about your current Physiological and mental readiness for today. If everybody— if I've got a softball team, 20 young ladies, and I've heard 8 to 9 truly say, man, I'm— God, dog, I'm so tired, man. We had that double overtime. I am, man. I am so gassed. As they're going through the warmup, I'm actively opening tabs in my head, as Miss Jessica would say.

Yeah.

All right. So we'll take the RDL out and we'll just do bodyweight.

Weight.

So you call the next thing, here we go, face that way, shuffle, shuffle, lunge, lunge. And as they're doing it, I'm actively walking and listening and learning. Okay, so they're labored breathing here, so squatting is hurting. All right, so we're just going to do in that space, we'll do body weight. So I'm actively doing this. So when we get to the rack now, hey, scratch this, what we're going to do today is this, this, this, this, and this, because I got it from listening to them. But if your child is anywhere where the strength coach is Coaching from the sideline, I'm telling you now, get your child off of that team.

Good insight, good information for sure. Well, thank you so much. I think we're out of time for today. And Matthew, again, thank you so much. We're very excited and very honored to have you come back again and teach us great information. As we wrap up part 2 of this series with Matthew McKay, there's one message that carries through both episodes: building resilient athletes requires intention. It's not about pushing harder; it's about training smarter, earlier, and with the long game in mind. The strategies that Matthew shared today give coaches, clinicians, and healthcare providers a clearer framework for supporting athletic longevity, Reducing injury risk and helping young athletes show up consistently, both physically and mentally. If you found this series helpful, I encourage you to revisit both episodes and start applying these concepts in your own practice and with your own patients or young athletes that you may coach or train. You'll also find links to related resources and upcoming Factor education opportunities in our show notes. Thanks for listening, and 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 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.