Joe Neal | From Youth to Pro in the Private Sector

In the private sector, you are always auditioning. Joe Neal, owner of 2SP Sports Performance based near Detroit, MI, shares a blueprint for serving athletes from youth to the professional ranks. Those foundational principles support off-season training for National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) players. Neal reflects on his untraditional path from an underserved college baseball athlete to a business owner. Along the way, his coaching was guided by self-experimentation, creative training techniques, and relentless learning. He explains what makes a strong private-sector program: coaches should be prepared, moving, and communicating, not buried in screens or programming. Neal also breaks down how he uses technology to individualize training, track progress, and support better decisions without losing supervision. He emphasizes long-term development, where overlooked athletes can keep growing, stay healthier, and outperform early expectations. Listen for practical lessons on culture, coaching, business, and private-sector development across every level of sport.

Connect with Joe on Instagram: @joeneal2 or by email: joe@2spsports.com

| Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs and LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs

Join the NSCA Entrepreneur Special Interest Group (SIG) on LinkedIn to connect with other coaches and explore ideas for building and leading in the private sector.

“If you want to go into the private sector, you got to be willing to bet on yourself constantly. And always be ready to audition, because that's what I feel like I deal with every single day.” 15:25

“If we can do a really competitive and compelling job to get them in there, it’s going to make a difference, you know, a change in their outcomes. [...] I was that athlete who really needed it and that athlete who we probably wouldn't have had, we probably wouldn't be talking if I didn't go through that process myself at this point and just kind of coasted through my career. And it was a game changer for me.” 23:25

“One thing that we want is we want our coaches prepped and ready to go. They shouldn't be programing during, during the session and those type of distractions are really problematic. [...] If they have high energy than our then our athletes are going to have high energy.” 29:40

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This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Eric McMahon, NSCA’s Coaching and Sport Science Program Manager. Today we hear from a veteran strength and conditioning coach and business owner, Joe Neal. He's in the Detroit area and leads off season training for NHL and MLB players. This is an important discussion. We'll touch on business acumen, coaching high level athletes, and special considerations for overhead athletes.

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Joe, we connected at the NSCA Overhead Athlete Summit in San Diego. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

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Thanks for having me here. That was awesome for sure. miss the warm weather.

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Yeah. It was. San Diego is beautiful. Whenever you get the chance to go out there. You came all the way from Detroit. Obviously a little bit different weather up in Detroit over the winter.

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And digging into your bio, you're a business owner up there. You have multiple facilities in the greater Detroit area. What was your path into strength and conditioning and how did your business take shape?

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Yeah, I had, very untraditional path into strength and conditioning. I was a,

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college baseball player. And, probably pretty underserved at the time.

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And I needed to go through certain things that, you know, we supply now and at the time around, you know, 99, 2000, 2001, there just wasn't the,

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you know, these these facilities that exist now to help athletes and,

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as I was going through college, I was very big into training myself and trying to learn different,

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different ways to improve my ability.

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And and that's how I really got into it. I went from being a guy who was very subpar baseball player to somebody that was,

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you know, pretty, pretty good at their sport at the time.

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and it was it was I can are credited to learning some culture in the gym and figuring out what to what to do better than maybe some of the counterparts on my team.

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So that's how I really got into strength and conditioning. I didn't go through, schooling and kinesiology and, I was honestly, I was

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I was my only it my only, idea was eligibility at that point for being a baseball player as a catcher. And I was good enough to move on, past college, but not not good enough to keep going, unfortunately.

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But,

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these lessons that I had really, from the strength and conditioning world really kind of, you know, are things that I'm passing down and got me to where I, you know, being, we'll call it serviceable, for for a decent baseball player in college. But by the time I figured out that I wasn't going to make it, I was already through college.

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And I just started training athletes with what I had known. And, you know, that's how I really got into the world of strength and conditioning.

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So there was there was a, you know, a pretty, sad ending to my career, but, a pretty good a good start to, you know, helping the youth and our community.

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And that's really where I got going. So. Yeah, that's that's that's great. And I hear that a lot, you know, underserved athlete in strength and conditioning. A lot of the other story I hear a lot is an athlete has a setback and overcomes it with strength and conditioning. But you mentioned okay, a little bit underserved on maybe the training side or getting yourself where you need to be as an athlete.

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How did you overcome that? What was it about strength and conditioning that allowed you to,

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I guess, have the confidence to pursue it as a career? Well, you know, what was the you know, it was a big leap. You know, this wasn't something you had full exposure to.

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I mean, you know, I was an undersized athlete. So in college, as a sophomore, I was about 155 pounds and, you know, very underpowered, very under speed, but had good technical skill.

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So I had a reasonable ability to throw a baseball and do some things that were, you know, not, maybe as, heroic, you know, from hitting a ball as far as is maybe, you know, some of the other athletes that were a little bit larger. So, you know, I started really reading into how I can make myself more powerful.

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And I figured if I can take myself from 155 pounds to, you know, ultimately I was, you know, a person I grew to about 190 pounds over a three year span and, you know, picked up a bunch of speed and picked up a bunch of power. And relatively speaking, you know, compared to athletes today, you know, it wasn't nearly enough.

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But, you know, I was my own experiment. And I figured if I could do that with somebody like myself, you know, I could definitely help people that maybe were a little bit further along in their sport. And that's really, truly how I got into into, strength and conditioning as a, as a full experiment. My first strength and conditioning coach was out of West Point in college.

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In our second year at Wayne State and Michigan. And all he did was we didn't even have a weight room where we did manual resistance as a, as our main as our main thing. So that was circa 2002, and we used to use towels and, and just different things, push push boards on gym floors and really add a different like view of like how to, how to create things where I didn't have the traditional weight room.

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And here's the weights and, you know, so I really figure it out. And then, you know, I took a lot of that information, credit. I don't remember the guy's name, but I credit him to have watching him and trying to he was trying to figure it out and then try to create, you know, environments that are going to improve an athlete's ability no matter what.

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I had available to me at the time.

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So now you're in a position to create environments for athletes at multiple facilities in the Detroit area. Tell me about your business. How did that get started and how did it grow to what it is today?

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I started really, you know, I started a little bit in baseball and then I really got into hockey, which is really an odd thing to do

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But all sports heavily rotational. We had started training some pretty high level I surgery and some pretty high level, hockey teams around here. Michigan's kind of notorious for having, you know, this pool of kids that come here from other states and they, they build it and do things and, live here and play on these teams.

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And I got involved with, a guy named, Igor Larionov. And, Igor was an agent at the time in Hall of Fame hockey player for the Detroit Red Wings. And, I had one of his top clients was just a couple years into my career. So I really started around, like, 2004, 2005, you know, really getting going in 2000, seven, 2008, I hooked up with him and started training his top client, who ended up being the first overall pick in the NHL draft, 20 1112 and at the time, he wanted me to go and research, areas in the world that were, you know, heavy in youth development

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So I, I actually flew over to,

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the, English Premier League teams three times I visit. He got me a visit with, the Arsenal. Arsenal? I looked at their first team and youth development programs for a week. Manchester City and Southampton, who was injured. Interestingly enough, at the time, a very big development hub for the Premier League.

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And we looked at

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all the different things that these athletes were doing from eight, nine, ten, 11, all the way up to their first teams, 21, 22, 23 years old. And it was just an interesting perspective that really catapulted my interest even more into now technology and in all these different avenues and modalities that we use, today and at the time, you know, a lot of these teams were like way for a further had this ten years ago, 12 years ago, actually 13 years ago.

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And these teams are so far ahead of what was being done in gyms around us. And so it just gave me a really interesting perspective to start looking at different technologies and different things that were happening that they were utilizing speed development apparatus, you know, run rockets, you know, before they were run like sled drills, things like that.

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And,

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so I brought all that information back, just started traveling,

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and, you know, meeting people. Michael Johnson performance down Texas at the time went down when he was really, over in Massachusetts. And just visited all these different places. That's truly how I got my education. And then I brought all that information back, and I started putting it together.

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But I had I had really at that at that point,

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started to create this collection and library of things that were happening in the environment around us and and putting them into programing and, and developing for kids. And,

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you know, then just started implementing with eight, nine, ten, 11 year olds and, and then building up to Nail Yakupov was that first overall pick.

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And and

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and he was he was like the most conditioned athlete in that draft class, which was great. And and he had a great first year. It was a lockout year. So they only played half the season. So that was really what catapulted my, my career. Red wings were we had a number of red wings that had come into the gym at that point.

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I had met them through, interestingly enough, some advertising opportunities that they were doing to New Balance. And then they didn't they got locked out. So, you know, Henrik Berg ended up in my gym and all these different high level guys and, and, really gave me an opportunity to,

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showcase what I knew at that point.

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So we were that was about 6 or 7 years in at that point, really trying to find ways to show people that I had something to offer.

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So, you know, what I'm hearing is you pulled in a lot of things that were happening in the field. I know early 2000s, early mid 2000s. There were a lot of facilities that were popping up.

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Private sector strength and conditioning was being created. At the time. You mentioned MJP or Cressy. Thinking about Exos, Parisi, tons of facilities going up, focusing on different

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areas within strength and conditioning. But they were out of the what you would call traditional collegiate strength setting or a professional sports setting. And really had the opportunity to serve athletes on breaks from school.

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Summer break off season. After a long MLB year or something like that, where

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I know I had a lot of players coming from the MLB side that went and trained with people in their areas, and we had to get to know those coaches. So it did create new areas of opportunity in our field, to establish a business and bring in ideas and really get to do some very specialized training.

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Like you were kind of talking about pulling things in from, from even Europe and other, other parts of the world. So I think it sounds like your career path was really telling of the times, just a really immense area of growth in strength and conditioning. The breadth of opportunities, even tactical strength and conditioning grew a lot at that time.

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So now we have more places to work. And one thing I hear from coaches that maybe start in college and some way we all start in college, right? And or professional sport, they love being part of something bigger than themselves, being part of a team. But it does seem really cool. But like, hey, I'd love to work for myself.

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I'd love to own a business or run a business in the private sector. But man, that scares scares me. I have a lot of nerves about that mentality of like, I gotta go and,

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you know, provide for my family or provide enough doing this, you know, what do you tell coaches that maybe were where you were years ago just to overcome those fears and maybe to go for it?

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I mean, the biggest thing I can say about my career is I've had a really good support. You know, throughout my career, my wife was we were we were together early. She was always very supportive. So I didn't have that pressure. That was that was a big thing that I hear a lot from young coaches is like, you know, you're working 80 to 9000 hours.

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I work it's literally from the time that the sun came up til it till the time that the, you know, went down and really even into the evenings and nights and things like that. And,

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I would tell most people that like, for me, I didn't really have a choice because because I didn't have, like the educational background.

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I had to create a next level for myself, which was which was a hard thing to do. Like, I probably wouldn't have the credentials and the background to go into a collegiate setting. So that would be a tougher thing for me, and I probably wouldn't be able to work for an MLB team unless, you know, or an NHL team, and especially now without having, you know, that type of, background.

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But I can certainly provide a lot of a lot of things that maybe some of these coaches can't overall,

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you know, especially now, but,

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that's one of the things that that deterred me from going there, because I was already through college, I couldn't do an internship in my own business because it already existed. Right? That was that was an interesting thing.

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So I had created a business and created a following before I actually

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was was far enough along to really think I knew something. But I was helping a lot of people at a time, and there wasn't like a lot of of this information going around, particularly in our area. And you have a couple other people that were providing the services that we were and our athletes and people.

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A lot of people don't understand that Southeast Michigan has a ton of people, and they're heavily influenced by sporting community around here, whether it be, you know, football, baseball, lacrosse is huge here, you know, so there was a lot of different avenues that I had to provide these people with. You know, information to help them to stay healthy, to, you know, get better at their sport, things like that.

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And, and a lot of these people are motivated to have their athletes go into college and, you know, get a scholarship and try to achieve, secondary level education through sport, which I think is is like a really, really special thing. So that that's where I saw the opportunity as far as, you know, going into, the private sector, you know, I just really believed in myself as far as what I could, what I could provide these people.

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And I saw, you know, the impact that I was making and, you know,

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our company now, like,

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hundreds of kids come to our doors a day. And so, like,

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you know, we had to be doing something right. And I and I know that I probably want a lot of my time at some point, I probably are injured somebody and I probably did something wrong.

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But I, you know, something that I was willing to do and that has made me I think a good coach is I'm very, very nimble and I'm able to learn really, really quickly. And so when I when if I do make a mistake and we're not making a mistake again, I think a lot of coaches, especially in our sector, you know, in strength and conditioning, they really

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think they always know it.

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Listen, because I've been an outsider in strength and conditioning from an educational perspective, I have never stop learning and I've been in it for almost over 20 years, and I know less now than I did when I started, because there's so much more to know. And I think that it's something that people think when they got it figured out,

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they're really missing it.

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I mean, this, this industry,

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it it takes on a new form every single day because of the technology that we are. I came through the technology, you know, improving of this. I mean, there's something to to rate everything we do on a daily basis now. And because of that, it exposes people. And, you know, we're big into technology force plates, you know,

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we use nine nanometers.

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We use every, every laser that you can think of within our company. And that creates exposure. But it also creates an opportunity to show that we're getting better. And so, you know, I question people that don't use the technology, you know, now because we can then show people why they're getting better, how they're getting better, when they're getting better, how how,

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exposed they are to injury risk, things like that.

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And,

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and I think that's the biggest thing. If you want to go into the private sector, you got to be willing to bet on yourself constantly. And always be ready to audition, because that's what I feel like I deal with every single day.

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Yeah, I like that. You said, you know, you just got out there and started helping people with the tools you had, and that grew incrementally over time.

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Technology. There's a lot of tools now. That's a huge advantage we have as an industry to prove our prove our worth, to prove that what we're doing is effective and working. And if we can leverage that, that can be a really good selling point for for our athletes. I know probably MLB, NHL athletes get the most attention. Oh, Joe works with this guy

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I want to go train with Joe. But I know you work with youth. I know you have some programs at local schools. Tell us about how important those programs are to your business.

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The youth development program. The majority of people that actually we actually train have been now have been come up through all those ranks. So kids that we've been training for ten, 12, 15 years of time are the people that are now in double, triple A big leagues, things like that.

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So it's like we've created this ecosystem that has been able to leverage, not leverage these kids, but to move them through the different pieces of of their career. And then with their journey for, for that long. And I think that is something that we, we do well, is, is we see both ends of the spectrum. Right? So all of these, major league teams and the show teams, NHL, they all have this technology and they all that's how they, you know, derive a lot of their,

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their decision making.

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Right? This guy does this, this guy does this. We we're able to trickle that down to, you know, we're taking data a nine, ten, 11 years, 11 year olds in unfortunately data you know, nothing nothing super aggressive. But we want to know who the outliers are. You know, how they how they're producing power on a regular basis. We hockey and we did 70,000 jumps on our Hawkins systems last year alone.

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We were probably the third, the third biggest company in the world in their brand to take, jumps. And what we want to do is we want to decide what what an outlier looks like. Now, listen, we want the B-level player to get to an A-level player in a in one of the things that I think is really important is there's a lot of athletes in the world who are under service, who don't understand how good they can be that early retire because they're, you know, they're stuck in the hamster wheel of like, oh, I got to be in Triple A hockey or I got to I got to play baseball at a

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really, travel baseball at ten, 11 or, you know, 12 years old and like, these, these athletes haven't gone through growth curves, and they get kind of shuffled out because they're, you know, because they're not as good. But what we've really done is we've been able to take I can name five kids in my career that my business is built off of who were nobodies when they were 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, who ended up playing double a triple A baseball.

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We had a guy, we got a guy in the big leagues right now that nobody ever thought he would make it, you know, and and his stories. Incredible. Played Division three college baseball. And didn't get drafted. And now he's no he's in the big leagues. And those guys are the guys that we really want to influence. If we can take those guys and girls, I mean, there are plenty of girls or, female, athletes that have gone from maybe being very, you know, subpar in high school to being high level contributors at power four schools.

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And to me, that is one of the things that

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if those are the hard cases, the easy cases are the are the athletes that were really great when they were young and they made it. Right. Well, nobody's surprised about that. But if we can take that, you know, very low level JV player as a junior and and put them in it, help them get into college and then they become somebody because as they age they get better.

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They stay in the game longer.

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Not only are they better individuals, they learn culture. They did all the things that were right. They,

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you know, they they were we were able to be part of a great journey. And to me that those are the game changers that we got to have within our company. It's not just the first round draft pick that was definitely going to be there.

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Yeah, I think that's a really cool perspective

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because we're not inherently scouts for our sport or we're not recruiting athletes. We have to be adaptable, adjustable to the athlete that walks in the door, you know, or in other areas.

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The head coaches we work with, the philosophy of the programs were in

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it's relatively easy to identify, hey, that's an elite talent.

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I remember back in the day when, you know, LeBron James was a high school athlete and I'd never seen a high school basketball game on TV, but this guy was so good. They're just putting him on TV to show everyone like, this is the next thing coming. It's relatively easy to see he was significantly better than everyone else, but what's harder to see is when you have an athlete that maybe has

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the foundation, the work ethic, but just the talent hasn't taken over yet, or they haven't come into that window of success yet.

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And we do see that a lot in baseball. And overhead sports, where,

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yeah, the some of the raw athleticism skills or maybe,

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maybe it's maybe just that game intuition, knowledge or level of play. They just haven't been exposed to the level of competition that's going to ignite that ability to compete at the level they can.

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So it's really cool that in strength and conditioning, especially in the role you've carved out,

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you get to see and and guide players through that.

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I mean, I think working at a high level, we do see athletes come into their own at different times. And you know what needs of teams change at different times. You

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sometimes athletes transfer and find a place that they can thrive. Something like that.

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So we are in the business of giving people opportunities, putting people in a position to have success.

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Another area that is health. How many times does someone who's just been able to stay healthy over their career build a relatively good body of work as a as a long term athlete in college or professional sport? They can just continue to contribute. Are they the best? No. Can they contribute and have a good playing experience? Maybe get a scholarship, whatever it may be?

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Those are those are great outcomes. Those are really positive things. And

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even if you don't go play professional, you know, the values we learn in sport are just so important for whatever you do in life. And you're going to come back to, hey, I used to get up at five in the morning to go get my training in before school, or I used to, you know, I didn't want to go do my training at the end of the school day, but I showed up every single day, and I was better for it.

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And I got to compete and I had friends. I had all these other benefits because of that. So it's it's huge. The service we provide when you when you know it's long term athlete development, it's not just the elite competition pathway, it's the participation pathway. It's the confidence and motivation that

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these athletes take from their life. So it's really, really exciting.

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I think in the private sector, we have an opportunity to really influence these young athletes. I mean, in my in my career, I've only ever worked with, you know, youth to professional athletes. I mean, we never work with fitness or, you know, that that type of demographic. But,

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you know, when we when we talk about trying to gain access, if we can convince these athletes to do the work that we're asking you to do, they're not there because they have to be there for college commitment.

00:22:41:14 - 00:23:01:18

You know what our, you know, three days a week or or whatever, they're coming in on their own accord. And for me, like we've we've done a really compelling job from a company standpoint to get these athletes to come in and and realize that this is part of their journey. And, you know, I would tell you over the years, though, I think strength and conditioning has got less cool.

00:23:01:20 - 00:23:19:02

You know, for for a lot of athletes, especially the younger ones, it's not as cool to be strong. We battle that today. There's more opportunity for them to do different things throughout it. Throughout the day. That's going to distract them from coming in a space like this. And, and, you know, pumping iron for, for lack of a better term.

00:23:19:02 - 00:23:37:18

You know, that's going to help contribute to their betterment. But if we can do a really competitive and compelling job to get them in there, going to make a difference, you know, a change in their in their outcomes. And I feel like that's what I've done a good job of, you know, that maybe separates me a little bit from some other people because I lived it.

00:23:37:19 - 00:23:51:23

You know, I was the I was that athlete who who really needed it and that athlete who we probably wouldn't have had, we probably wouldn't be talking if I didn't go through that process myself at this point and just kind of coasted through my career. And it was a game changer for me.

00:23:51:23 - 00:23:55:20

When I dig into that, you know, strength conditioning maybe isn't as cool.

00:23:55:20 - 00:24:10:01

You know, that that right mentality. I'm thinking about teenagers on their phone. I mean, we can pick on kids all day, right? Like teenagers on their phone. Tons of distractions. YouTube, screen time.

00:24:10:01 - 00:24:11:03

There's a lot there.

00:24:11:03 - 00:24:20:04

We have an influx. Influx of technology in the weight room. Not necessarily every weight room, but I'm thinking of iPads mounted to racks.

00:24:20:04 - 00:24:21:11

There's screens there.

00:24:21:11 - 00:24:56:12

Do you feel like we have a role now to keep keep our athletes on task, keep athletes focus. What's your thought on phones in the weight room in technology? How do you how do you manage those challenges? I go back and forth, on this because it's an interesting interplay, right? We used to I used to handwrite programs all the time and probably up until about, I don't know, right before Covid, we were we had Excel sheets that I mean were unbelievable that we had developed over probably a ten year, you know, trap tones and all the different things.

00:24:56:14 - 00:24:57:04

And

00:24:57:04 - 00:25:24:05

the one thing that was interesting about that is you would lose paper, people would mark it down properly. You know, there's a lot of, I would say, goods and bads to the technology in the weight room. I'm a proponent of technology in the weight room. As long as we can keep the athletes on task, if they're if we, you know, scrolling in there, you know, social media and they are they're too worried about what, you know, if they're going to video their workout like it's not things, you know, we're going to allow.

00:25:24:05 - 00:25:49:03

I'm not allowing ear pods in the weight room because it's a distraction. Coach needs to be able to talk to either athlete on a regular basis. Not only do we want them to communicate, and we also, you know, it's a safety hazard in my mind from from that perspective, if something were to happen. Right. So, the, the, the betterment of, of technology is better data tracking when we use, we use a couple different brands within our, within our company.

00:25:49:09 - 00:26:10:15

But we found, you know, we, we moved towards, more of a sports management software where we can individualize all of our programing, even in a large group, semi-private setting. So, you know, our athletes are doing programs that are specific from their from their assessment. Now, you know, you'll find that 80, 90% of all of our programing is relatively the same.

00:26:10:17 - 00:26:28:06

If we have a volleyball athlete, you know, or a baseball athlete, they might have a little bit in there because he's based on their sport, based on what they need to do, you know, based on injury history, based on risk assessment, things like that. But generally speaking, we're building templates around all these different things and then plugging them in.

00:26:28:10 - 00:26:47:14

And the way we can deliver them most efficiently at this point is through their mobile most of the time, or through iPad accessibility. And, you know, those type of, you know, kind of purchase style, you know, delivery system. So, which I like, you know, keeps it keeps a lot of those and we don't use that technology specifically for us.

00:26:47:14 - 00:26:47:23

But,

00:26:47:23 - 00:26:57:08

I think those are the goods and bads of it. And you just got to make sure that your athletes are on point. We're not leaving our athletes in the gym by themselves and going, okay, go do squat.

00:26:57:08 - 00:27:06:11

Follow this template. I mean, our our coaches are interacting with the these athletes on a regular basis because we need regular communication with them.

00:27:06:11 - 00:27:27:08

Hey, you know, their their decision make their code decision making and what they need to do, how they feel, what the direction they want to go. You know, are we you know, we use a lot of these. But you know, and that's something that's, you know, kind of self-regulating from our, from our, you know, inputs. So on on certain days we might, you know, we regular jump.

00:27:27:08 - 00:27:36:14

So we're comparing all of these different, measures that we're taking. So they might have to make decisions based on those type of decisions that we place into their programing.

00:27:36:14 - 00:27:45:06

Yeah. It's it's a huge debate. It's a huge topic within our field. The role of technology, how to keep athletes motivated and on task. That's a big one.

00:27:45:08 - 00:28:01:18

I know we've we have a lot of presentations at the NSCA. We we have a lot of coaches out there who thrive on I guess we'll call it autonomy, supportive coaching. I want to empower my athlete to know how to warm themself up, who to know how to get through their program.

00:28:01:18 - 00:28:05:04

But it does become when you don't have that

00:28:05:04 - 00:28:14:01

interaction with coaches, when you don't have the ability to communicate effectively or in the moment when something's happening, it does become a safety.

00:28:14:03 - 00:28:40:05

Safety topic as well. And I know the fifth Edition Essentials, a strength training conditioning textbook, which was just released, includes that point on headphones in the weight room that it is a safety issue and shouldn't be, shouldn't be within a team's strength and conditioning setting a something that you're promoting as a coach because it becomes a safety and potentially a liability issue for you.

00:28:40:05 - 00:29:01:11

If something were to happen and it's you could definitely make the argument of how much supervision do you have if you can't communicate with your athlete. So communication is key, the ability to keep those communication channels open. That's what we do as coaches and building an environment around that. That's really never changed. Right. That that's exactly what we've always done.

00:29:01:16 - 00:29:04:17

We just have a lot more distractions and tools

00:29:04:17 - 00:29:25:15

now. And I think also it goes to coaches behaviors too. It's like we can't be on our phones. We can't be tinkering with technology, even if it's having to go screen to screen to figure out, okay, this athlete has this next, or let's pull up this assessment or whatever it may be, we need to be prepped and ready to go so that we're not bogged down.

00:29:25:15 - 00:29:31:20

And we actually are providing supervision to our athletes. So technology and supervision, those topics go hand in hand.

00:29:31:20 - 00:29:44:03

with with our coaching staff, you know within we may I manage 14 full time guys or women and we have women coaches to watch there. And they're all fantastic. But the one thing that we want is we want our coaches prepped and ready to go.

00:29:44:08 - 00:30:06:24

They shouldn't be programing during, during the session and those type of distractions are really problematic. They should be going from athlete to athlete, kind of slowly moving because when when training slows down is when the coach gets kind of stale in, in their movements. Right. And so if they have high energy than our then our athletes are going to have high energy.

00:30:06:24 - 00:30:19:02

And and to me, a testament to a good program is, is an environment that there's a lot of things happening at one time and, and athletes are getting after it. And if the environment is too slow, which is dictated by the coach,

00:30:19:02 - 00:30:25:05

then that's a problem. And so for us, you know, we can't have our coaches, stuck on

00:30:25:05 - 00:30:37:08

forced play testing, for example, you know, we teach our athletes to self-test and they go and press a button and click their name, and they'll self-test so that they're not being bogged down by one specific, action.

00:30:37:08 - 00:30:44:23

We'll call it within, within the, environment that's happening. So those are, those are big. Those are big things that like

00:30:44:23 - 00:31:13:19

when we when we bring these groups. And I would say that our model is more in the, college strength and conditioning atmosphere, but more individualized from a programing standpoint. Instead of having a whole team of, let's say, 30 or 40, and we might have, you know, for us in the private sector, we might have 15, you know, for example, but all of those athletes are going to be bucketed into, let's say, 3 or 4 different programs and, you know, so there's some of them might have some individualized, you know,

00:31:13:19 - 00:31:20:24

very individualized things that they have going on within, within their their daily, dose of training.

00:31:20:24 - 00:31:41:07

That's awesome. Yeah, I think it's a huge topic. I know you're going to get a lot of people there want to talk about that, because it's a huge discussion of how to create that environment that athletes can thrive in, that overcomes some of those challenges that we just are getting with, with the technology push and things that we're embracing as a field.

00:31:41:07 - 00:31:47:08

But we we still get some of the downside of it. Joe, if someone wants to reach out, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:31:47:08 - 00:32:00:15

Yeah. I add Joe Neal 2 as far as my Instagram handle, that's, easy way to hit me up. Unlike direct message or something like that. And then, my, email is Joe @ two SP sports.com.

00:32:00:17 - 00:32:23:17

Awesome. Your your business email and your Instagram. We'll add that to the show notes for everyone. Really good discussion today. I took a lot away from it not being a private sector strength and conditioning coach, but one takeaway I had is that you're creating a culture just like you would if you were a collegiate coach, or in a professional sports clubhouse or locker room.

00:32:23:19 - 00:32:25:10

That training culture

00:32:25:10 - 00:32:46:10

builds a reputation for your business, for your program, and allows you to thrive no matter where you're at in the field. What area, what sector, it really doesn't matter. We built culture in the weight room and that is empowering to us as professionals. So I hope everyone enjoyed this episode and all of our new episodes on the NSCA Coaching Podcast.

00:32:46:10 - 00:32:50:20

A big thanks to our sponsors Sorinex Exercise Equipment, we appreciate their support.

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