APEX PWR | Athlete Angle
Mason Bradley is a defender at the University of Portland. He came out of West Linn High School with All-Three Rivers League First Team honors in each of his three seasons, played his club soccer with Oregon Premier FC, was a 2023 Olympic Development Program West Region selection, and arrived at Portland as the 22nd ranked recruit in the Pacific Northwest according to TopDrawerSoccer.
He spent this summer in our facility working through ACL rehabilitation.
Mason Bradley, University of Portland, working through ACL rehabilitation at APEX PWR in Tigard, Oregon.
We are honored to be a part of his comeback, and his story is a useful place to start a different conversation. Most athletes reading this are healthy right now. Fall practices are days away. Soccer, volleyball, and football seasons are about to swallow every free evening between now and November.
The question worth answering before that happens is a simple one. What happens to your training when the season starts?
The default answer across a lot of programs is to back off and save the legs. The research points a different direction.
A systematic review and meta-analysis on resistance training frequency in well-trained populations, published in Sports Medicine, addressed this problem directly. Its authors note that in-season schedules in team sports are long and congested, with some sports competing up to three times per week, and that under those conditions physical preparation often stops entirely or gets replaced by recovery work. The review examined whether shorter, more frequent sessions could keep strength development going inside a crowded competitive week.
The practical finding across the in-season literature is consistent. Frequency matters more than volume. One focused session per week is enough to hold what an athlete built. Dropping below that is where things unravel.
That is the floor, and it is worth explaining why we program above it. An athlete training twice a week who loses a session to a road game still lands on the research-backed minimum. An athlete training once a week who loses that session lands on zero. Two sessions also carry enough stimulus for an athlete to keep developing across a season rather than spending three months defending a number. We offer both, and we start the conversation at two.
One session a week is the floor that protects your offseason work. Two is what lets an athlete keep building all the way through November.
Faster than almost any athlete expects, and power goes before maximal strength does. Explosiveness is the first quality to fade, which matters enormously for a sport built on sprints, jumps, and changes of direction.
The clearest illustration comes from competitive soccer. After a heavy preparatory training block, players who continued lifting once per week across twelve weeks of the season held both their strength gains and their 40 meter sprint times. Players who lifted only every second week lost both.
Same sport. Same season. Same starting point. The variable was one session a week.
Youth-specific research is thinner and deserves an honest caveat. In adolescent male athletes, a single weekly maintenance session performed comparably to two. In preadolescent boys, one weekly session did not fully hold prior gains. The strength and conditioning research community has been clear that more youth data is needed, so any plan for a developing athlete should stay conservative and supervised.
August through November is the most physically demanding stretch of the year for a fall sport athlete, and the least protected.
Two to three matches a week in some stretches, on top of practice, with repeated sprinting, decelerating, and cutting as the core demand. Deceleration capacity is what protects a knee during a hard change of direction, and deceleration capacity is built with strength work. Soccer performance testing and training is the sport-specific entry point.
A jumping sport with an enormous landing count across a season, played largely indoors on hard surfaces, with tournaments that stack multiple matches into a single day. Landing mechanics under fatigue is the whole ballgame, and fatigue arrives in match four. Volleyball performance testing and training is where volleyball athletes should start.
Collision volume, heat in August camp, and position demands that vary wildly between a lineman and a corner. Most programs lift in-season, which is genuinely good, though it is rarely individualized and rarely accounts for who is playing 60 snaps versus 12. Football performance testing and training fills that gap.
Nobody plans to spend a season in rehab. It happens anyway, and the athletes it happens to are usually the ones with the most to lose.
A college soccer athlete progressing through ACL rehabilitation and return to sport work at APEX PWR.
Both athletes have worked through their rehabilitation with Dr. Jordan Prunty, DPT, and Dr. Dustin Zink, DPT, two Doctors of Physical Therapy on our sports physical therapy team. Both are doing the work well, and both will be better prepared on the other side than they were before. That is what a full return to sport progression is for, and we have written about how ours runs in detail in our guide to ACL rehab and return to sport.
The reason to show it here is different. Neither of them wanted this season. If your athlete is currently healthy, the window to invest in staying that way is right now, before the first whistle.
The evidence on that investment is strong. Lauersen, Bertelsen, and Andersen's 2014 meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, pooling randomised controlled trials, found that strength training programs reduced acute sports injuries to less than one third and overuse injuries by almost half. Those numbers describe the published research base and do not represent APEX outcome data.
Two appointments before the season, and one habit during it.
Objective measurement of strength, power, speed, and left-to-right asymmetry. A baseline makes it possible to see what is actually happening to your athlete across a season instead of guessing.
For anything that hurts now, or any old injury that never got fully resolved. Small issues carried into a season have a habit of becoming the reason a season ends early.
Semi-private small group training, programmed around game day rather than piled on top of it. Two sessions hold strength and muscle mass and leave room to keep building through November. A one-session option is available if two will not fit the week.
The testing and the evaluation inform each other. If testing shows a 15 percent strength difference between legs and the athlete has a history of ankle sprains on that side, those two facts belong in the same conversation. Because our sports physical therapy team and our performance staff work in the same building, they usually are.
Testing, a physical therapy evaluation, and semi-private in-season training for soccer, volleyball, and football athletes in Tigard, Oregon.
Book Testing & Training Book a PT EvaluationAn in-season session has to do a specific job. It has to preserve strength and power without adding fatigue that shows up on Friday night. That requires someone adjusting load week to week based on how many minutes the athlete played, how the body is responding, and what is coming on the schedule.
Semi-private small group training is built for that. Group sizes stay small enough that a coach can change an athlete's session on the spot, and the group itself does something a solo program cannot: it gets a tired sixteen year old through the door on a Tuesday in October. Consistency is the entire mechanism here, and consistency is easier with other people in the room.
APEX PWR is at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, central to the Westside metro and within roughly 15 minutes of Beaverton, West Linn, Lake Oswego, Tualatin, and Southwest Portland. We work with athletes from high school programs across the region and with college athletes home for the summer or training locally through their season.
Sport-specific starting points: soccer, football, and volleyball.
Two sessions a week keeps an athlete building all the way through November. Start with testing and an evaluation.
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