Mick Sterli (Katalyst Performance) - Building A Private Sector Youth S&C Program: From Garage Gym to Performance Facility

(upbeat music) Welcome back to the LTV Network Podcast. Today we're joined by Mick Sturley, the founder of Catalyst Performance, to unpack the story behind his thriving private sector strength conditioning program for young athletes. Mick is one coach of the year awards with both the NSCA and the US, and the ASCA in Australia, and has led programs for a number of sports organizations and tactical units around the world. During the conversation, we look at how his program has grown from a home garage setup into a dedicated performance space. We dig into how he structures the athlete journey and delivers quality S&C within the private sector. Also how he works with parents and coaches and balances, business realities with long-term athletic development rather than quick fixes. If you're a coach thinking about starting your own private sector program or already running one and wanting to sharpen your offer, this conversation with Mick is packed with practical takeaways for building a sustainable athlete-centered S&C service within the private sector. (upbeat music) Mick, welcome to the LTV Network Podcast. It's great to have you with us, really looking forward to this conversation about your program at Catalyst Performance. - Well, thanks for having us. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while, so we've finally got some dates and some times that align with each other, so looking forward to the chat. - Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's always a little bit tricky when we're jumping across multiple time zones. So yeah, appreciate you making time in the middle of your day early in mind. So what would be great to start with is just if you could tell us about your journey through S&C and now where you are, where you've set up Catalyst Performance, that'd be a great place to start. Basically, my journey through S&C is goes back way too long I care to sort of imagine now. It's you'd realize you've been in this game for way too long when you start talking and it has in decades as opposed to years. But started just at a local football club, West Magpies, I was there for, I actually started with their juniors, preparing them for a tour of the UK. I mean, you're not a kingdom. And then basically I did that. Once that was finished, I basically got taken up to the Premier League, which is like the reserve grade here in Australia, work through there for a number of years, ended up at the Canary Banks Down Bulldogs, the NREL teams there, work there for a number of years. And then after that sort of moved on, went to other sort of roles more in regards to developing teams for short term sort of competitions and representative teams, and with new South Wales rugby league in around under 20s, 21s, all that sort of stuff, getting ready where you have to, you know, you're getting players come into you, you're managing them for that set period of time with that competition and you're set of handing them back. Did that for a number of years? From there, Calis was sort of always in the background. A lot of times it was, you know, a way of having a little business in the background, where if I did a presentation, the money would go into that little account, that would be used to buy some equipment or pay for some travel, all that sort of stuff, just to offset some of the costs in regards to what I was doing and where we were going with it. And then basically that was sort of always bubbling along in the background. And then we had that thing that sort of impacted the world, which is called COVID. And then sort of COVID hit and obviously everyone had to sort of pivot and, you know, change directions. For us, it was more around, we just put together a garage gym to be honest. - Yeah. - You know, we wanted to find somewhere to train our cells, try to make sure that what I could keep fit during COVID, I'd had enough gear that I sort of acclimated over the time that I didn't need to buy too much sort of stuff. You know, you always find stuff on Facebook, Marketplace, things like that. And that's basically where Catalyst started. We started a little gym in the garage where we wanted to train after, or during COVID. Once sort of COVID finished and the world started opening up again, we had a few, our first client was, someone who's from the Bulldogs. He actually reached out, his son was a soccer player. And just to see, look, my son's turning about 11 or 12. He's getting beat to the ball. He's probably not quick enough off the mark. Could you do something with him? And having no idea of, okay, what am I going to do here? What am I going to charge? You know, I said, well, he said, we'll pay you. He was like, well, that's sort of blew my mind. I was like, oh, look, never really thought there should be something that we could work towards. But all right, let's see what we can do. And then basically, he came in. We were working on his son, Khalid. And then from that, all of a sudden just where to mouth go? Where is, how come this has happened? Why is he so much better at this? Why has this happened? And it was, oh, we go and see Nick down in all of a sudden that the referral started rolling in. And it got to the point where, after about 12, 18 months, it got to the point where we were turning people away. Like we physically couldn't fit people in our garage. That's how it was, and it would sort of come to that point where it's time to sort of, either bite the bullet, stay where we were or stop growing or actually bite the bullet and move into a factory unit and go from there, build our own facility. Yeah, so let's talk about that bit. The transition to full time and build in the facility. How did you approach that? Very daunting to start with. I mean, there was no minimal outlay, having something in the garage. We're already paying off the house. So there's no rent involved, things like that. We originally found a place where there was a gym that was shutting down, which we had found out early. We actually went down and spoke to the owner of that gym and they were keen to sort of say, look, you can take it as years go in. But the actual owner of the facility had said, no, he didn't want gyms in there anymore. And what we found out was that this is coming from the real estate and all that sort of solicitors that get involved on this was the government, the state government and our area changed the zoning laws for gyms, dance studios and all that sort of stuff. So rather than it be a commercial lease, oh, so rather than it be an industrial lease, it was a commercial lease, which meant it was different requirements and different bylaws that you needed to abide by. So because that was sort of fresh in everyone's mind and no one knew what it actually meant, was we actually applied for a number of spots and a number of facilities to try to get some factory spaces and we were actually rejected. They were just saying, no, everyone was going, no. And it's like, well, why not? And it's like, oh, the owner doesn't want to deal with fat or because it was sort of so new that everyone was a big gun shy on how that was going to work and what it would look like. And then we finally found the one that we were looking for and probably a little bit bigger than what we were initially envisaged, but it's actually worked out pretty well. - Awesome. So then you moved in, you've got your garage gym kit. What did you, I'm guessing you had some kind of fit out to fill that space as well. What did you see as the sort of key pieces that you wanted in there to run your program? - For me, it's about space, it's about line of sight. I don't want to have too much stuff in there. I want to be able to stand in a spot and basically swivel my head anywhere from 90 degrees and be able to see everyone it's on the gym floor. I'm one of those ones that like to have sort of broken up into sections as much as we can. Again, this is not something that was built by me. It was, this is the existing space that you have. Fit it out as you can. And I was lucky enough, I do do some work with play and I leaned on them a little bit to sort of say, look, this is the space that I've got. Do me up some renders. This is what I'm thinking, how is this going to work? And they were able to sort of plan out what I was looking for and how that was going to work. But funny enough, you mentioned that going from the garage gym, we got the key on Friday morning. We moved all the garage gym into there to start with on the Friday afternoon and running our first session on Friday afternoon with what we had in the garage. Just off back off in all corner in this massive space with just that basic gear that's all we had at that time. And our first client that came in there actually came in and helped us lay rubber mats before she could train. We got to the point, we were ready to go and she loved the space that much, we had to kick her out. It's like, okay, you've got to go now, because we need to go home, like this is getting ridiculous. Like we need to have a rest, it's been a big day. So you've got to be out of here. Yeah, that's how it started. But again, whenever moving into a facility of stuff like that, it's sort of more about fitting out the way that you like to coach or the way you want to sort of move people around. And have I got it right? I think I've got it pretty close. There'd be some stuff that I'd like to change next. But at the moment, I think we're basically where we need to be. But definitely having clear lines of sight, especially for the age group that we have is just a hundred pounds for what we wanted to do. We want to be able to see them every time that they're doing something and be able to coach or correct or stop the move that's a reason to their more somebody else. Yeah, I think the people that get it right follow what you've done there. Certainly when I've fitted out the facilities that I've done it is clear lines of sight, clear working areas for athletes to be in so they can start to understand that flow of working with a training partner in a space around a platform and developing those good, just good training habits. Not necessarily thinking too much equipment-wise and everything, or I think I've seen some school gyms, when I've done some consulting work with different schools. And they're like, could you come and just have a look at our plan at what we've got and it's like a static machine overload in the area? Like a commercial gym space where there's just put as much equipment in as they can. To be honest, our thing, the first thing that went in for us was our running track. Was our turf track winning. That was the first thing that we had in, to be honest. And then that was, again, that was that whole space where our activation, our movement prep, our running drills are all done on that track. And then we've got in one corner, we've got our weights up the other, we've got our conditioning and the idea is that they can come in, they do their activation at one site, their med balls, they move around, they do their running drills, they do their strength, and if there's conditioning in their program, and they finish with conditioning and then they're out of the door. To go away. It comes a way of, and it worked out well. We've started getting some teams coming to see us and having teams in where we might have them for an hour and they want to do everything. 'Cause, okay, we can actually do a group warm-up, we can split them, we can teach them how to accelerate, how to decelerate, whilst half are doing some conditioning or half are doing strength, and we can rotate those blocks around, where we can know we can have a decent amount of coaches and coaching provided in the technical stuff. The conditioning may be not, we can set it up and say to the actual skills coach, here's what we need you to do with these guys, and we can just keep an eye on them. But the actual coach bit, we can actually really focus on purely based on having those movements and having that space set up like that. - I think having that flow, and I think that comes when you're clear about what your philosophy is and how you train people. I think some people don't quite have that when they start these youth programs, they're not clear on what that is. And then sometimes the facility set up can reflect that. But yeah, it sounds like, as I'd imagine it, you could have almost like a conveyor belt of teams coming through with that flow. Your next group are coming in and starting their movement prep on your track space. Next coach is sort of picking those up while the others are flowing through. To be honest, I think that's a great way to set it up whether you're in a private setting or a school-based program where you've got different classes coming in or different groups coming in on a stagger. It's perfect set up. - And I think that's one of the things that most people probably get wrong too, to be honest, with set up is realizing that a, you need space. Probably what you set up is probably not going to be big enough eventually, anyway, with the amount of kids that are going to come in, even at a school space. And there's always change, there's always, and having that room to move or that room to grow. One of the best ones that I've probably seen is the H2F from the US military. But they have, like, literally have battalions come in. And they'll have, like, in the hundreds. And they'll have, this spot is 20 minutes. The next spot, 20 minutes. And they can rotate through hundreds of people based on their set out, their flow, and their flooring and their equipment. So they can actually do that. And that's sort of what really stuck to me that that was probably one of the best that I've seen is that the amount of people that they're getting through in a two-hour block. And if they can do that with soldiers, then that's the way we should do it with kids. It's keeping simple. They become accustomed to what they need to do and they can move through it there as well. - That was what I was going to say, I think, building a routine with young athletes that they become familiar with, just moves things on and not changing the flow every week. And that was something I learned when I was seeing classes of people come through having a system. We ramp warm up, we'd end with some plyometrics and some speed work. We lift, we do some flexibility and mobility and maybe some core work on the end. And that just became our flow. And then the more you stick to that routine, it develops that independence as well in being able to then say, crack on with your ramp warm up while I finish with this group or, though those sorts of things, routine, routine, routine was a big thing that we drilled through our sessions. - So especially with the individualized programs that we sort of provide is that there may be subtle differences between the way we want our BMX riders to warm up compared to our swimmers. - Yeah. - At least they know what I'm still in the right space. I'm in the right spot. I can go from here, I can move to the next one and we can sort of move them around as we need. - So before we get into the specifics of the programming with some different groups and bits and pieces, I think one thing for us, I'd really like to touch on is, we've talked about facility, which I think is one of the important. I think of four Ps, places, people, programs and processes. So my, you've got big tick in the places box, with the box with catalyst performance there. Can we talk about the people piece and the coaching and what, you know, I think we've both seen it from our discussion before we started recording is there's a lot of people jumping into this place that don't have appropriate qualifications and don't have appropriate experience, but see a money-making opportunity now in youth strength and conditioning and some of what we're seeing people share on social media, it's clear they don't have the technical knowledge to train kids safely, but are celebrating things like, you know, kids deadlifting, X amount of weight and their backs like a prawn. You know, those sorts of things which just don't fit. So what you're, how do you set up your coaches, what do you expect in terms of qualifications and experience? - So for us, every one of our coaches is an ACA accredited strength and conditioning coach, which is basically, I guess, the industry leader here in Australia to decore yourself a strength and conditioning coach you need to have an Australian strength and conditioning coach accreditation, you need to maintain that accreditation. With us, we've got a lot of coaches that have had a lot of experience in sort of definitely develop in the pro space, a lot of like junior development at rugby league clubs, a league clubs, things like that. And it's one of those ones where we want to bring that knowledge and share that knowledge with the kids and the athletes that we have. Like we've said before, is that we, and I by any means possible, don't see myself as a very good businessman, to be honest. Like I said before, is for me, if I focus on the product, which is our kids, and we make sure that they're the best that they can be, and we provide a service and a quality of service for those kids, then the other stuff that will follow, all the money and all that sort of stuff will follow after that. For us, it's a passion. So, you know, if you, that was that way, that's saying that you know, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. But yeah, I understand that at some point, we've got to make some money out of this. But for us, we haven't even, it was only been six weeks since we built a website, but we haven't even, we've done zero advertising. We've done nothing. But now you'll see, in Australia, we're coming to the end, all the sporting events, like the winter sports, the soccer, the rugby league, the hockey, all that sort of stuff is starting to come to an end now. And all of a sudden, you'll see people pop up out of there. And anyway, hey, we do these athletic performance, team's athletic performance. We do SNC for teenagers and sports-specific training. Okay, that's great, but what do you actually do? It's not as easy as, oh, we just write a whiteboard, or we come into a gym and there's four whiteboards, and you pick a whiteboard and that's your session for the day. But there needs to be some sort of plan around that, but there needs to be some sort of long-term goal. There needs to be long-term athlete development involved into this. When anyone comes into our facility, no matter what level they're at, they start on what we call our fundamentals program, which is basically, can you hinge? Can you press? Can you, you know, can you do a body weight squat? Can you do that with correct form before we've even started loading it? You need to earn the right to progress to jumping into the weights. And yeah, we want to have some of kids that, they're on that for two or three weeks, and it's like, this guy, this kid's pretty good. We can actually start to push them a little bit more. But we absolutely definitely drill the basics first. I mean, it's one of those things that, you know, we could come in and say, look in a month, we can get this kid to lift this, this, this, that. But if the tech needs crap, then the long-term advantage of that is probably going to disadvantage that kid. If we say, look, we've got somebody coming in, we're going to build you up slowly, add brick by brick, then over the term a long term, that's going to be beneficial for you. And again, that's what we want. We want athletes that want to be involved in sport for a long period of time. And we want them to enjoy what they do and want them to come into our facility and actually love being there. It becomes the sort of home away from home for some kids. We've got kids that come in and do their work out and then while they're waiting for their sister to finish dancing around the corner up stairs and on my desk doing homework, which is fine. Like, that's not a problem. Like, I'll give you the iPad. Here's the internet go up and do that. Because we'd rather than be with us than sort of running the streets or doing things like that. But yeah, it's always funny. We always have a laugh that people are now starting to in our area. Hey, you know, those Instagram ads are popping up and it's all over the place. It's all right. We haven't paid for an Instagram ad yet. We haven't done any advertising at all. And for us word of mouth is probably one of the best tools for us that we actually look after our kids and we provide a service for that. But yeah, definitely we hire accredited coaches and nearly all of our coaches have significant uni degrees as well. So they spent time getting that background knowledge. They can coach. They're generally at that point where one of our oldest coaches, Danny, he worked for the Sydney, South Sydney rabbis. Now for where we live, that's about an hour and a bit drive away. And he was driving in an hour to do a two hour session to drive home and doing that three days a week plus game days on Saturdays. Had a young family, absolutely loves coaching but just goes, "Make the travels killing me." He goes, "Oh, here, I'm five minutes away from home. I can come in, I can do two to three hours with no travel and be home earlier than what I was before and I'm still doing what I love. I still get to coach kids. I get to see the coaches smile, that the kids smile when they come in. Let me know how they went on the weekend. I'm seeing development, I'm seeing improvement and I just love it." And that's sort of what we want. That's, you know, he's got a young family, that little baby just had a baby. His wife just had a baby not long ago and we can provide that sort of level of that expertise that Danny's got to our coaches and to our athletes as well. So he takes that travel out. He does the way about that and he still gets to do what he loves. Great. I think it's a great career option for people. I mean, I took that option fairly early on 15 years ago to say, right, no, this youth space is what I can see me doing. Enjoy it, passionate about it, but you're right. I think it does give you, you know, I think of what I used to get in the school setting. You know, all my coaching hours were between nine and 330. I still have to do some after-school stuff. I take kids to games and things like that, but that was all part of the fun. But yeah, home in the evening from my family, earning a solid salary in UK terms, penchant, 13 weeks of holiday a year. There's some big positives for it. If you've got a family and it's a place where you can do what you love and still have some of your life outside that. I think in the private space on the boss, we don't get 13 weeks holiday. No, of course, but yeah, at the moment, we do two mornings a week for about an hour and a half, two hours a morning, because again, most of our athletes are kids. So we always stress the importance of sleep and it's like, we don't actually want you to live in here every day. There are times we've had athletes walk in and kids walk in and you can just see that they're just dent. Absolutely cooked. And it's like, you look at them and you see their body language is like, no, mate, you got recovery today, like, there's no point. We're going to get you fresh. We're going to freshen you up. Have a laugh, have some jokes with everybody. Relax, then we can go out of here. But yeah, we're there usually about three, three early in the afternoon. Our first session starts at quarter to four, because we want to have time for the kids to get home from school, decompress, have some food, get changed, you know. These stress from the day of school, and come to training. Basically every hour after that is when our session starts. We hear a little bit lenient on when they have to then it have to be there at a quarter to the hour every time. But it sort of gives them some sort of time frame that that is when that session will sort of start. But again, all our athletes have individual programs. So it's sort of more about helps with that flow. Well, like I said before, around the room, if they do get in with a certain amount of time, we know that they're where they should be and then what they're doing at that sort of time. So you described some of you guys have got that junior development experience, AFL, ALEG, that sort of thing. What have you and the team had to adapt in your coaching from your experiences at say a higher level, maybe slightly older athletes to now working with some of the younger athletes with not a junior elite level. Let's use that, I don't necessarily like that term, but, you know. Yeah, to be honest, I think it's probably education. I think I know where you go and correct me if I'm wrong with you. So I think it's education is a lot of them will come in seeing what they see on social media and thinking that that's what they should be doing. And for us, it's not just education. Sometimes it's the parents as well. Yeah, he was part of it. Yeah, so a lot of the ones that which we do with a lot of young soccer players. And if you look at the training loads of some of these young soccer player kids, for us, we sort of explain to the parents is, look, well, they're here. We're just going to make them resilient enough to deal with that training load that they're dealing with outside of here, because they may be part of a specialist, like at what we call an NPL club, which is a top tier soccer team. And then if they're in that team, then generally, they're probably at a sports school as well. So they might be training in the morning with their school team, training in the afternoon with their NPL team, they do that two days a week, or like Monday, Tuesday, then four sessions. Then they might say, but then we have a morning off, so we'll go and do a private school session. And then it's like, yeah, okay, that's great. But then you'll play soccer on Thursday for the school, Friday for the school, then you might have to play soccer on Saturday and Sunday as well as train Friday night. So if you look at it, these kids are doing this massive amount of volume. And the parents don't realise that that's probably not what you want to be doing with these kids. It's probably a bit of a crude sort of explanation, but I've always said, okay, so if I give you two used cars, it might be a Porsche or something like that. When they're five or six years old, one has 300,000 Ks on it, one has 100,000 Ks on it. They're the same price. Which car are you buying? Everyone goes, 100,000 Ks. So why are you putting so much volume into these kids? At a young age, when that can actually, we can make them more physical resilient. We can improve the chassis, we can improve the engine, we can tune up the motor. Like, this is what SNC and long-term athlete development does. You know, this is part of what coaches we want to try and do with these kids. Not just keep, oh, train more, train more, train more. And I think it's one of those things I see a lot, especially in junior soccer or football that's sort of known around the world. Yeah, I think that's common in the football space. Certainly, to be honest, I think it's common in youth sport, once you get to that level where you've been picked up. And it's, you're in a sport, but getting pulled from pillar to post by two or three different organizations or representative levels. That's the issue of no one. In my experience, I think it's done better in certain places now, but I used to feel, none of those people were talking to one another. And actually, someone in your position then becomes really important because you're sort of on the shoulder of the parent who's been thrust into this unknowingly and unwittingly unprepared to be a high performance manager for their, for their child. For their child? And they don't understand the training load, and they don't understand that there's probably, at some point, some sessions that are much higher priority than others if you actually want to go on and progress. And I think the analogy you said there about what how much mileage do you want on the car? I think it's a really, I think it's a really good one because I've seen lots of kids who've been great early on and just either burn out, get injured. I remember we had one kid who was playing 63 rugby games a season across four, I think it was school, country, local club, academy, and Mum and Dad were like, why does he keep getting injured? It's like, well, I mean, he's a mature physical player who likes contact and he's doing that 63 times a year, even the pros are not doing that kind of volume. That's right, that's right. We have one of those kids, he's a young kid, he plays rugby and plays rugby league, so he'll do Saturday and Sunday. And then he makes all the rep teams. And his dad is a very switched on guy and he's very open to what we sort of say, and there'll be times where we're always very open with our parents and we always say to our kids, if they have a big week, you need to let us know. We will adjust based on the information that you give us. And he has said that this kid, Benji, he's got players in his team that go elsewhere and he goes, they are always injured. He goes, but Benji does more than them, but because he comes here and you manage what he does, he can actually do those representative games and get through what he needs to do. And then even we're not, you know, adverse to reaching out to coaches. So we have, we might get a group of kids that are in the one team. We'll actually reach, I'll ring that soccer coach and I'll ask the parent, look, are you happy for me to contact, you know, little Billy's coach and I'll introduce myself. I'll explain what we do. And then I've got to have coffee with other coaches from these representatives. And look, this is what I'm doing. This is what my goal is to keep this kid on the pitch. That's it. Because that's where he gets his playing time. That's where he gets selected for these teams. That's where he wants to do. We just want to make them physically resume enough to stay there. So from that, here's my number. If there's anything you need from us in regards to, hey, for example, he didn't play this week or hey, look, I had to play more than usual. We've had a pity rough week. Just think me, what's that? Freak me a message. And I'll adjust his program. Like, I think the ability to reach out to to coaches. And, you know, when I did that the first time, the coach was blowing away. He thought I've never had anyone actually contact me and say, look, what do you need? Or you see this player more than me. I, like I said, I see them in the gym. I don't actually get to see them on the training page. What do you need me to provide you? And, you know, if that comes back to once I've had approval from the parents, I can share some testing results with them. Now, here's how they are testing. Here's our screens. Here's what we've done. You know, this is what we're working on. This box, you know, is only you need me to do. And that always seems to get a little bit more buying from those coaches as well. And the parents that have realized are, like I said, you've said it before. A lot of them are inadequately prepared to be a high performance manager of their kids sport. So if we can sort of help guide them and explain to them, well, this is what needs to happen. You need to have people communicating. If you need to have a WhatsApp group that includes little Timmy's, you know, NPL coach, little Timmy's football school soccer coach or his teacher at school and yourself and us because we're all there together. It's, it becomes a, you know, it takes a village. It's not just, you know, I'm, I'm here. He's got to do my programs and this is it. No, no, no, no, but he wants to play sport. Let him play sport. We want to keep them playing sport because that's what they love doing. Let's, we want to keep them doing that. Yeah, position. Yeah, education is massive and explaining that. And even football Australia recently released some guidelines in and around how often people should train it. How much gaps they should have between training sessions. And I thought, oh, this is unreal. I did a little social media post and fictored out. I had TD's ring me. So technical drill is going, how the hell did you get this? And we don't get it. But we haven't been told anything of this. I said, oh, well, it's basically because it's my job to know this. So it's up and it's up that I've been, you know, sprouting for ages is that it's sometimes it's better to have a day off and come and do recovery, you know. But again, even in that, I did notice that they said they, they on the days off they can do strength and conditioning. But it didn't say it needs to be within a credit to strength and conditioning coach. So I said, I can see what's going to happen. A lot of these private coaches now going to say, oh, yeah, we do S&C or we do speed and we do agility at the start of our session and give me $150 for the hour. It's like, well, you know, where do you go with that? But obviously, like you said before, people try to make money out of it. And for us, it's more of a passion and I think it's something that if we do well, then the money will come later. Yeah, and I mean, that's why I want to have these conversations with guys like yourself and running these programs and doing it the right way, in terms of the people that they've got in the places that they're running it in the programs because I think it's really important for people to hear what good is because I don't think it's clear to the, the people that are making these investments in these coaches in these programs, like we said, the parents, they're not necessarily able to differentiate what good is. I think what you've said there, I mean, in terms of how you're communicating, you know, making the effort to meet the people that are involved in developing these kids. I think what's happened, what a great way to just link up and connect with people because the issue is, is those people generally, if they're, you know, between the school, the club and the academy, they're busy in their own rights. They've got their blinkers on for their outcomes and their objectives for their team, or teams, if they're dealing with multiple, and they don't necessarily automatically get into the weeds of an individual athlete and what that load looks like outside of it. And I think the other thing, haven't mentioned in there in terms of those bits that we described is, I mean, I know an Australia P and Games is also, you know, another layer to that that they'll be, they'll be doing so. Yes, huge. I think sometimes it's, it's probably one of those things that coaches get, get some of them do is, they let the egos get in the way. And for me, it's not about egos. Like I said, I want what's best for these kids. Like I said, I want to see, and I'll get, no, I'll get so much joy, especially if I get, you know, a Saturday or a Sunday of like a swing pass, one of the kids, and watch, even watch first half of their game before I go and boot to someone else's and actually see them, when the kids see you there and see, hold on, he's come down and watch me play. Like I might not be able to be there for the whole game, but that's, you know, it sort of shows that investment in, hey, look, I'm around and I want to know what you, I want to know what's best for you. I want to know what works and what doesn't work. And I'm happy to say that, like I said, I'm not a soccer coach or I'm not a football coach. I'm a performance coach. I can make you a better athlete, but it's up to you and your soccer or your football coach to make you the better player. And I think sometimes like, we let ego get in the road, but any other day, we want to lift these kids up. We want these kids to get better at what they do. Yeah, that's the best way to do it. I think you're right. I mean, I think a lot of, not every coach, but some coaches do get wrapped up in winning the local age group league or the, the big thing back home for us when we were kids playing rugby was the county cup under 15 and under 16 was just like the biggest thing in some of these guys, you know, parent coaches lives. And it was like, I put it on LinkedIn. Screaming and chatting. Yeah, screaming and shouting and, you know, in, I remember, some of them is so emotional when we did, you know, have a, have a big game that got us to the final. Yeah, they've got a lot wrapped up in it, but what you've described is a very athlete centered approach. But I think for a lot of the people that fall into coaching on a voluntary basis, they lose sight of that individual and it's more about the team and the team doing well and achieving this outcome that they've attached. Obviously, a lot of valuable. And it's hard to, and I get that, like I said, there might be the time that little Johnny wants to go and play football or play rugby league and there's no coach available, so a dad will step up and, and they, and you know, they said they think that they're doing nothing and God love them for doing it. But it's that. Oh, God, yeah. Wouldn't, wouldn't, it doesn't happen with them. Does it? They are so important to do it. That whole group of team, well, the whole group of kids don't get to play without a coach, but sometimes I think like I said, we could probably do better in providing an education or providing that thing and here's what you need to do and this is how we can help. Yeah, I agree. And it's an education group right there. Yeah, it is an education piece. And the voluntary coaches are the lifeblood of sport in, in the grassroots levels, it's the education and getting them to understand a more long term approach to thinking about what they're doing with their team. It's not just winning at the weekend. It's not just winning this year. It's how do we develop this team over a number of years? And yes, winning is a part of that journey, but yeah, it's how you position it. But I think when, when they're coming from a voluntary position and, I think this is where it becomes important to pursue the coaching badges. If you are going to do those things, even if it's a level one or a level two in, you know, rugby, I remember doing my level one in rugby, I've got 2007. And there's some great things that you learn in that. Those basic horses. So if any, any parent coaches are listening, we'd encourage you to, to either do that, whether it's a level one in, we're happy to say that everyone suffers from that imposterous syndrome, you know, you don't think it, but there's, reach out. There's people that always help, people that are always free to, you know, have a coffee and sit down and say, have you thought of this and let's help with this. But exactly what you're saying, it's that long-term athlete, development program. That's the whole framework is, and that's sort of what we look at is some of the kids and that we've got kids of ours at the moment that are sort of starting to lean towards when they go to uni is being an SNC coach. It's like, beautiful. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll employ you, like we'll give you some of us. We've got a lot of uni students. We're doing a lot of ACA hours where we're going, yeah, come and, we'll show you what we do, like, and we'll build you up. But that, that would be perfect. We'd love to have someone that's come through our program, through our system gone unplayed, done what they need to do and eventually they want to come back because we want to give back to that community. The more educations are put out there, the better it comes back for us. Yeah, for sure. So touch, you know, you've touched on long-term athlete development and frameworks. You described your fundamentals being your first stage of your program. What does your framework look like beyond fundamentals? So once the sort of, we're deemed that they're, they're okay to sort of move into that, that the weight space will actually start lifting. We sort of follow up, you know, we always push for that we're an athletic development program. So we will always have some sort of component of speed, agility, some sort of movement quality in there. Because basically we wanted to sort of say, look, we don't need you to be the best in the gym. We want you to be best at what you do and that'll be out on the field. So when you talk about designing a program, generally I like to follow the tier system by Joe Ken and have a framework built in and around that, where I will have, you know, your movement prep, your pliers, your med balls, depending on the level of athlete, where they need to go, we'll be at the start of that. They'll move into their different tiers and their blocks based on where they are with that. And then from that, like I said, it'll be dependent on, again, are they getting enough conditioning at their own place? If they're not getting conditioning, we will provide that for them. But yeah, I just think that I like the tier system at the moment, especially at this age group and this sort of development sort of space is because there's no one focused. It's not a, you know, an all day lower split or an all day upper split. It's basically your work each tier, each day. And we can focus on one element and that's the priority for that day. But we also find that that doesn't make them that sore the next day and there's not that dorms that they can't go into their other training session and compete as well. Or they can't, now they're too sorted to go and train or they can't go and do that activity because, you know, I've done squats, lunges, deadlifts, you know, hax squats, step ups all on one day. Not relevant for our kids. It's sort of more of a, we want them to have fun. And I just think that that tier system has become very easy for us to sort of manage. And we know that this is your main box today. It might be a lot of body tier, tier one. That's where we go with our effort and we have armor box built into that and we have to have build them out from there. Yeah. Could you, for anyone who's listening that isn't familiar with the tier system and I'm one of those people who's not that clear on it. So could you just explain that system and how it works? Okay, so basically if you look at it simply enough, you'll have three tiers. You've got a lower upper and total. Now, if we split that across a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, tier one on day one would be, for example, upper tier two is lower and then you're finished with a total body. That's the three main list, for example. Okay. When you obviously on the Wednesday, then you've swapped that out. The lower would be the first tier. Total body would be the second tier and upper body would be the third tier and then obviously on the, on the Friday, total body goes to the top. I think it was upper and then it was lower. So basically you just rotate through those three. Generally, you can sort of say that you might have your strength block and you'll have a sort of weight range that's about 80% to 100% of your max and then you might have your repeated effort block would be from 60 to 80% of your max and then you work through that and then obviously we'll adjust to have a power block. We'll have a strength block. We'll have a repeated effort block. Now, we do more than generally just those three exercises, but that's probably the simplest way to explain it is that you work out your entire body every day, but your block at the top will always change. So, for example, Monday could be upper body, Wednesday, lower body and then Friday is your total body block. That's your main block for the day and everything else becomes like an accessory type of an exercise, depending on how you want it to program. And again, you might have strength first and then a power block, depending on the phase of where you want. You might put the power block first, then the strength, then the repeated effort and it sort of works in and that one. But yeah, it's one of those ones that Joe Kean has released the book on it. I think I'm pretty sure if you google it, it'll come up. There's some other power points on it. There's a few in there. We've actually expanded a little bit. We've also got other streams in there, so we'll have a single leg stream, we'll have a hinge, we'll have a lower back, we'll have things like that we'll put in there as well, just to make it more, I guess, complete in regards to our older sort of athletes as they get a little bit more advanced, especially in the preseason or the offseason, but yeah, that just becomes a nice easy way for those kids to make sure that when they come in, we know that they're getting everything covered for them. Yeah, that doesn't mean that they're all doing the same exercises. I mean, you know how many different variations of squat there are, but it'll be basically pitched towards their level. And then I'll see again, we'll have at the start, we will have, you know, the movement prep, some plyos, some med ball, some running drills. Yeah, and it just feels that like a program. I've always heard that program. And then those things come before and then feed into the tier system applied to strength. My understanding like, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I always, one of those ones, and it's quite, I think that Lauren Landau taught me and I'll sort of explain it this way, is that we'll always do some sort of athletic movement like, you know, acceleration drills, top-end speed drills, change in direction at the start, because I'm always at the end if we get five minutes of that in, it's, you know, you get doses of venom to become tolerant to snake bite. And that's what we want to do. We can plot that in and we can put that in. And then I've always said that the way we've sort of set up the tier system that we've got at the moment and through our exercise programming software is, I can provide the skeleton and then all you do is you just add the muscles or add the meat onto that skeleton and hold it out that way. And like I said, for the kids, they sort of know that flow. They get into that ribbon. This is my main lift or this is my power block and we explain. This is where you need to move fast. This is where we're going to focus on this. This is our strength effort today. This is where we need to knuckle down, concentrate, get our technique right, and this is a heavy exercise. And then we always finish without what I call armor, which is, you know, and again, it might be, you know, if they've done a push up or they've done bench press, they might have some sort of rotator cuff work in there. We call it armor because if we call it an accessory, they're all not going to do that. But armor gives a lot to armor. Well, armor builds your body. This spots keeps you doing what you're doing. Yeah, cleverly marketing it. Definitely about accessories. We want the kids to buy into it. And that's we call it armor. What do you mean by armor? Well, that's like your, you know, you're not in armor. That's what you're going to put on your gear. You go to, now you put a mouthguard into play rugby or it's the same thing. This is what keeps you doing that. This is your armor. This is your body armor. This is how you build that. Yeah. No, I think that's a great way to do it. I think you're starting immediately. You've got a conversation piece then around it. What does that mean? Yeah, exactly. Your tier system bit is then almost your engine. You've got your engine. You've got your armor. Yeah. Yep. I like it. I like it. You build it off. But yeah, I'm more than happy. If you want to, I can give you a code for my fundamentals program. And people will be able to download that as well. Yeah, awesome. I'll put a little thing. I'll set up on our, I'll use bridge athletic. I'll set up on bridge and I can give that out. And they can have a look how we do our fundamentals. That'd be cool. Yeah, I think that would be great to share that and you'll sort of see how we do it. And that's our basic fundamentals. And if you want more than happy to give you a sample of what our pop up tier system would look like and give you some people some ideas of that. Yeah. They can give you one that they can play around with. Awesome. Yeah. Maybe we can tell what maybe we could set it up as a bit of a blog on the RTD network page and people can listen into the podcast and then they can download the resource. That'd be awesome. Yeah, let's, let's aim to do that off the back of this. That'd be, that'd be great. So yeah, I mean, go. Sorry. I just think, like I said, for us, I think that really works really well. Firstly, for our younger kids, they work through the fundamentals. We can have a minimum of, you know, four, three to four exercises that they need to focus on, especially when they're getting started. And it's, you know, it's generally give them a percentage range. Again, we don't do one, I'm testing, but we talk about in RPAs, this should take you about 80%. So I mean, you've got two or three left in the tank. And it's, they can sort of understand that until they get to the point where we need to do one, I'm testing as they get older, but that's obviously most of our kids a long way down the track. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's great for people to hear, though, in itself, that there's three to four key exercises that they need to do. And for what you've described to do, they need to do them really well. And then they can progressively load them from now. I'm training my, my eldest son, he's 14 at the moment. We're just doing some bits and pieces from home with some dumbbells and things. And we do four exercises once he's through the warm up stuff. A squat, a push, a lunge, and a pull on repeat. And just watching it. Yeah, exactly. And it's just more we're doing it in the, in the home, in the bedroom space at the moment, because it's baking hot outside in Dubai, to the point where we're not able to do so much of that other stuff. But yeah, definitely. Like you say, a loaded carry, a bit of core work. And you've got the, the, the fundamentals or foundations of a good program. But I think what you've said there as well, the dynamic work, the speed, the agility, the, the, the plyos, the medals, those things, they've got to be in there around that as well. And I think that's one of the things that I probably see more going out on the social media pieces. You see people doing the strength training. But are they doing those really explosive movements, the stretchortment, cycle actions, getting in that bit of the program? I think people are less, less familiar with people in the gym, they're comfortable lifting, they're comfortable getting that client's lifting, but maybe they've not had that exposure to some of those other training domains. That's right. And to be able to tell a kid that I need you to Hulk smash, Hulk smash this med ball through the floor. Yeah. Or, or, or, hey, throw this through my wall. Yeah. We've got the little speed sleds that we put a little bit of sandbag in there. Okay, we're going to run with this, and they think, Oh, this is the best thing ever. Like, you know, I'm, I'm doing what the big kids do. Or I see, you know, some of our older kids sprinting with these and I get to do the same thing, but it's at my level. It's like, oh, yeah, but I'm doing the same guy. This is the best. But you're right, it's, it's one of those things that we want to look at. It's an athletic performance program. So, we have to improve athletic performance. And the reason we do that is by, again, giving them little bits of everything and dialing that in. So across the course of a 12 week program, they may have spent two hours doing speed. If they're doing five or 10 minutes, or, you know, each, each session, well, it adds up every time that's going to add up. Yeah. What, so I mean, I think what you've described in terms of the strength training, it's pretty clear. Your progression is from bodyweight towards towards barbell. Could you maybe just talk us through what your progressions look like within one of those other domains, the plyometrics and the medicine ball work? Yep. So for our players, we always want to teach them to land first. So basically, I've got the saying that, you know, what's a formula one car without brakes is just a go car. All right. So we want to teach them to land first. So it's, you know, as you're told of short landings, it's, you know, from, you know, tall to two feet, tall to short to two feet, tall to short to one foot. And it might be a little altitude landing offer, you know, the smallest ply box that you have. Can you land on two feet? Can you jump and spin around and land properly? We talk about athletic position with our kids. So we actually get them to stand up tall and we want push them on the shoulder and say, oh, see how you took a step. See how you're off balance. If you can drop your body weight, get into position where I push you and you don't move, that's how we want you to move. That's your athletic position. That's how you start. That's how you land. That's how you take off if you need to change direction. That's how you guard somebody or if someone attack us running at you, that's how you need to get a position to defend. So we basically start at nice and small with the mid balls. It might be, we'll start them on their knees. So they take the legs out of it. So they need to rotate through the hips. We'll actually break it down from there. This is not an arm exercise. This is a core. This is a trunk. We want you to make sure that when you rotate, you rotate from your belly. You know, depending on age of the kid, we're talking about it. You can't shoot a cannon from a canoe. This bit from here to here to be nice and strong so that when you do go and progress on and do other stuff, this becomes a lot easier for you. You've got the basics, right? That stuff will be easy. I mean, there are always, I think I've mentioned you before, is that, you know, the young kids come in. They might be 12, 13-year-old boys. Everybody wants the bench press. Everyone wants the bench press. All right. We've got a little box of actual dog squeaky toys we got from the hardware store, where they've got to put that under their chest. They've got to do three sets of pushups and they've got to squeak that dog toy 10 times each time they get their three sets of 10. Okay. Now you can do bench press, but we always start with the basic introduction first. So it's, you know, the simple stuff, it's wall drills. It's holding the position in an acceleration position. A lot of kids don't have the hip flexor strength to actually hold it up. And you can sit there and you can watch them do that. You can watch from the from the back and you see that they'll drop their hip or they'll they'll collapse through the trunk to try to get their leg up. They'll make a compensation to make that happen. Okay. We dial them back. This is what we need you to do. This is what it needs to look like. And all of a sudden they sort of start to clue in, okay, this is what I need to work on. And I think we at some point we we end up underestimating how good our kids are at picking stuff up in regards to we sort of put limitations on them and they're never going to get this. But I think most of the kids will surprise you if you give them the time, you give them the knowledge and you let them practice and they'll get there. But yeah, we always start with the basics first and we build up from that. So it's not the, you know, the how you're going to do three jumps on here and then jump spin 360 land on a box. It's like, no, no, we're going to drop it down. We're going to land first. Once you get that, we might do some bounds, do some lateral bounds, some 45 degree bounds. But yeah, we break it down very simply. The beauty of, and again, of the exercise programming software that I use is you can actually put progressions and regressions in there. On the gym floor on the iPad, I can sit there and say, James Baker, he did that really well. Okay, let's try this one and I can just swap it to the next level. That's great. And it can jump straight back. And then at the end, I can go and look into your program and I'll tell you what exercises I changed in and out. So once they do finish their thunder or we deem it there, hey, they've got these fundamentals right. We can start writing them a program. I can go back and look at well, for a squat pattern, what did he get to? And he goes, he's up to a front squat. Beautiful. We can start with a front squat now. We don't need to go through, you know, the goblets. It's like, we'll just go straight to front squat because that's where he's at. Yeah, I started to get there. I started writing a few things down the other day for for some of them I'm working on and you know, around what we need our coaches at this sort of level to have. And one of the pillars was clear framework for progression and regression for all your exercises and all your domains. How deliberate have you been about mapping that out or is it just something you have in your head? Emigods, when I watch them do it and when I decide, or do I have like the criteria they need to hit to make it? Yeah, I mean in terms of, yeah, I guess what would your criteria be for progression and regression? That would be one question. But have you been deliberate in mapping out within your software or on a whiteboard somewhere for you and your coaches? What the progressions are within each of those exercise categories? It's been that long since I've done it. I think I have, I was deliberate when I did it in regards to that. In regards to it, you know, obviously body weight is first. For a squat can you physically do a body weight? And from that I'm looking for again, what does it look like? Can they maintain core control? Are they rocking forward to their toes? Is their hips collapsing? Is there, you know, are their knees caving in? And it could be as simple as it might be, again, a lot of the kids we've got, they've never been trained before. It might be a coaching cue that they need, that they can instantly fix that. It could be how you spread the floor with your feet, try to pretend in this mat. I want you to rip the mat apart. All of a sudden the knees stop collapsing. Beautiful. It could be that they lean forward. Are they leaning forward because they could trunk control? Or is it a, you know, is it tight hit flexes? It could be, you know, hold this med ball or hold this kettlebell, hold it in front like a trophy. Can you do it now? And all of a sudden if they do it, okay, beautiful. It's a tick in the box. So for us, it's more around that, I guess that visual recognition of what it should look like. And then queuing the athlete or the young kid in how to do that properly. Yeah. That's where your coaches got to have. And this is where the accreditation comes in and is really important. And I think this is what we're seeing in these other videos and things that pop up on social media. You've got coach who has a technical model, but it's not quite good enough or they don't have the skills. They know the technical model, but they can't see it and correct it. And I think alongside your progressions and regressions, having coaches that can correctly identify errors and correct errors with either what you've described. A physical fix of, you know, a weight or a dumbbell or whatever it is to fix it or be able to give that queue. And I think that is such a critical skill for the youths and sea coaches to develop and not. And from what you've described, you guys obviously do it really well because you know you can't overcoat that. You just blow their brains with technical points. So yeah, two critical things there, I think progression, regression and for each of those progression and regressions, understanding what? Why, and why you don't despise it? Yeah. And what looks good. And like I said, we want our kids to enjoy being there. So we don't want to constantly be on them and saying, you know, good at this. And you will see the kids that are perfectionists. And they sort of really get down on themselves if they can't nail it the first time. And it might be the option that, hey, listen, not everyone is good at this. We're going to help you get it right. And then once you get it right, we can move on. And they're the other ones that will sort of, you know, they'll do it. And it's just a breeze for them. But we do get, you know, and especially with, it's just the joys of coaching, you get that very wide bandwidth of who you get and what they can do and what they can't do. And it's finding that sort of middle ground in regards to where we can move you on and where we can just hold you back just a little bit because I need you to get this right. How do you manage that with kids that, from what you've described, you get groups that are very talented within their sports? Do you find that some of the talented kids in their sports struggle with some of this physical stuff? How do they react to being held back? Because I find that I had kids who were like, I had a couple of one lad, he was almost in tears because he just had to stay on the incline press up versus his mate who he perceived not to be as good a sportsman as him because he was, you know, technically the best player on the park. How do you get that? Again, I think it comes back to that sort of is that coaching is about connection. I was about building that connection and that relationship with the kids. And knowing that, you know, I can walk into the gym and not, you know, they know that we better not muck around because mix here. But then I can also have a little bit of a joke with them and sort of say, hey, what about, you know, that sort of is an important part. But regardless though you mentioned having a good kid come in, sometimes it might be not just showing them but also showing the parent because a lot of times the parent is the one investing in this kid and they want to, they want to see results and it might be, well, why is it Johnny getting up to this though? And I might say them, okay, come on, I want to have a show. And when we do our fundamentals, we always offer that first session that the parent can watch and we are not treating that. So that's heavily coached. And we'll actually explain to them what I'm seeing or what we as coaches are seeing because sometimes that might lead to asking to a question. So we had a, I'll give you two examples. And if I forget one, make sure I remind me, but we had a young soccer player that came in and he plays for an A. Lee club at a development like an MPL level, young kid, he's the captain of the team, couldn't do a single lead squad at all to save his life. And I was like, okay, so if he's running nine, 10 Ks a game, but physically he cannot balance on one leg and have a movement that's that's strong enough to support that one leg, that is a problem. And straight away, the light went off on his dad, okay, yeah, I see what you're talking about now, like this is a big problem. You know, okay, got that one. We had another young kid came in that was an AFL player and it wasn't me that saw this. I had one of our other coaches will thank him for this. And he goes, can you just watch what his hip does here? And we're watching him has gone, yeah, that's not right. It was like like a corkscrew type of an action. And again, I talk about ego at the point where I know I can sort of do a certain extent, but there's certain things that I can't do. So I'm happy to refer to someone who can do that. So I rang a physio friend of mine. I said, listen, I've got this kid here. There's something that either we're not seeing or there's something that we're missing out on here. You know, and I said, do you have if the yet fleet send him over? So I said, look, to his dad, look, and I showed his dad as well. Look, this is, and he goes, yeah, I've never noticed that before either. And it's, okay, well go and see this. I said, look, it could be something that yeah, we could fix with, you know, some some strength training or it could be something that underline that we're not aware of, that we need to be aware of. That's yep, sweet. I'll take it. So he took him to see this physio. He only came back in two days ago. You know, it is one of his legs is 15 mil shorter than the other. So when he does it, obviously, that throws his hips out, which leads you. Oh, beautiful. Now we've got a solution to the problem. And then the physio rang me to say, ah, this is the problem. He goes, yeah, he goes, we couldn't see it either until I, oh, yeah, that's it. I took the measurements. I was going, I was seeing what you're seeing going, maybe a little bit more in depth into this, but that's his expertise. And obviously, he fed that back to me. We've got that relationship. We said, okay, yeah, beautiful. He's got the little heels in there. He's going to get orthotics and he'll be fine. But something that like I said, one of our coaches will saw and said, hey, could you look at this? And I was like, yeah, that's got me stumped. But his dad had no clue. They weren't aware of it. But now, obviously, that would have effected him later on if we just ignored that and continued to go on and, you know, load that deficit. Then, obviously, that's going to be a problem. He's going to have hip issues and he's going to have issues that we're not going to be able to deal with. So I think that becomes important as well. He's getting them into sort of say, this is what we're seeing. You're investing in your son. We're also going to be invested in your son or your daughter. So we want to show you what we're seeing. And then all of a sudden, they can see, okay, now I know why you're doing this. Yeah. Having it clear, being open and clear about what your criteria is around an exercise, why someone should progress or not progress. And I think once you can, similar situation with this Lado, I was holding back on the push-ups who was getting frustrated. Wanted to take him the time to say, well, these are the things that you have to do. Showed him a little video of his push-up in a in my position when he tried to do it on the floor. And then he was like, okay, started to get it. I think, like you say, taking the time to explain is a critical part to the to the parent or to the to the athlete in front of you, to get in them to understand why they're doing something and what the rush and hour behind it, we don't want you to get injured doing this exercise. I think the only really important thing you mentioned there, and again, maybe someone's listening to this who's setting up one of these programs, knowing the limit of your expertise and scope of practice as a strength and conditioning coach and having local providers that you can go to that can give you that expertise. Is it really, really important? And it's building those relationships, too, that, you know, again, when it's not an ego thing, we want what's best for the athlete, and if you're not going to be an athlete centered civilly or, you know, want to deal with long-term athletes and deal with young kids, then that's what you sort of need to do, like it's a no-brainer. And then even with, we provide, you know, full vowed performance testing for our kids, but we don't do it straight away, because I can say to the parent, look, I could sell you the magic snake oil and have your son or daughter come in here, I'll test them straight away, put them through four weeks and test them again and go, look how good I've got them, but they've come from nothing, and they've done something, they're going to get better. I said, I'd rather them dial in, get everything right, get them to the point where they can start lifting for a week or two, and they're good, now we'll test them, because now that gives us more of an accurate picture of what we need to improve, as opposed to, we'll test them straight away. And again, depending on the age of the kid, if they do have a lifting background, yes, we'll probably test them. If they come from a program that I know they've been doing stuff like this before, I'll test them straight away. But generally, we wait a little bit before we put them through the testing, because I want it to be accurate. I don't want them to have this base level that is so poor, that, oh, we need to work on everything. I know I need to work on everything, because I haven't done anything before. All the buckets are empty. Correct. That's where they need to get to. First, then we can test where the hole is, and pull that, and then patch that hole in that leaky bucket. But again, that comes down to that education, that communication with the parents and the athletes too, because again, everyone's invested in the same thing. Again, the parents, generally, the one that's going to be providing the funds to do this sort of training. They're the ones cooking the meals too. So when we sit there and say at the start, when they do their little well-being screen of, have you drunk enough water today? Have you eaten right? Have you slept enough? And if they don't slide it far enough, again, that starts that conversation from the coach to the athlete. Well, why aren't you drinking water? It's now summer in Australia. If you don't start drinking water, your performance is going to decline. Anything up 2% decrease in your body weight free of water, it has a significant impact on how well you can run and how far you can run. You need to maintain your hydration. And that's that, oh, okay. And all of a sudden, they're sort of starting to take some responsibility in and around what they do and how they do it. Because they need to slide across and record what they're doing, what they've done. And some of the parents said, yeah, it could be an admired leader chat with a parent is that, listen, he's not drinking water. Do we know why? He doesn't like water. Okay. Well, what can we give him? Oh, yeah. Let's look at some other stuff. Can we put a little bit of cordial in there? Sugar free cord? Just put a drop in there or put some strawberries in the water. I don't know. What does he like? Give him something that will help them overcome that I don't drink water. Well, let's find a way to make it happen. Yeah. Just picking up on one of the things that you've mentioned a couple of times through here. Maybe this will be the, we'll do, maybe this is the last section to wrap up the podcast. You've mentioned testing. You've mentioned using valve equipment and things. What's your philosophy around testing? And what's your, what are the tests that you do within the catalysts program? What are your common tests? I'm sure you want lots of variations, but the core. Absolutely. So Jim, we will have our typical the counter movement jump. We'll do a mid-fire pull. We'll do a drop jump. We'll do foot and that's probably basically, we'll do the norboard as well. So we have it, like you said, we have a set group of testing that we do for everybody. But then we also have the ability that, you know, if a rugby league player comes in, we'll look at doing the ash test and we'll do some some shoulder work for him. Our soccer players, we might spend a little bit more time on the calves, the groins, the hamstrings in the fourth frame. So generally, we have our key ones that we will do for everybody, but then we have spin-off ones which will do, you know, based on previous injury history or their sport profile and what their general injuries in that sport would be. So when you ask us, do we have a dedicated test protocol at the moment? I'd probably say not yet to be brutally honest. It's more around, we'll do the basics on what we've got access to and then it's from more of, okay, well, let's look at and it could be a discussion with the parent. What injuries have I had before? Where are they deficient? And we'll design the test based in and around that and that way we've got something to track as we go through. So testing wise, probably something that to be honest, we need to improve on and I'm happy to say that is that it's one of those things that, you know, there's that mini test that you can do, especially with the valve stuff now. It's, you know, it's dialing in and sitting down and going, well, what are the basic ones that we can do? And I think we've got that right, but obviously then, like I said, we've got so many different athletes come in, it's like, well, we can't really have a testing battery that's just for them. It might have, here's your rugby league testing battery. Here's your dance testing battery. Here's your gymnast testing battery. Here's your net ball testing battery. So there'll be some sort of crossovers, but a lot of times it's like, more as we treat that person as an individual, watch your previous history, watch your injury, history of life. What's the injury markers for that sport? And then what are we seeing on the gym four that we might need to dive a little bit more into and try to find a solution for and go from there? I'm hoping that sort of answers your question. So yeah, probably, I think that's probably, probably one thing that we probably need to dial in a little bit more on, but like I said, for us, the coaching bit is the fundamentals we're dealing with at the moment. And that's sort of an extra one that will come into that. And as we grow and get better, I think we'll, and the more tests that we do, we'll generally have some sort of norms that will start to peel out and go, hey, this is what we really need to focus on for us. Yeah, 100%. I think the too many people are too focused too much on the testing and the data before getting their coaching right. I'd much rather hear that someone's trying to get the coaching and engagement and movement stuff right and iterating on both processes over time than, you know, I see too many examples, particularly in this part of the world where they're people are saying they're going to test all these things and then we're going to build this program. It's like, like you say, all the buckets are pretty empty with this young athlete. Yeah, we've got Phil, we've got Philip. They need to become familiar with the test. I think for one of the things I like to do when I think about testing is start to describe the population with those tests, look up, like you say, what are the relevant tests for the sport and then gradually start to filter out, well, what actually matters to that sport and yeah, we might do a lot of tests to begin with, but I'll give you an example. I was working in athletics and we had a battery of probably 10 to 12 field tests and, you know, CMJ and all of that. We cut it back to four in the end by a process of elimination because some of the things were not predictive of performance or they were not appropriate because of the skill level of the kids in terms of, say, some of the bounding type movements in the climatic field tests and we were just like, you know what, that doesn't, it's not giving us a good reflection of it, but it takes time. And that, you know, that was a five year process of refining refining that testing bit. One of the places I used to work out before is that we used to have a 40 meter sprint and a vertical jump and I got to the point where I said, why are we doing a 40 meter sprint because the risk of injury of people that have never sprinted for however many weeks or ever to be honest and we want them to run as fast as they can or the ones that generally jump higher generally run faster. So I haven't seen anyone get hurt doing a vertical jump yet, but I've seen plenty of hamstrings and calves and stuff. Let's scrap the 40 and just use the vertical jump. Yeah, it's not ideal for, oh yeah, but we want a little Johnny from A to B, but I don't want little Johnny to be out of training for six weeks. Yeah, yeah. Well that, we actually did what you described something very similar. We used to do CMJ and sprint very early in the GPP part of the season for our young track and field guys and in the end what we said was, we'll jump test in week three or four, but we'll do a full battery of tests at the end of GPP when they've got some running, they've done some technical sprinting work, they've progressed their distances from shorter 0 to 15 meters out towards that and then we're actually capturing something that probably reflects more accurately their level, but also completely reduces that risk of injury early in the season and then we get, so we used to test, I think it was usually like October and November time with a full 50 meter sprint, but again, a lot of, we made those mistakes in year one and two that we were actually, no, it's just not necessary. We're not even using that information, it's not a great reflection at this. Yeah, that's right. So we're designing some attesting battery for one of the local MPL soccer teams and same thing, they put it in, I would you do testing day one, it's like no, give them a couple of weeks of training and then we'll come and test and again it comes to that education piece and I explain that, but you know, we don't want them having come back from supposedly having six to eight weeks off and then expecting them to do a max sprint or do a max test, you're basically again with empty buckets, a little bit first and then we can test them and then explain to this and he goes, oh, I didn't even think of it that way, but again, it comes back to that, well, this is what we want to do and you know, it was when I was at West Island at Aaron Zimmerman that did a thing that we looked at, the ones that completed them over 9% of preseason training, generally we wanted to have at least injured in season. All right, so if we can give them that volume in training and keep them training, then we're going to get them through the season and that's what we want. So it's no good ask, breaking them at the start of the season because we wanted to do testing. I'm proving first and get them, you know, and then we'll come and do the testing and it's like, all right, let's do it, you know, week three, end of week three, perfect, they've got two days off, we'll come and do it on the weekend, beautiful, we'll do it then. So I think that comes, I think that comes with experience, you know, I think the textbook model of pre-post training that people pick up in their university degrees and then try and force into some of these environments because they've been told that's what they should be doing, test before training intervention, post, prove my worth, prove my self-programming is correct. I think there's probably some some pressures from that, but like say, with experience, it's much better. You've got to test before you do any sort of thing and it's that whole mentality, it probably doesn't work in the real world. That's, yeah, absolutely, that's why I think we need to look at doing it. And that's how we're sort of changing the model now, that's depending on what test we want to do, we want to sort of have them moving our in and around for a little bit first and then we'll introduce the testing. That's probably better and safer. Yeah, great. It's their experience and that knowledge that, well, this is where I think we need to go with this. Yeah, it's where we need more and more experienced people working at the level with the youth athletes to make sure that they're getting the right support, the right things done at the right time, the right progressions in their training, the right information and education, and yeah, I've really enjoyed hearing about the catalyst program, sounds like you're doing some awesome stuff and the way you're approaching it, your long-term progressions, your program, any organisation around your systems, your testing, so yeah, great work mate. And really appreciate you coming on to share that with us today. I think there's a lot for people to take away from that. Yeah, not a problem. Thanks for having me and again, I'm more than happy if anyone wants to reach out of sharing stuff and like I said, I'll give you some stuff before and I'm more than happy again. It's one of those things I've always been big on. It's not there's no secret source out there. This is what I'm doing. I'm happy to share it because again, I'm happy to learn from other people as well. And if anyone wants to reach out, I'm more than happy to have a chat or jump on a WhatsApp call and give me a look and explain how we do things because I think that's how we make things better and that's how we can improve things and we can all learn off each other. So thanks for taking the time and having me on. No problem. That's what we're trying to do. Elevate the delivery of this stuff across the across the world. It's it's really important and yeah, really appreciate your openness to that. If people do want to reach out to you, what's the best place whether it's Twitter handle or email or yeah, you can jump on our website now. Like I said, I've finally done a website about six weeks ago. It's Catalyst Performance with a K because there's a notification in there that will actually come to me or again, my email is just Catalyst Performance at gmail.com and I'm more than happy. Like I said, I'll they reach out to you through LTA network. I'll give you my mobile number and my personal email and whatever they need, I'm more than happy to sort of reach out and do it that way. Whichever way you see fit. Yeah, no, brilliant. Nice to meet you. Thanks again for your time and we're waiting to get those resources either within the show notes or within the blog on the site. We'll put a link in the description to to that stuff, but perfect. Cheers. Cheers, Mick. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the LTA network podcast. If you'd like to dive deeper into all things you've athletic development, whether that's strength development, speed, agility or long term planning for your program, head over to LTA network.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and share it with another coach and join us again next time as we continue. Exploring what it takes to build better environments to support developing athletes.