The Strength House

The Strength House Follow along as we continually work to evolve our training process to best serve our athletes.

3 or 4 years ago, Bill Hartman recommended I read “Thinking In Bets”. It was very influential for me. I have probably gi...
09/08/2026

3 or 4 years ago, Bill Hartman recommended I read “Thinking In Bets”. It was very influential for me. I have probably gifted over 20 copies of it since. Bill often says: “What information do you need to make the first decision?”

Ex. An athlete walks in with 15+ things I could assess. It’s not about how much can I collect - that’s pedestal-building.

You don’t need to completely understand the athlete before acting. You need enough information to identify the next consequential choice. Then you act, and the athlete’s response generates new information.

Information-Decision-Action-New information-Next decision
Rather than:
Collect everything-construct comprehensive explanation-finally act.

Quit helped me see that it’s not just info for first decision. It’s aLeo information needed to make a different decision.
I think those belong together.

What do I need to know to place the bet?
What do I need to see to update the bet?

Say you’re looking at a pitcher and think proximal tibial rotation is limiting something downstream.

The first decision. Not the answer. That’s a massive distinction.

You don’t have to know where the entire process ends to make a high-quality next decision.

You see A. A gives you reason to test B. B changes when you alter C. That response makes D more or less likely. Now you know what to do next. You didn’t need D when you started.

Decisions are made with incomplete information. Waiting for certainty has a cost too.

An assessment isn’t primarily an exercise in collecting information about an athlete. It’s an exercise in reducing the uncertainty necessary to make the next decision.

Don’t collect information to know more. Collect the information necessary to make the next decision, and make sure the decision produces information that helps you make the one after it.

09/03/2026

“You can’t fire a cannon off a canoe.”

Ya, we get it.

But actually, you can.

“Ya, but it’s unstable.”

No. You can literally fire it every time…off a canoe.

“Ya, but you don’t know where it’s going. That’s the point.”

Oh. So you can’t accurately fire a cannon at a target off a canoe.

“Sure. Ya. Because it’s unstable.”

It’s unpredictable.

“Same thing.”

No. It’s not the same thing.

The task got completed. That tells us a solution existed.

It tells us nothing about the solution, what it cost, or what becomes possible next.

That’s part of my problem with “stability.”

I revisited this topic after a great discussion with my friend Taylor Burns Taylor Burns. During it, I was reminded of s...
09/01/2026

I revisited this topic after a great discussion with my friend Taylor Burns Taylor Burns. During it, I was reminded of something Joe Maddon has talked about: empowerment over control. I’ve gathered a lot from listening to Joe speak, and Taylor and I are always having insightful conversations.

Hindsight is 20/20. I’m no longer running a staff. This was always my intent, and I think I got better at it as the years went by. I wasn’t perfect, and neither is this take.

I’m proud of the people who worked with me and for our facility, and of what they’ve gone on to do. I don’t take credit for that. I’m proud of them for identifying with the process and sticking to it.

08/30/2026

Restoring IR relative motion really boils down to how we manage force within our base of support. We lose the relative motions as the base of support shrinks effectively skewing the gradients between ER and IR space. Imagine two columns of people, in single file, standing behind double doors.

A Left column and door, a Right column and door. When their respective door opens, they can move forward. Faster the more open it is, more slowly when they have maneuver around the door. In order to open the door it has to go out, out equals forward. To close it, it must swing back in. In equals delay of forward.

If you want to manage traffic, you want to be able to open and close the doors, both in tandem and relative to the other.

That analogy lacks a lot of nuance, and dimensions, but I think it can conceptually help a lot of people.

A 12 year old isn’t a smaller professional athlete.Age, training history, physical and biological maturity matter. So do...
08/29/2026

A 12 year old isn’t a smaller professional athlete.

Age, training history, physical and biological maturity matter. So do attention, motivation, social environment, experience and what the kid actually cares about.

That doesn’t mean everything we do with them needs to be different. A movement I choose for a 23 year old might be just as useful for a 12 year old. But the 12 year old probably won’t understand it, focus on it or execute it the same way.

Coaching is communication. What they hear matters more than what you say. If you can’t put an idea into a context a 12 year old understands, start somewhere you can. Analogies, games and familiar problems often give them something to attach the solution to.

Individualization can still live inside simple.

You don’t need to replace jumping, running, throwing, lifting and playing with a collection of highly specific drills. Small changes to those things can nudge development toward what that athlete needs while preserving the variety they still need.

The same context matters with arm pain.

Too much throwing is a problem. But I think too much throwing that kids are led to believe matters is an even bigger one.

Games matter. Tournaments matter. Velocity matters. Making the team matters. Performing for adults matters.

Kids need throwing that doesn’t matter too. Throwing for fun. Different games, different environments, different ways to move and compete. And actual periods where throwing goes away.

The concepts don’t have to become less sophisticated because the athlete is 12.

The skill is keeping that sophistication in your decision making while making the solution simple enough for a 12 year old to actually use.

“Data is only useful if you know how to use it.”That line gets used as a deflection. An excuse to skip the work of explo...
08/25/2026

“Data is only useful if you know how to use it.”

That line gets used as a deflection. An excuse to skip the work of exploring what you could measure and going through the process of finding out whether it’s useful.

Most strength coaches back their efficacy with strength numbers. Weight lifted, reps at a load. No quarrel there. But we reproduce outcomes in that context largely because the barrier to capturing it is so low. Log the workout and you’re done.

When linear progress stalls, the narrow thinker stalls with it. The coach who’s been capturing more can apply progressive overload to less straightforward variables, across longer timelines. Some data is useful on day one. Other data only becomes useful once the problem gets complex.

Your ability to judge what’s useful is limited by your exposure to varying data sets. So collect broadly early rather than defending what you’ve already demonstrated an understanding of. More to comb through means more dots, patterns, relationships, trade-offs. Over time you find almost all data is useful — just not in every context. That’s what sharpens how you organize it.

Data alone will not suffice, sure. It needs to work alongside:

Experience - Ability to recognize subtle patterns and anomalies, dynamic mental models of how human systems interact and adapt, and interdisciplinary education — biomechanics, physiology, psychology — to synthesize disparate points into one story.

This is interpretation.

That intersection sharpens contextual sifting: knowing which variables matter right now, and which to filter out.

Collection. Interpretation. Application. CIA — fitting, because at the highest level you’re a detective, and detectives don’t throw out clues that don’t fit the theory.

Building that interpretive skill is most of what I work on with the coaches I mentor, it’s the part no course teaches. DM me if you want in.

Getting down the mound is late external rotation. As the pitcher moves down the slope, internal rotation has to leave th...
07/25/2026

Getting down the mound is late external rotation. As the pitcher moves down the slope, internal rotation has to leave the system proximal to distal — ilium, then femur, then tibia, then foot — and IR is what controls the speed of that, delaying how fast the leg reaches its full ER shape. That delay is the point: it’s what builds linear momentum and lets you save the backside release for the right moment.

Think of it as the late propulsive phase of gait, foot underneath you to toe-off, just exaggerated and far more drawn out. The ER you have to acquire down the mound is so large there’s no way to get all of it from relative motion between segments alone; eventually you have to link and orient segments to finish the shape. The whole game is how late you can hold that off. The more relative motion you own at the back hip, the later you link and the cleaner the sequence stays.

Here’s where it breaks. The first ER is proximal: the right ilium compressing into the sacral base. From a hip with space, that’s relative motion. From a hip that’s already compressed, the same ER can’t be relative, so it becomes an orientation: the whole pelvis turns as a unit, the femur gets carried along, and there’s no relative IR left at the back hip. The abduction got spent early. Now the femur is pulled down with the pelvis instead of moving on it (no length, no space in the back hip) and the pressure that never got absorbed up top travels: lateral knee, tibia into ER early, lateral ankle, foot dumped into IR.

So the fix isn’t chasing whatever feels tight down the leg. It’s decompressing the joint to create real space, recentering the center of gravity, and reacquiring internal rotation relative to the external rotation you have so the femur, tibia, and foot can hold their shapes while the hip moves separately. The differences are small. Down the mound, they compound.

—

Comment “evaluation” if you want to go deeper:
• Coaches — to sharpen how you evaluate movement and mechanics
• Pitchers — to get evaluated by me directly

Over the past several years, my role has become increasingly difficult to define—not because the work has become less fo...
07/13/2026

Over the past several years, my role has become increasingly difficult to define—not because the work has become less focused, but because the problems worth solving don’t fit neatly within traditional titles.

A professional athlete isn’t developed by strength training alone. Or pitching instruction alone. Or rehabilitation alone. Or biomechanics alone. Performance emerges from the interaction of all of those disciplines, along with leadership, communication, decision-making, and timing. Separating them into isolated silos may make organizations easier to structure, but it rarely reflects how athletes actually develop.

As a result, I’ve found myself working between those disciplines rather than inside any one of them. Sometimes that means evaluating a delivery, sometimes discussing rehabilitation strategy with a physical therapist, sometimes collaborating with a pitching coach, sometimes designing physical preparation, and often helping connect those conversations into one coherent plan.

I’ve intentionally spent years studying each of those areas—not to replace the experts within them, but to better understand how they influence one another. My goal is never to become the smartest person in the room. It’s to help create an environment where specialists can work together more effectively in service of the athlete.

This philosophy is my attempt to articulate the principles that guide that process.

At its core, it can be summarized in one sentence:

Create an environment where the standard is excellent and the decisions are increasingly accurate.

Everything that follows is an effort to explain what that means in practice.

Address

256 Ayer Road
Harvard, MA
01605

Telephone

+19788462882

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Strength House posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to The Strength House:

Shortcuts

Share

Category