Today on The Ascent, we measure almost everything that happens in sports. Batting average, exit velocity, pitching velocity, sprint times, points, rebounds, assists and countless other statistics help tell us what an athlete is doing in competition. But there is another question we don’t ask nearly as often: What do we actually know about the athlete producing those results?

In today’s Featured Story, we’re introducing TitanForge, the athlete-development system we’ve been building inside APEX Batting Cages & Performance Lab. TitanForge brings an athlete’s physical performance information together with the measurements that matter in their sport, creating a profile that can evolve with them over time. We’ll look at why we created it, how athlete profiles can help coaches make better training decisions, how baseline data can provide valuable context when an athlete is returning from an injury, and why we’re adding cognitive testing as another piece of the performance picture.

In Thursday Thrive, we’re taking on one of the biggest misconceptions in sports nutrition: that serious athletes need a cabinet full of supplements to perform at a high level. Some supplements have legitimate scientific evidence behind them, but no powder, pre-workout or recovery formula can replace adequate nutrition, purposeful training, hydration, sleep and recovery. Before building a supplement stack, athletes should understand what problem they’re actually trying to solve.

Parent Playbook looks at a related issue from the other side of athlete nutrition. An athlete can eat foods that appear healthy and still simply not eat enough to support school, growth, practices, games and training. We’ll look at why under-fueling can sometimes resemble a conditioning or effort problem—and why adding more work isn’t always the answer.

Finally, today’s Daily Edge heads into the weight room. If you’re younger or relatively new to strength training, putting a barbell across your back isn’t a requirement for developing strong legs. We look at why a trap-bar squat variation can provide an effective way to learn how to produce lower-body force while reducing some of the technical demands of a traditional back squat.

Today’s issue ultimately comes back to one idea: good athlete development isn’t about automatically doing more. It’s about understanding what you need, choosing the right tool for the job, and measuring whether it’s actually working.

Train Smarter. Play Harder.

Most athletes have a profile somewhere.

A baseball player might have batting average, exit velocity and pitching velocity. A basketball player might have points, rebounds and assists. A football player has position statistics, film and maybe combine numbers. Coaches use those numbers to understand what an athlete is doing in competition.

But they tell us surprisingly little about the athlete producing those results.

How powerful are they? How quickly can they produce force? How well do they accelerate? Can they decelerate and change direction efficiently? Are they moving differently on the right side than the left? Has their mobility changed? Are they getting stronger? Is the training they’re doing actually improving those qualities?

And perhaps most importantly:

How are those physical changes affecting the way they actually play their sport?

Those questions are why we created TitanForge.

TitanForge is the athlete-development system we’re building and using inside APEX Batting Cages & Performance Lab. Instead of looking at performance training and sport-specific training as two separate worlds, we’re trying to connect them.

An athlete’s TitanForge profile can contain information about mobility, strength, power, speed, acceleration, balance, asymmetries and jumping performance alongside measurements that actually matter in their sport.

For a baseball or softball player, that could mean pairing physical-performance information with exit velocity, bat speed, throwing velocity or pitching data. For a football player, it could mean combining acceleration, change-of-direction ability and power with position-specific movement and throwing data. Other sports require their own relevant measurements.

The objective isn’t to collect as many numbers as possible.

It’s to create a better picture of the athlete.

That’s an important distinction because modern athlete monitoring increasingly emphasizes looking at multiple dimensions and tracking changes longitudinally rather than relying on an isolated test result. A 2026 review in Sports Medicine, for example, describes assessment as periodic measurement and monitoring as repeated, systematic data collection used to understand how athletes are adapting over time.  

That’s much closer to what we want TitanForge to become.

Imagine an athlete tests with us today and produces a certain jump height, 10-yard time, range of motion, force profile and sport-specific performance.

Those numbers aren’t particularly valuable just because they’re numbers.

Their value comes when we test again.

Did the athlete get faster?

Did power increase?

Did an asymmetry improve or worsen?

Did strength increase without a corresponding improvement in sport performance?

Did throwing velocity change as lower-body power changed?

Did improved mobility coincide with a mechanical change?

Now we’re no longer asking whether an athlete looks like they’re improving.

We have information we can use to investigate what changed.

That also allows coaches to adjust training. If an athlete already produces plenty of force but struggles to express it quickly, their program shouldn’t necessarily look like the program of an athlete who simply needs more strength. If testing identifies a meaningful mobility restriction, movement limitation or side-to-side discrepancy, that’s information a coach can consider when deciding what to prioritize.

TEST. MEASURE. TRAIN. REPEAT.

If you’re serious about your sport, eventually someone is going to tell you about a supplement you “need” to be taking. Maybe it’s protein powder or creatine. Maybe a teammate swears by a certain pre-workout. Your social feed is probably full of athletes promoting greens powders, recovery drinks, hydration mixes, amino acids and products promising more strength, energy, focus or muscle.

When you see high-level athletes using these products, it’s easy to make the connection that if you want to perform like them, maybe you should be taking what they’re taking. The problem is that you’re seeing what’s in their shaker bottle without seeing everything that built the athlete holding it: thousands of hours of training, consistent nutrition, strength programming, coaching, recovery and sleep.

The supplement conversation often gets pushed to one of two extremes. Either athletes are told they need a cabinet full of products to maximize their potential, or they’re told every supplement is useless. Neither position reflects the evidence particularly well.

There are supplements with legitimate scientific evidence supporting specific uses. That is very different, however, from saying that supplements are necessary to become a high-level athlete. Training consistently, consuming enough total energy, getting appropriate amounts of protein and carbohydrates, staying hydrated and getting sufficient sleep still form the foundation.

Consider an athlete sleeping five or six hours per night, skipping breakfast, barely eating lunch and arriving at afternoon practice under-fueled. That athlete can take an expensive recovery supplement immediately afterward, but the supplement isn’t correcting the larger problem. Trying to optimize supplementation while consistently neglecting nutrition and recovery is focusing on a relatively small part of the performance equation while ignoring much larger ones.

The same principle applies to training. If you want more explosiveness, buying something marketed for “power” doesn’t replace appropriate strength and power training. If you want to get faster, you still have to sprint, produce force and train the physical qualities limiting your speed. If you’re trying to build muscle, you need an appropriate training stimulus combined with sufficient energy, protein and recovery.

Even something as common as taking pre-workout because you’re exhausted before training deserves a second question: Why are you exhausted? If you’re chronically underslept, dehydrated or haven’t eaten enough during the day, masking fatigue with a stimulant doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem.

Supplements can sometimes support a well-designed performance system. They can’t become the system itself.

Supplement recommendations spread quickly through locker rooms and weight rooms. Someone gained ten pounds while using a product. Another athlete says a pre-workout makes them feel incredible. A teammate says everyone on their club or college team takes the same thing.

Those experiences can be real without proving that the supplement caused the result. A teammate’s experience isn’t a controlled experiment, a social-media athlete holding a product isn’t scientific evidence, and words such as “advanced,” “clinical,” “anabolic” or “scientifically formulated” on a label don’t demonstrate that the claims on the container have been proven.

There is also an important regulatory distinction athletes should understand. In the United States, dietary supplements generally do not go through FDA premarket approval for safety and effectiveness in the way medications do. Manufacturers and distributors are responsible for ensuring their products comply with applicable requirements, while FDA oversight largely occurs after products enter the marketplace.

In other words, being available for purchase isn’t the same thing as being proven to improve athletic performance.

As athletes move into higher levels of competition, supplement selection can carry another risk: what is actually inside the product. Products can potentially contain undeclared or problematic ingredients, including substances prohibited under anti-doping rules.

USADA warns athletes that supplements can be mislabeled or contaminated and emphasizes that athletes are ultimately responsible for substances found in their bodies. Third-party certification can help reduce the risk, but it cannot eliminate it completely.

That makes “my teammate takes it” an especially poor standard for deciding what goes into your body. If you’re competing in an environment with drug testing, understanding the product, ingredients and applicable rules becomes part of being a serious athlete.

Not everything on the supplement shelf belongs in the same category. Protein powder, for example, can provide a convenient way to help an athlete meet protein requirements, particularly when eating a normal meal isn’t practical. But the powder itself isn’t inherently superior to getting adequate high-quality protein from food.

Creatine monohydrate is another useful example because it is one of the most extensively researched sports supplements and has substantial evidence supporting certain improvements in high-intensity exercise capacity and training adaptations in studied populations.  That doesn’t automatically translate into “every athlete should take creatine.” Age, health, diet, sport, training demands and individual circumstances still matter, and younger athletes in particular should involve an appropriate healthcare or sports-nutrition professional before using performance supplements.

The better question isn’t simply, “Does this supplement work?” It’s “What problem am I trying to solve?”

If you can’t identify the problem, it’s difficult to justify adding a supposed solution. Maybe you’re actually deficient in a nutrient. Maybe you’re struggling to consume enough protein through your normal diet. Maybe there’s strong evidence for a particular supplement in the performance quality you’re trying to develop. Those are legitimate conversations. But the decision should start with a need, not with the fact that somebody on your team bought a tub of it.

One of the biggest temptations in performance is searching for the thing everyone else knows that you don’t: the secret workout, recovery hack, perfect pre-workout or supplement stack that will finally unlock another level.

The reality of high-level athletic development is usually less exciting. It’s consistently doing important things well for a very long time. Train with purpose. Eat enough to support the work you’re doing. Get adequate protein and carbohydrates. Hydrate appropriately. Sleep enough to recover. Then come back and do it again.

Once that foundation is solid, there may absolutely be situations where a properly selected, evidence-supported supplement has a place. That’s what the word supplement is supposed to mean: something added to an already functioning system, not something used to compensate for a system that isn’t functioning.

So before spending another $50 on something promising more strength, energy, muscle or recovery, ask yourself a more useful question:

Have I already mastered the things that don’t come in a bottle?

For a lot of athletes, that’s still where the biggest performance gains are waiting.

Train Smarter. Play Harder.

Parents hear a lot about what young athletes shouldn’t eat.

Less processed food. Less added sugar. Fewer fried foods. More fruits and vegetables. Better protein sources. More water.

Those can all be reasonable goals. But there’s another nutrition problem that gets considerably less attention in youth sports:

Athletes simply not eating enough to support what they’re asking their bodies to do.

An athlete can have a diet filled with nutritious foods and still be under-fueled.

That’s because food quality and energy availability aren’t the same thing.

A growing athlete may go to school all day, attend PE, walk around campus, practice for two hours, strength train, play multiple games over a weekend—and still need energy for growth, recovery and normal physiological function.

That workload adds up quickly.

Every practice has an energy cost.

So does lifting.

So does sprinting.

So does competition.

And when training volume increases without a corresponding increase in nutrition, the athlete can begin operating with an energy deficit.

In sports nutrition, persistent mismatch between dietary energy intake and the energy required for exercise and normal physiological function is part of the concern surrounding low energy availability and, in more consequential cases, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or REDs.

The International Olympic Committee’s consensus on REDs describes potential consequences affecting numerous physiological systems as well as athletic performance.

And this isn’t exclusively a female-athlete issue.

It can affect both male and female athletes.

Imagine an athlete starts looking sluggish late in practice.

Their first few sprints look good, but speed falls off.

They’re struggling through training.

Recovery between sessions seems poor.

Parents and coaches can understandably interpret that as a conditioning problem.

So what happens?

More conditioning.

But adding workload to an athlete who is already struggling to adequately fuel and recover from the existing workload may be exactly the wrong direction.

Nutrition isn’t the only possible explanation for fatigue or declining performance, of course. Sleep, illness, training load, stress and other factors matter too.

But food should be part of the investigation.

Before assuming an athlete needs to work harder, it’s worth asking:

Are we actually giving their body enough resources to perform the work we’re already demanding from it?

This becomes especially important with carbohydrates.

Protein gets enormous attention in fitness culture, and appropriately so—athletes need adequate protein to support recovery and adaptation.

But high-intensity sport also relies heavily on carbohydrate availability.

That matters for the athlete repeatedly sprinting down a soccer field, running routes, playing basketball possessions, stealing bases or performing repeated high-intensity efforts during practice.

An athlete’s nutrition shouldn’t simply resemble an adult weight-loss diet with some extra protein added.

They’re fueling performance.

That means carbohydrates such as fruit, rice, potatoes, oats, pasta, bread and other appropriate foods can have an important place in an athlete’s diet—particularly around demanding training and competition.

One of the easiest mistakes is evaluating individual meals instead of the athlete’s complete day.

Breakfast might look good.

Lunch might look good.

Dinner might look good.

But then you realize the athlete ate breakfast at 7 AM, barely touched school lunch at noon, had nothing before a 4 PM practice and didn’t eat dinner until 7:30.

On paper, they ate three meals.

From the athlete’s perspective, they just attempted a demanding training session after going roughly four hours without meaningful fuel.

That’s why athlete nutrition has to consider what they eat, how much they eat and when they eat it.

We often separate nutrition from athlete development.

Practice is training.

Strength work is training.

Speed work is training.

And eating is something that happens afterward.

But that’s not really how adaptation works.

Training provides a stimulus.

Nutrition provides some of the raw materials and energy necessary to respond to that stimulus.

Recovery gives the body an opportunity to adapt.

Then we repeat the process.

If we’re serious about developing athletes, we have to take all three seriously.

So this week, don’t just ask whether your athlete is eating “healthy.”

Ask a better question:

Because sometimes the next performance breakthrough doesn’t require another drill, another workout or another hour of practice.

Sometimes it starts with properly fueling the work they’re already doing.

Train Smarter. Play Harder.

Coach Ryan
APEX Batting Cages & Performance Lab

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The back squat is one of the most recognizable exercises in the weight room, but being a great athlete doesn’t require proving how much weight you can put on your back. If you’re younger, relatively new to strength training, or your goal is simply to develop stronger legs, a trap-bar squat variation can be an effective place to start.

Standing inside the trap bar places the load around your body rather than across your upper back. That can make it easier to maintain a stable torso and learn how to produce force through the floor without first having to master all of the mobility, bar positioning and technical demands of a traditional back squat.

That doesn’t make the back squat a bad exercise, and it doesn’t make the trap bar automatically injury-proof. Technique, appropriate loading and coaching still matter. But when we’re introducing strength training, the goal isn’t to choose the exercise that looks the most advanced. It’s to choose the variation that allows you to train the desired movement safely, confidently and with good technique.

If you’re new to lifting, start light. Learn the movement. Control the lowering portion, keep your trunk braced, drive through the floor and earn the right to add weight.

You don’t get stronger because the exercise looks impressive. You get stronger because you can perform it well enough to progressively train it.

TRAIN SMARTER. PLAY HARDER.