Chuck Wilson on Sports EP. 5 – Andy Procopio

Strength Training for Young Athletes

Middle school and high school athletes are finding that strength and conditioning programs help them build confidence and improve athletic performance. How do these programs work and what training methods have proven effective? Andy Procopio, who leads Rhode Island’s well-regarded AMP Training Center, joins Chuck Wilson to describe his approach, and some important factors for parents and coaches to consider in evaluating athlete development.

Chuck Wilson on Sports™ features professional and amateur coaches, athletes, officials, and others, sharing insight and perspective from the playing field while discussing issues that impact the game.

Chuck Wilson on Sports and Peer Into Character® podcasts for youth and adults are presentations of Even Field®, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization cultivating integrity, life skills, and leadership, through sports.

Even Field founder and series host Chuck Wilson has been recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential Sports Educators in America” by The Institute for International Sport.

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Episode Quotes, an Audio Timeline, and an Episode Transcript can be found below.

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This Chuck Wilson on Sports™ Episode

• Written and Produced by…Chuck Wilson
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Our thanks to Professor Mike Davis and his Digital Production class at New England Institute of Technology for the live-to-tape recording of this interview. The recording took place at New England Tech’s East Greenwich, Rhode Island campus.

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Episode Quotes

on the role of a strength and conditioning trainer in the life of a young athlete.

“We basically become a guide for a lot of these athletes because we’re not a coach, we’re not a parent, we’re not a teacher…We’ve talked about it a lot as a team. And we said, we take this very seriously, this opportunity to become something like a mentor for young athletes“.

on the difference between chronological age and developmental age

“…we have some 12-year-olds who are unbelievably athletic. We have some 12-year-olds who look like they probably shouldn’t be playing sports. By the time they’re 15, those two groups might not be the same.”

on the importance of confidence

“A parent will comment like, “Oh, you know, Johnny’s playing so well now. You guys have really, you know, made him such a better athlete”. And I always laugh. I’m like, we didn’t do anything. He’s more confident now…Now you’re seeing what can happen when someone’s comfortable in a situation and doesn’t think, and just goes for it.”

on considering physical maturity when evaluating athletic performance

“I can think of an athlete we worked with who was a seventh grader who used to be hitting home runs all the time. And everyone’s like, oh my God, he’s such a great baseball player. Well, he’s a great baseball player because he’s a 13-year-old in the body of an 18-year-old. Let’s see if he’s still a great baseball player when he’s 16 and 17.”

on how today’s youth sports culture encourages early specialization in one sport

“…we’ve almost created this environment where it almost is a necessity…I don’t endorse that. And I never will. But, if you are going to go that route, let’s talk about how to do it safely. So, that’s the discussion we have with parents. You need to make sure we’re taking care of this body and we’re not overdoing it.”

on the future of athletic training, strength training, and conditioning in youth sports

“We’re moving in a direction where you will see sports performance become part of every organization at every level. I mean, every club organization sends their kids to a place like us. So, I think we need to be really careful with how we approach it and understand the heavy responsibility of dealing with young athletes and the level of impact we have on them.”

Episode Audio Timeline

Episode Audio Transcript

Strength Training for Young Athletes

Middle school and high school athletes are finding that strength and conditioning programs help them build confidence and improve athletic performance. How do these programs work and what training methods have proven effective? Andy Procopio, who leads Rhode Island’s well-regarded AMP Training Center, joins Chuck Wilson to describe his approach, and important factors for parents and coaches to consider in evaluating athlete development.

Here is some background on Andy Procopio.

• Founder, owner, and President of the AMP Training Center in East Greenwich, RI (2013-Present)
• 15 years experience in strength and conditioning, working with athletes of all sports/skill levels
• University of Rhode Island, BS, 2007
• University of Rhode Island, Master of Science (MS), Kinesiology and Exercise Science
  • 2 years as asst. strength and conditioning coach, working with all varsity athletic teams
  • Graduate assistant in the Kinesiology program
  • Researched effects of resistance training on adolescent athletes

Andy Procopio: guest

Chuck Wilson: interviewer

Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

As we began our conversation, Andy said that interpersonal relationships are at the core of AMP’s approach.

Andy Procopio: We’re a strength and conditioning facility. We train athletes. But, we’ve learned over the past couple of years that we’ve become so much more than that.

We basically become a guide for a lot of these athletes because we’re not a coach, we’re not a parent, we’re not a teacher. So we’re not talking about grades and giving athletes grades that are going to keep them off a field. We’re not talking about performance where you didn’t perform well, so you might be sitting on the bench or you didn’t do this, or you’re getting cut from the team. And, we’re not punishing or making rules with these athletes, like their parents.

So, we have a really interesting role that we play in the life of a young athlete.

We’ve talked about it a lot as a team. And we said, we take this very seriously, this opportunity to become something like a mentor for young athletes. So, our guiding principle is to build relationships and trust and keep things simple. So, we cannot add stress to an athlete because of everything they’re dealing with.

Chuck Wilson: What are the goals of the various programs?

Andy Procopio: Everything we do is, is foundational strength. So what we say is we’re trying to build an athlete that can deliver on whatever demands their sport might require. So if you come through our doors, you’re going to walk in and everyone’s going to follow the same goal of building a body that is going to be resilient for performance.

And I think that it doesn’t really need to get much more complicated than that. How we progress it and where we go is going to change throughout the experience and the physical maturity.

So, if you come in the door and you’re a middle school athlete, we have a goal here. Our goal is to just build a foundation of a body that is strong so we can bring that to the next level. And as we go with the athletes, we try to make them progress from strength to speed and power onto more specific things.

Chuck Wilson: What initially are the mindsets of the athletes that come in? I imagine it differs somewhat by age, but what do you see?

Andy Procopio: Every single kid that walks through our door has a different preconception of what it’s going to be. When we talk about the youngest athletes, many of these athletes do not know why they’re there, so, the mindset’s really hard to figure out.

They’re there because someone told them to, their parents told them to come to the gym, or a doctor referred them to us because they had an injury or they had some type of chronic problem. So, the mindsets are hard to pinpoint because it really, it really depends.

When we’re talking about older athletes, more mature athletes who have a little more experience, the mindsets are pretty simple. They’re coming in for a specific purpose and they want us to help them with that purpose. But if we’re focusing on some younger athletes mindsets are all over the boards. Some kids are nervous, some kids are excited. Some kids think they know what it’s going to be. Some kids have no clue what it’s going to be. And it’s really interesting. So I can’t nail down what a specific mindset that we see on a daily basis is.

Chuck Wilson: I think one of the interesting things that you must run into is figuring out what’s developmentally appropriate. You’ve got all the biomarkers and the physiological stages that various kids go through. What’s kind of the way that you measure that upfront? How do you match up kids with the kind of program that’ll work best for them?

Andy Procopio: So, with our younger athletes, we want to focus on higher volume, simple movements that are going to build some foundational strength in their bodies. So, we take all of our middle school athletes and bring them in and say, okay, here’s our focus. We’re going to do these types of warm-up activities. We’re going to try to have some fun because if we go back to the whole mindset conversation, these kids don’t know why they’re there. So if we start to push them into this rigid thing you need to do and this regimen, and you don’t know why you’re doing them, it’s going to get complicated.

So, we bring all the athletes in. We try to have some fun and build some basic movement competencies. So speed development, some jumping and deceleration activities, some things where they’re going to start to learn how to move their body through space and where they should be. Then we bring them into some basic strength movements that we understand to be safe and productive for their bodies.

So keeping it simple with basic exercises. Like we might teach kids how to squat and how to bend and lunge and push and pull. And these basic movements that don’t actually translate directly into sport performance, but build their body to be a little more strong, build their bones to be literally thicker, to have stronger bones, tougher ligaments. That across the board is appropriate for middle school age athletes, for young teenage athletes.

Some of the things we look for are overstress. And that’s where we say, what’s going on? This is a case-by-case thing. If you have a young athlete, it’s never going to be this 12-year old and this 13-year-old, and this 14-year-old, all are going to be growing at the same rate. They’re not all going to be adapting at the same rate. They’re going to be on very different levels of the curve of what they understand about how to move and where they’re at.

You know, we have some 12-year-olds who are unbelievably athletic. We have some 12-year-olds who look like they probably shouldn’t be playing sports. By the time they’re 15, those two groups might not be the same. So, developmentally we work on individual relationships. So, getting feedback from the athletes. How does your body feel right now? What are you going through?

If we want to talk about, you know, the science or the biomarkers, one of the big factors is peak growth. So, what we do with our younger athletes is we just measure their height. We look at their height. We see when they’re growing and when they’re growing faster than other points in the year, we might back off some of the volume of what we’re doing. We might recommend that they back off some of their intensity or volumes of practices and sport performance.

But other than that, what we understand about young athletes is their bodies respond really well to basic stimulus and they adapt pretty quickly. So, if we load them a little bit with basic exercises, their bodies get stronger and more resilient.

What we watch for is if they’re starting to have those rapid points of growth.

You take a middle school boy who just grew five inches in the past year. He’s going to be dealing with some tissue pain. He’s going to be dealing with some problems that he might not be dealing with six months later. He might not have been dealing with six months before and we just adjust and adapt.

Chuck Wilson: Critical to motivation obviously is just what you talked about earlier. And that’s this ability to be able to build confidence and trust in what you’re doing. How intentional is that on your part? How do you go about it?

Andy Procopio: I think that building trust is just a simple, genuine thing. It’s hard to teach, but something that should be understood.

And when we select coaches or we select organizations, one of the things we talk about is who do we put with young athletes? And if you look at my staff and my team of coaches, there’s a certain thing I look for in everybody. And it’s not being great at understanding exercise physiology, or understanding the science, or being able to regurgitate something from a book. But I’m looking for someone who genuinely is just a nice, cool person to be around. And we talk about it like it’s a joke, but the reality is all of my coaches in the gym are cool and the kids like them.

And if you start with that, now you take people who just genuinely are interested in others, who genuinely like being around people, and have a little bit of kid themselves still in them. We build trust by just genuinely being interested in the athletes and hanging out with them and having conversations.

So, if you come into our gym, it might seem like an unorganized atmosphere and environment because there’s a lot of side conversations going on. There’s a lot of kids running around and hanging out. But what you’ll notice is there are deep, strong relationships between the athletes and our coaches. There’s trust that’s been built because they just enjoy being around each other.

So I guess to answer that question, I think for us, it’s just, do you genuinely care about others, and are you fun to be around? And if you can do those things, kids will gravitate. Kids will come and they’ll tell their friends. And then you can get into that relationship aspect that I was talking about before, which is serving as a mentor, that’s out of that normal realm of being a parent, a coach, or a teacher. So that’s our approach is just be fun and, and be cool and be nice. And I think it’s pretty easy.

Chuck Wilson: You train some teams. A lot of what you’re doing is team training. What are the advantages? What are the challenges?

Andy Procopio: (chuckling) Team training’s complicated! It’s interesting. We have a few aspects or a few programs, I guess we follow at the gym. And one of them is our team training program. And one of them is what’s called our open sports performance program. And what we see is there’s a huge dynamic shift between team training and the individual sports performance, which it’s still in groups. But the team training dynamic is interesting because, and it’s more complicated because, there’s a comfort level involved.

So, let’s say we have a team of 24 athletes who come into the gym together. They all know each other. There’s a hierarchy of who’s who. Who’s cool, and who’s not. Who’s good and who’s not. Who’s the coach’s favorite and who’s not. And that’s been established. These kids have been playing together. They know each other. So, they come into our environment and that’s already there.

And for us as coaches, that’s a hard egg to crack. It’s interesting because there’s this level of comfort with the athletes where they can almost tune us out and be in their comfort zone. And, trying to change the dynamic and trying to get the athletes to work together and forget about those things, is really complicated.

So team training is very interesting because of those, I don’t know what you’d call them, predetermined dynamics, predetermined team dynamics. And those things can be leveraged in a bad way with the wrong people in charge. And I’m sure the right people can probably try to change that dynamic and use it to build culture. For us, it’s something that is really complicated.

Andy Procopio: On the other hand, if we have a group of 12 athletes who come in, who are all from different places, all from different backgrounds, all play different sports. There’s some girls, there’s some guys, whatever it is. That dynamic’s really easy because they’re all dialed in on one thing, which is us. We become the focal point of that group because they don’t know each other. As they get to know each other over the course of a season, you’ll see that dynamic shift a little more.

But it’s really interesting because it’s something we need to talk about. How do you work with the team effectively, so you can use that preexisting dynamic to build a stronger team?

It’s, it’s tough.

Chuck Wilson: What about competitive versus cooperative? Is there a place for cooperative drills? Because one of the things we really believe in, especially at younger ages — developmentally they’re so different. They’re at such different stages. And sometimes having the one kid that might be more advanced physically, helping a younger one on the team to be able to learn a skill, there’s a real feedback loop that can be very effective for both. And I’m wondering, is that dynamic at all present?

Andy Procopio: That dynamic is absolutely present, especially with young athletes. Like I said before, you could have four 12-year-olds and all four of them are at completely different stages of their physical maturity, their skill maturity. So, it’s really interesting.

Now sometimes that dynamic can work. Maybe we could do a little better job of pushing that. We do partner work. The problem is, we try to push everyone to their capacity.

Chuck Wilson: That’s hard because the athlete that is at the more advanced (level), they’ve got to see what’s in it for them. You know, they’re there to improve themselves, not necessarily somebody else. But, in a team dynamic when it’s going to help the team perform better…

Andy Procopio: It is interesting. If we look back at the team training, we have one team. It’s a field hockey team. They’ve been training with us for over 10 years since before AMP Training Center even existed.

And what we do with them, we pair one of the upperclassmen with one of the newer athletes and say, alright, each upperclassman is responsible for one or two of the sophomores. We don’t have the freshmen participate. And their job is to help us as coaches not only teach the younger kids what they’re doing, (but) actually build a relationship and build comfort.

So, you know, if you walk into a gym and we have 24 athletes in the gym and eight of them have never been in the place before. They don’t know what’s going on, they’re nervous.

We can ease our jobs by saying, okay upperclassmen, you are responsible for one of these kids. You are going to help them make sure they understand this stuff.

What you see happen there is you build this, it’s not like a full mentor relationship, but you build this dialed-in mentality of whoa, one of the seniors, who is a starter, who’s good, who’s this or that, is going to help me. I’m going to pay attention. I’m going to focus a little more because I want them to like me. I want them to think I’m cool. I want to show them how good I am.

We use that excitement to help the athletes dial in on what we’re trying to get them to do. And that’s something we can do in the team training environment that we don’t do as much in, on the other side.

Chuck Wilson: Let me ask you about physical literacy and the Long Term Athlete Development program. The ADM model in the United States. But this idea that before those kids get to you in that six to eight and maybe six to nine for the boys, that age group. If we can help these kids develop some athleticism, just normal fundamental movement skills, fundamental motor skills. Right?

You mentioned it before. Just getting some form of knowing how to jump, how to run. Look at the different styles when kids are young of how they run. Just learning how to use your body a little bit better. And I would make the argument without having the knowledge that you do from a training standpoint, that the more that we can increase a child’s overall athleticism, just the way they feel about being able to move their body, and if we can get them to develop some balance, to develop some agility. All of these things go together to give them some confidence, right? They’re going to gain confidence. Competence as well.

So that if you can get that done before you start to introduce sport-specific skills, it seems to me that those are transferable skills that are going to help an athlete in whatever they do.

What are your thoughts on that?

Andy Procopio: Oh, no question. So, I hope I’m getting this right. I’m going to throw a name out there. There’s a place outside Boston called Achieve Performance, I believe. I wish I could remember the guy’s name right now who runs it. (Andy is thinking of Jeremy Frisch, CEO and owner of Achieve Performance Training in Clinton, MA) But, what they do is really interesting.

So, the biggest thing we see happen with the younger athletes. We have this conversation over and over again. A parent will comment like, “Oh, you know, Johnny’s playing so well now. You guys have really, you know, made him such a better athlete”. And I always laugh. I’m like, we didn’t do anything. He’s more confident now. And he’s going out there and he’s not thinking so much and he’s just playing confidently. Now you’re seeing what can happen when someone’s comfortable in a situation and doesn’t think, and just goes for it.

And so, going back to what I was talking about with Achieve Performance.

The only physical activity a lot of our young athletes do is practice. They have baseball practice, they have soccer practice and that is it. And then when they’re not at practice, they’re at home studying or playing video games. They don’t have this unstructured play anymore.

So what you’re seeing is facilities like Achieve, which are basically doing unstructured play. They set up obstacle courses and have kids run through the gym and jump and they might set up rings and say, okay, jump from this ring to this ring, to this ring.

And what they’re doing is they’re teaching movement competency through games. And what that’s doing is it’s teaching children how to move. It’s teaching them to control their body in space. It’s making them physically aware and it’s building stronger, confident athletes, But not just athletes. If we want to take it in another direction, building stronger, confident people.

And that’s where we need to see these athletes go in this direction. If your whole physical activity revolves around just baseball practice and you start to get up to a point where 9, 10, 11, 12, you start to be more self-aware and you start to notice, well, that kid’s way better than I am in this. It can kill your confidence and stop you in your tracks and probably destroy careers by 12 years old. And that’s crazy.

But if you’ve developed this physical competency at a younger age where you’re confident and comfortable and know where you’re at, it’s just a different thing. So I think there’s a lot of use to this whole unstructured “build athletes through play” and get them to the point where they’re confident before we start hammering them with practice only, and competition only.

Chuck Wilson: The free play idea. Unstructured makes so much sense. Kids have so much fun and I would argue conflict resolution. They work out their own issues, right? They don’t have some adult trying to adjudicate every little thing that goes on. They make up their own rules and they work out their own problems. And I just think that gives them so much more confidence that they’re going to be able to handle interpersonal relationships. They’re not being handled by an adult.

Andy Procopio: I talk about it all the time. Just watch my daughters. I have a three and a five-year-old. And you know, some parents will look at me sometimes, especially when (the girls are) in the gym and they’ll be arguing, yelling at each other. And (those parents) say, ‘You know what your daughters are doing?’ (and I respond) “Yes. I call that conflict resolution.” They’re figuring out how to solve this problem that’s going on between them.

And I think that adults have come in and structured everything for everyone. And they mean well, but we see the effects of it every day. We have crazy emotional kids who, if they don’t do something perfect the minute they walk in the door, they’re upset or terrified. And, it’s pretty crazy.

Chuck Wilson: We’ll get to parents in a couple of minutes. But, the chronological age versus developmental age, which you mentioned. You can take a 12-year-old and physically that 12-year-old could be what nine or 10, could also be 13, 14, 15 years of age. That’s enormous. And, it has real social consequences.

Andy Procopio: Oh, absolutely.

Chuck Wilson: And I don’t know what the real answer is. Bio-banding has been looked at as one answer.

Andy Procopio: What’s that?

Chuck Wilson: Well, trying to put developmentally aged kids together, at least for some of the time that they’re going to compete, rather than just (by) chronological age. And we run into this whole relative age issue.

Our family is a perfect example. We have three sons. Our two younger sons both were born on July 31st. In Connecticut, where they were growing up, the start date (for sports programs) was August 1st. So both of them were the youngest on every single team they played on.

That has consequences. When every single kid…now listen, it’s good to play against people that are better than you are, that’s how you can get better. But, if every single kid has months of development ahead of you and you don’t happen to be an early developing kid, that has consequences.

This is why I get frustrated at the idea, Andy, that we are excluding kids so early in the process. That by 10, 11, 12 years old, we’ve given that signal to kids, “Oh, you’re not an athlete. You’re not going to be any good.” And they go away before they’ve gone through puberty. And that’s another issue, puberty happening earlier now.

But, what are your thoughts on just being able to look at the big picture and being able to be patient, and staying with the process?

Andy Procopio: We have this conversation a lot with parents. You’re seeing people begin to self-remedy it. And, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. The amount of athletes who are being held back or starting kindergarten late, or repeating kindergarten. Or, we see a lot now the new trend (of) repeating eighth grade. We have had so many athletes who have repeated eighth grade.

We’re also seeing, you know, you see the PG’s, but not even as much of the PG’s anymore, as you see reclassing. Kids going to a different school to reclass because they’re physically behind or they were an early birthday or whatever it is. People are beginning to self-remedy that.

I don’t know if that’s a great solution or not. We’ve talked about it with my daughter. My daughter’s a June birthday and I’m looking and I’m like, geez, she’s going to be one of the younger kids.

But, she’s so advanced. She’s smart, she’s physically…I couldn’t imagine ever saying, you know what, let’s start first grade late. It’s just crazy to me. But, we think about these examples all the time. And what I talk about on our end is, we look at those markers of developing athleticism more than we look at the physical development.

And I can think of an athlete we worked with who was a seventh grader who used to be hitting home runs all the time. And everyone’s like, oh my God, he’s such a great baseball player. Well, he’s a great baseball player because he’s a 13-year-old in the body of an 18-year-old. Let’s see if he’s still a great baseball player when he’s 16 and 17.

You know, it’s almost unfair to look at because, from our standpoint, we’ll almost write that kid off and say, well, he’s better because of his early physical development. Well, maybe he is just a talented athlete.

And on the other end, I think of a hockey player we have, who’s always been specifically way more talented than all of his peers, even though he was small and a late developer. And you look at that kid, and you say, okay, I want the athlete who has not yet physically developed, but skill-wise can hang with all of his peers who are physically developed.

And, it’s a conversation we have a lot. And I don’t know if there’s a remedy. I think what we do is socially, we just say, you know, “Hey, your kid is right on track for where they should be athletically. They’re doing the right things. They move well, they may be a little behind in physical development, but once everyone’s 16, it will all be okay.” And, that’s one of the things we just kind of try to have a conversation, but I don’t know, or we are not privy to, any good strategy to deal with that.

Chuck Wilson: Andy, when I was growing up, being a multi-sport athlete, that’s what you wanted. You wanted to be able to play multiple sports. It allowed you to kind of stretch your abilities and we’ve seen all the studies now. There’s less burnout. There are fewer sport-related injuries, chronic injuries, and overuse injuries.

There are so many advantages to it, but there’s also a lot of pressure to specialize early.

Now, we know that there are early specialization sports, right? We know figure skating, diving, and gymnastics, right? For some of the acrobatic sports, you have to get started early, because it’s an early-age sport.

On the flip side, the evidence seems to indicate that kids aren’t at all behind the eight ball by starting later in other sports, especially if they’re developing these transferable skills from one sport to another, and there is a body of coaches now, that prefer the multi-sport (athlete) to the athlete who played just one sport for quite a long time.

So, what are you seeing? What’s kind of your thought, because this specialization, (there is) a lot of pressure.

Andy Procopio: This is an interesting conversation. I’ve been talking about this a lot lately.

I heard something on a podcast the other day that made me think, and it was a great point. It was the first time I’d heard an exercise physiologist make an argument for sport specialization. And, he wasn’t arguing that it’s a good thing, but he was almost arguing that it’s become necessary because of society.

So I have a lot of thoughts on that.

Anecdotally, everyone will say, well, this professional athlete was a multi-sport athlete and they were star in football and a star in baseball and a star in basketball and they could be professional in anything.

The anecdote is it’s because they were a multi-sport athlete. And I would tend to agree with that. And what you said, I think, is right on point. Which is, if you can develop movement competencies…and that’s where we go back to the whole ninja course or obstacle course stuff.

You know, we could always name the one or two kids who you would always say, give them a stick or a ball and they’re going to be better than you. They can cross paths however they want. So, you’d say anyone who can build competencies in multiple sports is going to be at an advantage as we get older because their body’s going to be more well-rounded. Their performance is going to be more well-rounded. And that’s what we see over and over and over again.

You can’t argue with the statistics, but society has driven this other side with the whole like 10,000-hour rule that to be an expert in a sport, you have to have spent X amount of hours practicing that sport.

So, if you look at it from that side, it’s really interesting to think about.

So, let’s say my daughter plays soccer and my rules are, you play your sport in the season. You play soccer in the fall, you play basketball, hockey, (or) gymnastics in the winter, and you play lacrosse, baseball, whatever in the spring. And that’s how it goes. You know, you stick with your seasons and you play one sport in each season and that’s it.

Well, so let’s take my daughter who plays soccer in the fall, and then eight of her peers also play soccer in the fall. But then, they play soccer in the winter and they play soccer in the spring and they play soccer over the summer. And then my daughter who’s been doing other things comes back around in the fall. And in one year all of her peers have flown past her. You say, well, what happened?

So, my daughter that might be a physically capable athlete is now behind in soccer. And what we’re seeing a lot of is these athletes are getting so much better. I was a lacrosse player and I was watching a lacrosse practice the other day. I said, I would never even make a team in this environment. These kids are so good. And one of the coaches who I work with was like, well, they have a lacrosse stick in their hand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They’re always playing this sport. They’ve developed so much quicker.

And so it comes back to that argument of my daughter, even though she might grow up to be a well-rounded, physically capable athlete. She may be behind the eight ball in soccer because all of her peers over the years that they were playing club and this and that, they got so much more experience, specific skill experience, scenario recognition that they’re better than her. And she may be able to adapt to certain things on the field, but she just doesn’t have that same level of skill in that sport.

And, I’m not necessarily arguing that we should push everyone into early sport specialization. What I’m saying is we’ve almost created this environment where it almost is a necessity and what I propose or at least what we talk about is, I don’t endorse that. And I never will.

But, if you are going to go that route, let’s talk about how to do it safely. So, that’s kind of what the discussion we have with parents is. You need to make sure we’re taking care of this body and we’re not overdoing it.

Mental burnout. We can’t do anything about that. If you’re playing a sport year-round, all the time. It’s hard.

There is a time and place where we do recommend athletes specialize. If they’re much later in their careers and they’re finding that playing three high school sports seasons is taking away from their ability to train or practice their sport. And they’re already going to college, then we say, okay, you’ve played soccer and basketball and softball your whole life. Let’s take one of those out of the equation over the junior and senior years that you’re preparing for college.

Chuck Wilson: But that’s at a

Andy Procopio: much later time.

Chuck Wilson: Right, that’s in your middle teens, 15, 16. I get it. That’s fine, especially if the impetus is coming from the kid because they have a passion for one particular sport.

Where I have a problem is with the preteens and this early specialization. I mean, look, two of our three kids played travel soccer. Okay. You’re required to play in two seasons and you’re highly advised to play indoors in the winter. Right?

And the interesting thing I found with this program is as young as U-7, U-8, (laugh) the goal of the soccer program was to win. Individual improvement was up to you. And I’m saying to myself, you’re putting winning now over development.

That means you’re going to play all the early developing kids and anybody who isn’t an early developer is going to get limited time because the coach is being judged on a won/loss record, not on how many kids want to play next year and how many kids got better for the next year.

It seems to me, if you’re trying to create a feeder system for the upper levels, you’re excluding a lot of kids early. Why would you want to do that? (That) doesn’t make sense to me.

Andy Procopio: (laughing) Well, we said we’re going to talk about the parents, right? That’s an adult ego thing. Right? And it’s a mindset thing. And it’s an uneducated mindset of…you now, look at the club programs.

I always talk about this with parents, ‘Do you judge a club program based on how they’re developing the athletes or where they’re placing athletes?’ You know, are they placing athletes in environments that are going to make them successful, or are they placing athletes in places that give them a bigger name? And, are they talking about how many championships they’ve won or their records? And I said, you know, what we tell the athletes all the time is, well, they might go to every tournament and win and they have a name, but are they developing every individual on that program?

Again, a lot of this stuff just comes down to conversations. It’s the first thing we discussed today, which is how do you build trust in relationships? And, I think it’s taking egos and mindsets in this like race to the top, out of things, and zeroing in on someone and saying, “What’s going on? How are you doing? And, what can we do to help or make things better right now?”

And if all the coaches were thinking about that the way we do, I think we’d have a lot of happier and more successful athletes.

Chuck Wilson: What’s the role of strength and flexibility in reducing and preventing injuries?

Andy Procopio: It depends. That’s a complicated question. So, maybe five, 10 years ago, a lot of strength coaches would always say, we practice injury prevention. And, you know, I used to say that too.

And then we started listening to some of the smarter people and saying, okay, we can’t prevent injuries. We cannot prevent anything from happening. We try to practice injury reduction or reduce the risk of injury. And that, even in itself, is really complicated because there are so many variables when it comes to injury. Take an ACL (knee ligament) injury, for example, and people talk about, oh, it’s because of strength and this person was weak or it’s because of hormones, or it’s because of the volume of practice. And ultimately all of those factors are true, right? Yielding at high speeds is an issue.

We try to address those things, but it’s not perfect. So, when we look back at what we do, we say what is our goal — foundational strength development.’

We are trying to build a body that is going to be resilient to all of those issues. We want to build a body that can answer on the demands of sport. So I believe personally, and obviously, I’m biased in this, that the role of strength and conditioning, and strength and flexibility, and movement is, it’s preparing a body for whatever physical demand sport is going to put on it.

Just last night, a father of a young athlete, she’s 13. She tore her ACL and she started training with us and that’s how she came to us. And he was sending me some videos of her playing lacrosse. And he sent me one screenshot of her in a position. And it was really interesting because he said, this is what I’m nervous about. She cuts so hard and she pushes into the ground and she had this crazy angle. She’s a very capable athlete, but she’s put these demands on her body. She’s played so much lacrosse without this strength and conditioning aspect to build a body that can handle those demands.

Now, I’m not sitting here saying I necessarily believe that she may not have torn her ACL if she had been doing some sports performance training at a younger age or getting stronger. But, I like to believe that we may have been able to teach her some better biomechanical awareness. Maybe teach her body to be a little more resilient or give her a better capability to yield at high speed. So when she puts her foot in the ground and turns her body, it might be a little more capable of doing that.

So, my take on all of this is if we can keep things simple and make sure the joints move in the range of motion they’re supposed to move, but not just, and this is where I’d say flexibility, in my opinion, is not as important as some of the other aspects.

The idea of flexibility is different than when we talk about mobility or being able to access a range of motion, but also being able to stabilize or control within that range of motion, alright? So, if I can, you know, bend my knee like this, well, that’s great that I can get my knee there passively. But, if some really high-speed forces take my knee there, can I stabilize my knee in that range of motion versus just getting my knee to that range of motion? So I believe our job revolves around teaching bodies to not just access positions but to be able to control speeds and movement in certain positions. So I think we play a huge role.

Chuck Wilson: What’s the biggest misconception that parents have about strength and conditioning; about a training program?

Andy Procopio: (laughing) It’s pretty simple. There are two.

Number one is there’s a major difference between fitness and performance training. And I talk about this all the time and it drives me up a wall. And then the second one is, is sport specific.

So those are two things I deal with constantly. I answer questions about why is my child not sweating and exhausted when they come out of the gym or, you know, why is the workout so easy. Oh, it’s too easy. It wasn’t hard enough. And we say, well, what are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to make someone sweat and have this kid who’s down on the floor exhausted after a workout, or are we trying to build control in certain positions and movements? Are we trying to build someone who is physically prepared for sport or are we trying to be, you know, gym class?

And, what I always talk about is what we do when it comes to sports performance or strength and conditioning, we’re very specific. We’re trying to address specific needs and build movement competencies. We’re not just trying to make someone tired, and that’s important.

And then the second thing is this whole idea of sports specificity, and I’m not talking about specialization, but I’m talking about the idea that a baseball player’s workout should be completely different from a football player or a hockey player or a lacrosse player or a basketball player. And that, you know, they need to do movements that mimic their sport.

To some extent, that’s true because we have to go back to that whole, well, here are some positions you’re going to be in on the field and you’re going to need to be able to control getting into those positions at high speeds. But, you know, mimicking the movement of a swing isn’t necessarily going to make you stronger in that swing.

So one of the big misconceptions is what we call sport specificity. Sports specificity happens at practice. Strength and conditioning happens in a weight room, building strong tissue and bones.

Those are the two big misconceptions is the whole idea of fitness versus and then sports specificity. A football player, a basketball player, a soccer player, lacrosse player, surprisingly can all do the same workout and benefit from it. And those are big things.

Chuck Wilson: Let me ask you about mental training. What are the important things that kids need to develop in terms of mental skills and psychological skills?

Andy Procopio: Mental preparation is going to come in many shapes and sizes. Every athlete prepares differently.

One of our college football players said the other day, he’s like, “You know, I want to be so angry before I get out of the locker room. Before I go out on the field, I want to be so angry that I just want to kill someone, take their head off.” And I’m sitting there thinking, like that’s the complete opposite way of how I approach things, which was, I want to be calm and comfortable and know what my job is today and dial in on what I need to do going out there. If I’m so angry that I’m going to go out there and be reckless and make bad decisions and take myself out of the game…And the point of that story, I guess, is to say that it’s going to be different for everyone.

But one of the things we talk about with mental preparation and we don’t do it a ton because honestly, we’re limited in time, is visualization. Can we teach these athletes how to relax and breathe and dial in on what they need to be focused on and try to tune out all the noise? But that noise is getting worse and worse and worse. And, being a young athlete now, being a young teenager and early teenager right now is very complicated.

And one of our coaches said this the other day, and I thought it was really interesting. He made a great point. He said, “When we were young, everyone had bullies, right? We always grew up with bullies and you had something in school that scared you and you might have pretended to be sick one day, so, you didn’t have to go to school because some kid was going to beat you up or something. You literally would pretend to be sick, so you wouldn’t have to go to school to see that kid because being home was safe. Well, now that bully can get to you 24 hours a day.” And, I don’t think we understand the levels of stress that that takes on these young athletes.

So for us, mental preparation comes down to trying to get athletes to build confidence in what they’re doing and knowing that they’re capable within themselves and that they can play a role on a team. And, they know what’s expected of them, without being another stressor. One of our main objectives is to not add stress to an athlete’s life.

Chuck Wilson: What is the future of athletic training, strength training, and conditioning? Where is it headed because there are a lot of really pretty exciting changes?

Andy Procopio: Well, 20 years ago, places like us didn’t exist, or maybe there were a few of them. Now, they’re on every corner. And now, even high schools have strength and conditioning coaches.

Athletic performance has become mainstream. It’s rapidly moving in the direction of technology, data collection, and analytics from a physical X’s and O’S standpoint.

But on the other side, it’s going in the direction of interpersonal communication. And guys like Nick Winkelman and Brett Bartholomew are kind of trying to lead the way on that. And those two have talked so much about communication and interpersonal relationships. They’ve both written books on it.

We’ve become this resource for parents and for coaches that is almost invaluable because we have access to the athletes in a different way than others do.

We’re moving in a direction where you will see sports performance become part of every organization at every level. I mean, every club organization sends their kids to a place like us.

So, I think we need to be really careful with how we approach it and understand the heavy responsibility of dealing with young athletes and the level of impact we have on them. But I think the two ways this is going is, everybody’s going to be using technology and analytics and already are, and we’re moving there very fast. But the other thing is coaches are starting to get better at interpersonal communication and building relationships. And, I’m interested to see where that goes.

Chuck Wilson: Andy, we definitely have to do this again. This was really, really interesting. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Andy Procopio: Thank you for having me.

Our thanks to Andy Procopio,

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Chuck Wilson

Founder & Executive Director
Chuck Wilson is an award-winning host, interviewer, and commentator. He was an original host on ESPN Radio and was with the network for close to 17-years. In 2007, Wilson was named one of the 100 Most Influential Sports Educators in America by the Institute for International Sport. He is the founder of Even Field.