Welcome to the FAKTR Podcast where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school. How to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real world challenges of being a healthcare provider. From delivering top notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective, cutting edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in.

Welcome back to the FAKTR Podcast and Happy New Year. It feels really good to be back behind the microphone with you. Our entire team took a little time off over the holidays to reset, reflect and plan. And I'll just say that 2026 is shaping up to be a huge year for FAKTR and for our podcast network. We can't wait to tell you about all the exciting things we have in store. More conversations, more depth and more opportunities to bring you practical, forward thinking education that actually moves the needle in your practices and with your patients. If you're new here, I'm your host, Jessica Riddle and this podcast is where we challenge outdated thinking and explore smarter, more sustainable approaches to rehab, performance and overall patient care. Today we're kicking off a new two part conversation with Matthew McKay, a strength and conditioning coach with over a decade of experience working across high school, collegiate, professional and military settings.

And he also happens to be a chiropractic student at Texas Chiropractic College. So he really brings a unique blend of performance, coaching and clinical perspective to this conversation. In Part one, we challenged the idea that stronger is always better when it comes to training. Today in Part two, Matthew will walk us through the utilization of movement quality, unilateral training and thoughtful programming to help young athletes stay healthy, consistent and in the game across seasons, not just perform well in the short term. And if this topic resonates with you, I encourage you to check out our show notes for a few additional resources to extra trainings, certification programs and even an update on some live in person hands on courses we have planned for the year ahead. You'll find that link again in the show notes. So be sure to stick around after the show and check those out. All right, let's jump into part two with Matthew McKay.

For our next slide, I kind of want to talk about just training age and what this could look like in these spaces. So if you have a first year student who is getting ready to lift with you and what I mean by first year training age is you're consistently working out, the goal should be movement fluency. Me personally, and we may have different opinions and that is fine. I love to learn. I love to get you all feedback as well. My goal is not to make them increase their squat by 50, 60 pounds by the end of their first year. I want to make sure their movement fluency is where it needs to be. So what a progression could look like.

I know our last presentation we talked about having a space where we could show a couple of examples. I would never do you the disservice of giving you a cookie cutter program. Just have your basketball players do this and they'll be perfect for strength. I haven't seen your athletes, I don't know if they ever had a movement screen done and if they did, what was it? Was it a fms? Was it sfma? I'm not sure. So I think it'd be doing you a disservice to give you a cookie cutter program to go and put into your space. And now you wind up hurting your athletes and that's not fair to them, their parents, you or their future. So what I will show you is a couple of examples. So when I looking at the ability to go through this, so goblet squats, you progress that to a double kettlebell squat and then you go that into a front squat.