APEX PWR | Champions Circle + Athlete Angle
Zach R. is 15, a track and field thrower and a soccer player. He tested with us on 12 June and retested on 26 August. Two and a half months, no gimmicks, no off-season miracle protocol. Here is what the force plates say happened in between.
His lifts moved up across the board over the same window. But the jump numbers are the ones worth explaining, because they are the ones that tell you whether the weight room work is actually showing up in his sport.
Zach R. in a semi-private session at APEX PWR, Tigard, Oregon.
A squat jump starts from a paused, static squat. No dip, no bounce, no countermovement. That matters because it takes away the elastic stretch-shortening cycle, the springy rebound that helps you in a normal jump. What is left is pure concentric force production: how hard can you push when nothing is helping you.
Zach went from 11.0 inches to 13.0 inches, averaged across his test reps. Two inches on a metric that strips away every assist is a real strength change, not a technique fluke.
RSI-modified is jump height divided by the time it takes him to reach takeoff, in metres per second. It answers a different question than "how high." It answers "how quickly."
Two athletes can jump the same height and have completely different RSI numbers. The one who gets off the ground faster is the one who will win a first step, recover from a bad plant, or finish a throw before the ring runs out. Zach went from 0.49 to 0.67 m/s, a 37% improvement. That is the number that made his coaches look twice.
The reason all three numbers together matter more than any one of them: jump height and RSI are calculated relative to bodyweight. Add 15 pounds and both numbers should fall. His went up. Squat jump concentric impulse also climbed from 222.9 to 260.5 newton-seconds, meaning he is putting genuinely more force into the ground, not just standing on the plates heavier.
Throwing. Shot put and discus are decided in a window measured in tenths of a second. A thrower needs to be heavy enough to have something to accelerate and fast enough to accelerate it. Mass with no rate of force development is a big kid who throws short. Rate of force development with no mass is a fast kid who throws short. Zach moved both at once, which is exactly the direction a thrower needs to go through his mid-teens.
Soccer. Different demand, same underlying quality. Reactive strength is what a change of direction is made of. Every cut, every deceleration, every recovery step is a fast force application against the ground. A 37% RSI improvement is a defender who arrives a step earlier.
Any gym can tell you your kid is working hard. Most of them are right. What almost none of them can tell you is whether the work is producing the specific adaptation the sport requires, or whether your athlete just got bigger and slower over a summer.
Numbers settle that argument. They also catch the thing nobody wants to find: an athlete whose weight went up and whose explosiveness went down. That happens, it happens quietly, and by the time it shows up in a game it has usually cost half a season. Testing every quarter means a wrong turn gets caught in twelve weeks instead of at tryouts.
The other thing testing does is give the athlete something honest to chase. Zach knew his June numbers. He knew what he was trying to beat. That is a meaningfully different motivation than being told to work hard.
Zach worked with Dr. Jon van den Boogaard, DPT, OCS, our Director of Rehab and a Level 2 USATF throws coach. That combination is not common and it is the reason his program looked the way it did. A throws coach knows what the event demands. A doctor of physical therapy knows what a 15-year-old's body can absorb while it is still growing. Programming a thrower without both of those lenses is how young athletes get hurt.
None of the programming was guesswork, because it started with data. Here is the sequence, and it is the same one every athlete in our youth sports performance training program follows.
Test first. Build the program from what the test found, the athlete's goals and the sports they actually play. Train it consistently in a semi-private group. Retest every quarter. Adjust. Repeat.
Everything starts with a Sports Science Assessment. It is two sessions, one-on-one with an APEX coach, and it covers VALD force plate testing, speed gate testing, and a full movement and strength evaluation.
Then the part that matters most to families: a walkthrough. The athlete and the parent sit down and go through the baseline data, what it means, and the specific plan built from it. Nobody leaves with a printout and a guess. The assessment is $199.
| Stage | What happens | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Sports Science Assessment | Force plate and speed gate testing, full movement and strength evaluation, then a results walkthrough with athlete and parent | 2 sessions, 1-on-1 with a coach |
| Semi-private training | Individual program built from the assessment, the athlete's goals and their sport, coached in the room every session | Up to 5 athletes per session, ages 8 to 18 |
| Quarterly retest | Same tests, same plates. The numbers either moved or they did not, and the program changes accordingly | Every 3 months |
Training runs in groups of up to five athletes with a coach present the whole time. Five is a deliberate number. It is small enough that every athlete can be running a different program and still be coached, and large enough that the room has energy and the price is reachable for a family with more than one kid in sports.
A thrower and a soccer player in the same session are not doing the same workout. That is the whole point.
Every athlete who trains with us starts the same way Zach did, with a baseline. Two sessions, one-on-one, and a plan built from what we find.
Book a Sports Science Assessment See the Training ProgramZach showed up. Over two and a half months he did the sessions, including the ones during soccer season, including the ones where the program called for something unglamorous.
We would love to tell you the 18% came from a proprietary method. It came from a program built on his actual test data, executed consistently, by a kid who kept coming in. The assessment made the program right. The consistency made it work. Neither one does the job alone, and there is no version of this where a great program on a schedule nobody follows produces a 37% RSI gain.
APEX PWR is at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, Oregon, just off Highway 217. Our youth sports performance training serves athletes ages 8 to 18 across football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, baseball, softball and track and field, from Tigard, Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tualatin, Sherwood, West Linn, Hillsboro and Southwest Portland.
Two sessions. Real data. A program built from it. That is how every result on this page started.
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