How Do Young Athletes Decrease Their Risk of ACL and Other Injuries?
For most parents, the goal is not only a faster athlete. It is an athlete who stays on the field. This is where performance training and our physical therapy expertise overlap, and where the data is genuinely encouraging.
Structured neuromuscular training, the combination of strength work, plyometrics, landing mechanics, and movement quality, is the most evidence-supported way to decrease injury risk in young athletes. The research is strong: well-designed neuromuscular training programs have been shown to reduce ACL injury risk by roughly half, and to meaningfully lower overall injury rates in youth sport. Female athletes in particular carry a substantially higher ACL injury rate than males, which makes this work especially important for girls in cutting and jumping sports like soccer, basketball, and volleyball.
The mechanism is not mysterious. An athlete who is strong through the hips, glutes, and hamstrings, who can decelerate under control, and who lands and changes direction with sound mechanics is far better protected than one relying on skill alone. That posterior-chain strength and movement quality is built directly into how we train, and on the clinical side it is led by our sports physical therapy team, including the work Dr. Jordan Prunty, DPT, focuses on with youth athletes around posterior chain and position-specific injury risk.
Should My Athlete Start With Training or Physical Therapy?
The answer depends on where your athlete is right now, and APEX is built to handle both paths under one roof. Whether it is performance training or physical therapy, the plan fits the athlete.
Healthy and Ready to Build
A healthy athlete starts with a Sports Science Assessment, then moves directly into sport-specific performance training built from their numbers. This is the path most athletes take in the summer building window.
Coming Back From an Injury
An athlete dealing with an injury, pain, or a movement limitation starts with one-on-one sports physical therapy to address the issue first. Because our PT and performance teams work in the same building, the handoff from rehab back to full training is seamless rather than a cold restart somewhere new.
Speed Training and Testing: Why the Numbers Matter
Speed is the quality every athlete wants and the one most often trained by guesswork. We treat it as something to measure and develop deliberately. Acceleration off the line, top-end speed, and the ability to change direction are all captured at the assessment with speed and agility gates, then developed through targeted programming and retested so progress is visible in real numbers rather than vibes.
That measure-build-retest loop is the heart of how APEX works, and it applies whether the goal is a faster forty, a higher vertical, or a more explosive first step. You can explore the full performance training approach on our sports performance training page.
Why Summer Is When Athletes Are Built
It bears repeating because the calendar does not wait. Summer is the rare stretch where an athlete can train hard without school pulling at their energy and time, recover well, and actually adapt. Strength gets built. Speed gets developed. Movement gets cleaned up. Then the season comes, and the athlete who used the window walks in ahead of the one who did not.
The work starts now, and it starts with a single objective measurement of where your athlete stands today.
Every Sport. Every Athlete. The Work Starts Now.
Book the Sports Science Assessment and we will build your athlete's plan from the ground up. Tigard, Oregon, serving the greater Portland metro.
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