APEX PWR | Partner on the Podium
The partnership with Lake Oswego Little League came together with D-BAT PDX West, our neighbors in the same building complex, who handle the baseball skill side while we handle the athlete underneath the skill.
That split is the point. A hitting facility can make a swing better. It cannot make a kid faster, stronger, or more durable. Those are trained in a weight room and on a turf, and for most youth baseball players in the Portland metro, nobody is doing that part at all.
Lake Oswego Little League 10U and 12U athletes at APEX PWR in Tigard.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association's updated position statement on youth resistance training states there is no evidence that resistance training negatively impacts growth and maturation, and that a properly designed, supervised program is relatively safe, with injury rates comparable to other youth sports. Properly run programs produced strength gains of roughly 30% over 8 to 20 weeks, above and beyond what growth alone delivers, and the position statement concludes that such a program can increase a young athlete's resistance to sports-related injuries.
The word doing the work in every one of those sentences is supervised.
A study of youth pitchers ages 9 to 13 measured how energy is generated and transferred through the lower body during a pitch. Each successive joint up the kinetic chain generated significantly more power than the one below it, and the trunk-pelvis junction produced the most power of any lower body joint (Pryhoda and Sabick, 2022). The arm finishes a movement that the ground, the hips and the trunk start.
Sprint work and lower-body strength are arm work in disguise, which is why a speed and strength block belongs in a baseball player's year.
A 10-year prospective study followed 481 youth pitchers who enrolled between ages 9 and 14. Those who pitched more than 100 innings in a single year were 3.5 times more likely to suffer a serious injury (Fleisig et al., 2011). Separately, research led by Dr. Neeru Jayanthi across roughly 1,200 young athletes found that injured athletes had specialized in a single sport at a mean age under 12.
The recommendations: train no more hours per week than the athlete's age in years, one competitive sport per season, and at least three non-consecutive months off from competition each year. Volume is not development. Volume is just volume.
Sprinting is a skill with mechanics that can be coached, and at 10 and 12 years old those mechanics are highly trainable. Most young baseball players have never been taught how to accelerate, how to decelerate, or how to change direction without losing their base. We wrote more on that here: speed training is more than just running sprints and why speed training matters for youth athletes.
We are a testing facility first. Before we prescribe anything, we get numbers, because "he looks stronger" is not a plan. Our baseball and softball performance testing runs on VALD force plates and electronic speed gates, the same equipment used by college programs and pro organizations.
| What we test | What it tells us about a baseball athlete |
|---|---|
| Sprint speed through timing gates | Acceleration over the distances that decide a stolen base, a first-to-third, or a ball in the gap. Also the cleanest measure of whether training is working. |
| Countermovement jump on force plates | Lower-body power output and how quickly the athlete produces force, which is the engine behind both running and the front side of a throw or swing. |
| Left versus right symmetry | Baseball is a rotational, one-directional sport. Asymmetry accumulates quietly, and the force plate sees it long before anyone watching practice does. |
| Retesting every quarter | Progress you can point at. A number that moved is the only honest proof that a program is doing something. |
The testing is also how we keep ourselves honest. If a young athlete trains with us for a quarter and the numbers have not moved, that is our problem to solve, not something to talk around. More on that thinking here: test, don't guess.
Here is the part we care most about, and the reason the Lake Oswego block is a starting point rather than an event.
Most youth baseball training in the Portland area happens in bursts. A winter camp. A pre-season clinic. Eight weeks somewhere, then nothing for five months. An athlete on that pattern spends a large share of every year rebuilding qualities they already had, which is why so many players look the same at 14 as they did at 12.
Real development happens when an athlete is trained continuously, with the emphasis changing across the calendar rather than the training stopping. Off-season builds. Pre-season sharpens. In-season maintains. It is never just a summer thing, an off-season thing, or a one-month thing.
That is how our semi-private sports performance training is built. Frequency flexes as the season changes, the programming shifts between building and maintaining, and the athlete stays in the same system with coaches who already know their numbers. We work with athletes ages 8 through 18 across every sport, and baseball and softball players make up a large share of the room.
We host teams for training and team building, the same way we are running the Lake Oswego Little League block. Sessions are built around your practice and game calendar, run by our coaching staff, and can be held once a week or more depending on where you are in the season.
If you coach or manage a little league, travel team, or high school program anywhere in the Portland metro and want to talk through a block for your roster, call us at (971) 294-2669 or email team@apexpwr.com.
A two-session baseline on VALD force plates and speed gates plus a full movement and strength evaluation, ending with a walkthrough of your athlete's numbers and the plan that comes out of them. From there, athletes move into semi-private sports performance training with retesting every quarter.
If your athlete plays baseball or softball specifically, the baseball and softball testing and training page lays out how the sport-specific version works.
Speed, power and symmetry on the same equipment college and pro programs use. Ages 8 to 18, in Tigard, Oregon.
Book a Sports Science Assessment Baseball & Softball TestingAPEX PWR is at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, Oregon, just off Highway 217, in the same complex as D-BAT PDX West. We are a short drive from Lake Oswego, Beaverton, Tualatin, West Linn, Tigard and Southwest Portland, which makes a weekday evening team block realistic for families who are already driving to practice.
Our staff includes doctors of physical therapy alongside the performance coaching team, so an athlete who shows up with something that hurts does not have to leave the building to get it looked at.
We will build a speed and strength block around your season, the same way we did for Lake Oswego Little League.
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