Episode 9: Foundational Truths in Athlete Development (with Mike Boyle)

In this episode of the Evolving Performance Podcast, Kevin is joined by Coach Mike Boyle, one of the most respected and influential figures in strength and conditioning. Mike is the co-founder of Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning (MBSC), a best-selling author, and a former coach for the Boston Bruins, Boston Red Sox, and U.S. Women’s Olympic Hockey Team, among others. His decades of work with youth, collegiate, and professional athletes have shaped modern performance training.

They explore the "big rocks" of athletic development—timeless principles that remain essential even as trends, tools, and tech evolve. Mike shares insights from over 40 years in the field, including how to identify and develop athletes with long-term potential, when kids should begin training, and how parents can best navigate today’s youth sports landscape.

This is a must-listen for parents, coaches, and performance pros looking for clear, experience-backed guidance to help athletes reach their full potential.

Topics Include:

• The “big rocks” of training that outlast fads and technologies
• What separates athletes who make it from those who fall short
• The right age to start formal strength and conditioning
• Key physical and psychological readiness signs in young athletes
• Misconceptions about youth training and growth stunting
• Advice for parents on year-round sports and specialization
• Why most youth athletes don’t need to “play up” to get better
• Signs of overuse and burnout in young athletes
• How to identify appropriate coaching and training environments
• The importance of consistency and long-term planning in development
• Why early success doesn’t always lead to long-term achievement

📲 Connect with Mike Boyle:
Instagram: @michael_boyle1959
Twitter/X: @mboyle1959
Websites:
➡️ CompleteConditioning.com
➡️ BodyByBoyle.com
➡️ MBSC on TrainHeroic
➡️ StrengthCoach.com

📩 Contact Kevin:
Follow and suggest future guests, topics, and questions: @KevinNeeld
📺 Watch the videos: @NeeldPerformance
🧠 Subscribe to the free newsletter: KevinNeeld.com
📬 Email: KN@KevinNeeld.com

Thanks for listening!

⏱️ Timestamps

00:00 – Mike Boyle Bio
01:23 – Episode 9 topics

02:11 - Welcoming Mike Boyle to the podcast
04:02 – Coaching vs. technology
07:48 – Strength and consistency
12:28 – Traits of high-potential athletes
16:18 – Training vs. skill in offseason
20:58 – Role acceptance for long-term success
25:58 – Social media and talent myths
28:43 – Ideal age to start training
33:13 – Starting LTAD at 11 vs. 18
36:18 – Lifting and growth: myth vs. fact
39:20 – Long-term development mindset
43:00 – What separates pros
46:00 – Training adjustments with age
47:33 – Parent advice: avoid year-round hype
52:00 – Burnout and D1 predictors
56:00 – Development over tournaments
59:08 – What to look for in coaches/teams
1:03:00 – Where to follow Mike

Transcript

EVOLVING PERFORMANCE PODCAST
Episode: Mike Boyle - The Big Rocks of Athletic Development
Date: May 29, 2025

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KEVIN NEELD: Welcome to the Evolving Performance Podcast. Today, I'm excited to welcome Mike Boyle as a guest on the podcast. Coach Boyle is one of the foremost experts in the fields of strength, conditioning, functional training, and general fitness. In 1996, he co-founded Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, one of the first for-profit strength and conditioning companies in the world, training athletes from junior high school students to All-Stars in almost every major professional sport.

Prior to co-founding Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, Coach Boyle served as the head strength and conditioning coach at Boston University for 15 years and as the strength and conditioning coach for men's ice hockey at Boston University for 25 years. He also served as the strength and conditioning coach for the Boston Bruins for eight years, the Boston Red Sox during their World Series winning campaign in 2013, and the U.S. Women's Olympic ice hockey team during two Olympic cycles, helping the team win gold in 1998 in Nagano and silver in 2014 in Sochi.

He also served as a consultant in the development of the USA Hockey National Team Development Program in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mike has been a featured speaker at numerous strength and conditioning and athletic training clinics across the world, has produced 20 instructional videos in the area of strength and conditioning available through Perform Better, and published his book "Functional Training for Sports" for Human Kinetics.

In this episode, we discuss the big rocks of training and development that will survive short-term fads and stand the test of time as being essential for an athlete's success; the appropriate age for youth athletes to start a performance training program; common characteristics of the athletes that make it, and common characteristics of those that fall short of their potential; and advice for parents navigating the youth sports landscape, including whether kids should play one sport year-round and how to decide if an athlete should play up or down a level.

If you're the parent of a youth athlete, odds are a lot of the questions you have about the development process and how to make the best decisions to set your son or daughter up for success are covered in this episode from someone that has helped develop as many youth athletes as anyone in the world.

Now, please welcome Mike Boyle to the podcast.

Mike, thanks so much for doing this. I'm excited to have you on.

MIKE BOYLE: Thanks for having me. It's just good for us to get a chance to talk. We don't get to do it enough.

KEVIN NEELD: No, it's not. It's surprising given, you know, we're both, I would say, in the greater Boston area, but, you know, as the crow flies, probably pretty close, but with the traffic and everything, a few hours apart.

MIKE BOYLE: Exactly. I've been saying I got to get down to the Warrior now. I think I've been saying that for five years, and I still have yet to make it.

KEVIN NEELD: Well, you got an open invitation. Anytime we can make it work, scheduling wise. Well, cool. Let's jump in here. So, you know, I think where I wanted to start is just with the increased availability and use of technology, and, you know, now the introduction of AI on a more mainstream basis, there's a lot of focus on the future and what the industry could look like ten years down the line. It's been around long enough now that you've seen tons of fads come and go, you've seen this pendulum swing back and forth on different aspects of training. So, you know, I wanted to get your take on what you think won't change moving forward. In other words, despite some things inevitably evolving, what are the big rock aspects of training and athletic development that will stand the test of time and be important for athletes to continue to focus on?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I think honestly, this is my thought process. I think we've seen or are seeing what I would call the datafication of strength and conditioning. There is a perfect marriage of technology and management because management loves the technology and they love the graphs and the charts and all that stuff. But I think what they're going to realize over time is that that doesn't really move the needle, that the information doesn't really help you to change the training process.

It still becomes like—you're in the NHL now and you realize, I got to get guys to work out through the course of an 80-game season, and technology isn't going to help me do that. I'm not going to be able to look at that and think, oh, I got force plate numbers and that's going to motivate the guys after a game to get in here and work out, because I just don't think it does.

I think it motivates management, and I think I've seen it creates a lot of work for people in our field. I mean, it's created a whole new field. Everybody's got a sports science guy now who's telling everybody all kinds of stuff, but ultimately I think it's going to spin back around to teams are going to realize, wow, I need a coach. I need a guy who can relate to people in the weight room and get them in there to work up. Because what will make you successful long term is simply consistently working out. It's not you having more data—not going to look like, oh, I have way more data on this guy, therefore he's going to be better. It doesn't.

Because I even think talking to guys like Devin McConnell and some guys, when you really start looking at the data and you say, okay, what is the data really made you change from a training program? What I keep getting back is not that much. Maybe 10%, maybe at most 20%, we're doing something different because of the data. And I think what teams will realize after a while is that while we spent a lot of money, we put a lot of money into this, we added positions, but I don't know if it's really changing. I just can't see where it changes the physical preparation of these guys.

And I may be completely wrong. I may be like the old guy on this one, but I think eventually teams will come around and say, you know, I'll start getting calls like, hey Mike, I need a really good coach. I need a guy who's good in the weight room. I need a guy who really relates to the guys, because that's where we're realizing that we're failing. And I mean, that's my hope, too, because I think people say, you know, like, AI will replace us—I don't think AI replaces us because it can't coach. It can only aggregate information. We could say if I said, hey, tell me all about Kevin Neeld's training program and input a lot of information about you. It's probably going to spit out something that you've already produced in an article anyway, so I could get that. But do I get the guy in the room to relate to the guys? I think ultimately that's still the secret sauce.

KEVIN NEELD: And what about from a training standpoint more directly? Are there—you know, there's, to your point, you know, there's integration of different tools that provide feedback on velocity of movement, on power output, some things like that. You know, I also think that one of the things that's really changed over the last 20 years is there's weekend certifications for just about everything now. If you want to be a stretch specialist or a mobility specialist or, you know, movement optimization specialist—there is—and I'm intentionally trying to be vague out of respect for some of the organizations that fall under those different categories. But, you know, I think one of the things that I've seen is that in part because, you know, your athletes are exposed to some of these things through social media and it seems like this is the solution that they've been missing. And a lot of things are marketed that way where I think it's easy to be drawn into, you know, like I need to be doing this one specific type of thing. And, you know, this person says that everything else is going to screw me up if I'm straying off of this course of action here. So, you know, what are the big rocks from a training standpoint that you think aren't going to change, even as our understanding evolves?

MIKE BOYLE: I still think people need to be strong. I think because you know yourself, when you look at a guy, the one thing you'll look at quickly and think, this guy's just really not strong enough. So I think ultimately it's the same thing—with velocity-based training and with some of these other things, ultimately, at some point you got to look and think, hey, if this guy can't do ten chin-ups, he's not strong enough. If this guy can't bench his body weight ten times, he's not strong. And if this guy can't do a single-leg squat, he's not strong enough. I don't think that stuff's going to change.

And I don't think there's a technological solution. And I think that's the difference—there really is no hack for work. Like people look, if that's where someone could really look at this and say, somehow I'm going to hack my way around this guy actually doing the work that he needs to do, that would really be a game changer. But we haven't seen that one yet. Guys have to show up.

I think when we talk about what's important, the biggest thing that's most important: attendance, consistency. I mean, I worked for the Bruins in the 90s. And when we started, basically nobody lifted weights during the season, really. When we first started, there were a few maybe oddballs that did. And as we got more guys to lift during the season, our injury rates went down and they went from the highest in the league to almost the lowest in the league during that ten-year period, and it really was about attendance. How many guys—as I got more guys that would come in and do some sort of simple total body workout, the numbers got better.

So I think ultimately—and you probably see that in your setting now in terms of, you know, if you got a guy who doesn't want to work out during the season, that guy tends to be a guy that has problems. He tends to fade at the end of the year. He tends to have more of an injury situation, more of an injury history.

So I think eventually management will wise up. But as I said, I think right now we're just at this point where everybody wants like, you know, a Harvard guy or a Yale guy or a guy with an MBA and everybody's really super psyched about, you know, show me all the data. You know, I can remember when I worked for the Red Sox, I can remember being asked, is there anything expensive that we can buy? And I'm thinking to myself, what a ridiculous question that is, that we're just looking—we're literally looking for something to spend money on.

And I remember going back to them and saying, you know, we could really improve the food, that would really move the needle for us. We could create a sleep room, that would really move the needle for us. But, you know, if we got another underwater treadmill or, you know, something—that would not move the needle for us. That might help one guy with his rehab at one point way far in the future.

And so my hope, my real sincere hope is that management will get smarter and will look and be more analytical. It's funny—you've got the NHL Combine coming up. And I always tell everybody, I'm like, scrap all the testing, just do vertical jumps and draft. I'd literally be like, I don't care. I saw someone—John Powell was talking to me about the bench press test and they're doing, you know, trying to get watts per kilogram or something on the bench press. And I'm thinking, what the heck is that going to tell us about that prospect?

But if I look at a guy and think, hey, that kid's vertical jump is 36 inches and he's got really good hands, I'm like, draft him. He's going to probably be a pretty good player. I would just literally sit down and be like, okay, here's my list. Here's the list of player ratings. Here's the list of vertical jumps. All right, let's correlate those and see who's the most powerful guy with the highest rating. I'm just taking those guys. And you can show me 75 other tests and I'd be like, I don't really care. Because one thing I've seen—the best guys have natural genetic explosive lower body power, almost without fail. And if a guy doesn't, if a guy kind of is under a certain level, he's a real outlier. And he'd better be really, really good at hockey.

KEVIN NEELD: That's probably an appropriate segue. You've had athletes now from middle school, possibly earlier, and you've trained them all the way through retirement from their professional careers—and I'm sure in a few cases beyond, into their amateur golf careers and whatever they're doing afterwards. What are some of the common characteristics of the athletes that you look at and think they've had the most successful runs, at least in terms of fulfilling their potential? Obviously, everybody's ceiling is a little bit different. And then, within the same context, what are some of the characteristics of the athletes that didn't live up to their potential, that probably fell short of where they were reasonably expected to play?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I would tell you, one, it always comes down to talent. I think talent is always first—you have to have it. It's very difficult to overcome lack of talent. But when you sort of take our best players at that time and you pool guys of relatively similar talent, then the word I keep coming back to again—we talk about attendance, consistency—the guys who kept showing up.

I look at Jay Pandolfo—he was always my best example in terms of Jay having a really, really long NHL career. And he was one of those guys. He was always one of the first guys back after the season ended to start working out again. He probably missed the fewest workouts. And obviously he put a lot of energy. He worked hard, but if you work hard just when you're there but you're not there, then it doesn't really work out. So you've got to combine. Like I'd almost rather have a slightly lower level of work with a higher level of attendance.

You know, if someone said to me, I'm going to come in, I'm going to go balls out, but I'm going to make 25% of the workouts—I'll probably show up on Monday, and then I'll probably miss the rest of the week. I'm thinking that guy probably isn't going to achieve.

Whereas if someone came in—and I think about, you know, a lot of these guys have become really successful—the Jay Pandolfos and the Chris Drurys and the Mike Griers like our group of guys has excelled at the management level. You know, Donnie Sweeney, who obviously you work for now—Donnie was incredibly consistent, incredibly diligent. And that's what you see. If you can get these guys who have the requisite level of talent and then this—and maybe you'll have a better word for it that I don't have—but just this kind of consistency and this diligence where they don't miss days, those are the guys that achieved. And the guys that didn't achieve are the guys that didn't show up.

I used to have guys—I can remember having a conversation one time with a player. And I won't say this player's name, but this player was unbelievable one summer, made the Boston Bruins. The next summer, all of a sudden it was, well, I got invited to this golf tournament. I'm going to go play in this pro-am. I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go do that. And I remember saying to him, you have to remember they do not invite the Providence Bruins to these tournaments. They invite the Boston Bruins. And I ended up being right. This guy did not last, and he did not last because his consistency dropped off.

His talent never changed, but suddenly he was making 50% of the workouts. And I saw that with my NFL guys. I saw NFL guys do the exact same thing. They suddenly make it in the league and they realize, wow, there's a lot of guys in the league that don't work that hard, that don't show up for workouts. And so they stop showing up for workouts and then two years later, they're out of the league and they wonder why they're out of the league. And I'm like, well, you stopped showing up.

I love—you probably read Slight Edge, right? But I love Olson's idea in The Slight Edge because he said, basically, rule number one is show up and rule number two is keep showing up. And then rule number three is keep showing up. I think he's, you know, keep showing up with great passion. And if you really can just look at that slight edge concept from Jeff Olson's book, I think that's what really makes these successful guys—you get a guy who's talented enough to play in the NFL, NHL, whatever we're talking about, and then that guy decides I'm going to show up and I'm going to keep showing up and I'm going to show up with a great attitude. Those guys are going to do really well.

KEVIN NEELD: You mentioned that talent is one of the big rocks of future success. And I would agree with that. I think that kind of leads to the question though—and I'm sure you've seen this with hockey too—that there are certain guys that in the off-season, they just want to spend the whole time on the ice, you know, whether that's with skating or skill coaches or whether it's just doing stuff on their own. But I think that from their perspective, there's probably an argument that they're developing their skill and developing their talent, but it's coming at the expense of them putting in time training. And then, you know, maybe the other extreme of that is somebody that dedicates their whole summer to training, but then suffers from a skill standpoint when they get back to their team on the back end. So where's the balance there in your perspective? Is it more player to player that you just kind of have to see where the player is exceptionally gifted or not, and that may steer some of that decision-making?

MIKE BOYLE: I think to some degree, yes. The problem is I think players use that to their advantage because they want to assume they are what they like to do. So if I said, oh, it comes down to that type of player, then you'd get that guy who's like, I just like to be on the ice. So that's what I'm going to do.

I think part of it is acknowledging where your real weakness is. So if you're looking at it and saying, I really am lacking—and even where your game is, right? You might look at it and think, you know, you might have a guy who's out on the ice practicing to be a first line guy and be a power play guy. And you might know in your heart of hearts, he's never going to be that. If he can stay on his team, he's a bottom-six forward and he's a 5-6 defenseman, and he's wasting a lot of time trying to become something that he's not.

So I think the other thing that you see is there are guys who know what they are and they train and behave in that way. Again, I go back to Jay. Jay was the perfect example. Jay was an extremely gifted college player who went on to become a really, really good fourth-line NHL guy, a great defensive forward, because he just realized, okay, this is where I slot in here. Maybe I would like to be on the power play. Maybe I would like to be on the first line.

But I always talk about it—I wrote a little story for a section of a book that I think Ryan McCaffrey did, but I forget whose book it was—I call it "The Janitor and the Window Washer." And it's like, if the coach comes down or the boss comes down to you and said, I need you to wash the windows. And every time he comes down and you're sweeping the floor and he looks at you and goes, Kev, windows! The windows are a mess, I need—and you're like, but you know, I'm the best floor sweeper here. I love this. And he's like, yeah, but you know if you don't wash the windows I'm going to fire you.

And it's like that's a lot of guys in sports in terms of they're arguing with the boss about what the available job is. And the guy is like, this is the job I want you to do. This is the job I want to pay you for. If you don't want that job, I'm going to give it to somebody else. And that's what happens. And sometimes those guys end up in the minors because they're not listening. They're not hearing that, hey, this is what we want you to be. This is the role.

You could use the same movie analogy. Hey, you know, you're not going to be the leading man, but I got a really good best supporting actor role right here that you could fall right into. And so I think there is some awareness of that. And the guys who are usually extreme one way or the other lack that awareness. The guy who's a real gym rat and you look at him and think, you know, you're already the strongest guy on the team, but you could use three more hours a week on the ice—generally won't want to do that because he'll want to stay where his strengths are. And then vice versa.

The thing I always say, though, is that you can change your body way more than you can change your skill. That's one thing that I've seen. Skill—when we get to the higher level, the BU college level, the NHL level—your skill level is probably not going to change appreciably, but physically you can change significantly.

I look at Mike Grier as the perfect example. Mike Grier went from kind of a 250-pound overweight, slow, unfit guy to a 215-pound wrecking ball and became an NHL player because of that. I don't know that his skill changed all that much during that time, but his body changed completely. So I think it's the ability to be truly introspective and to truly self-evaluate, which I think a lot of people aren't very good at.

KEVIN NEELD: And if I'm understanding what you referenced earlier, maybe part of that is just listening and really being open-minded to the feedback that you're hearing from the coaches and the people around you, especially for the players that are entering situations where there's jobs on the line—whether that's in the form of scholarships or spots on Division One teams or at the professional level.

MIKE BOYLE: It's a mindset thing, right? It's fixed mindset, growth mindset kind of thing. I think you've got to have a growth mindset. And that is like you said, that's that ability to listen.

And I can't tell you how many times I watched Coach Parker have discussions with players about, hey, this is who you are. This is who we see you as. And kids thinking, no, you know, I'm going to come back next year. I'm going to be on the first line. And those were generally kids who didn't play. Those were kids who ended up being healthy scratches because they couldn't evaluate what job was currently open.

KEVIN NEELD: Sure. And I think there's probably an assumption that it's the first line guys that move on to the next level. And obviously there's a lot of cases where the best players are in those situations on the team and they do move on to the next level. But I think the higher you go, the more important it is to find a role. And, you know, you might have a really, really good third-line player in college that can be a really, really good third-line player in the NHL, where you may have a first or second-line player in college that's very good at that level that can't be a good third-line player in the NHL and isn't good enough to be a top-six forward at that level.

MIKE BOYLE: I think there's tons of guys in the American Hockey League like that who were great first-line players in college or in junior or whatever, but couldn't adjust themselves because it is a different role. It's suddenly someone saying to you, hey, I don't really want you to handle the puck. I'd like you to get that puck in and then go chase it. And even though that may not be your nature, if that's what the job description specifies, then you better prepare for the job description.

KEVIN NEELD: Do you think it's natural for youth athletes certainly, but even on up through the levels, to look at the best players in the world and to try to find out or see what those players are doing and want to replicate that? Do you think that there's value in learning from the best players in the world, or do you think that maybe that can be a dangerous practice because they're by definition exceptional and outliers in what they're able to do?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I think when you're young, I think there comes a point when you're young—yes, I think you want ideally you've got an eight-year-old, you want that kid to watch hockey and you want him to watch McDavid and watch Barkov and watch these guys and think, hey, that's how I want to be. Because that will then set a really high ceiling for them versus your son looking and thinking, hey, I'd really like to be a good fourth-line checking guy. You think, well, that's probably not a great goal for you at eight.

So the problem is as you age up and start to realize, okay, this is probably who I am, and I'm not going to probably be scoring Michigan goals, and I'm probably not going to be centering the first line, and I'm probably not going to be on the power play. So I think there's a little bit of a continuum there. And I think for kids, you want kids to be able to think and to dream.

I can remember Scott Gomez talking one time about being at a camp and saying to the kids, when you're young, try everything. Carry the puck, deke people. Don't ever dump a puck. Try to beat the guy every single time that you can, because at some point someone's going to tell you, you can't do that anymore. And I thought, that's really, really good advice.

Because suddenly when you get to games where the wins and losses really matter—and I think the difference with that is when there's a coach that can get fired because you don't do what you're supposed to do. I think that's when the game starts to change and when you have to start thinking, all right, I need to now structure my game to the rules that are being outlined for me by the coach. But that's certainly not youth hockey. That's certainly not probably before that kid is 14 or 15 years old.

So I think younger kids—maybe some unrealistic dream expectations aren't so bad. And then when they get older, it needs to kind of come to earth a little bit and you just have to start to get some good self-analysis of, hey, this is what I can do well, this is what maybe I don't do as well.

And from training and lifestyle as far as nutrition and some of the other things, I think that there's some great players that do those things really well too, and they probably are the ones that have the habits that you would want other players to mimic. And there's—I'm sure you've seen players that are exceptionally gifted that succeed maybe despite their preparation and their habits.

KEVIN NEELD: Do you have any advice for athletes that are looking at some of those aspects of some of the players they look up to on how to filter out what may be contributing to that player's success versus what, at a minimum, is not helping and in some cases maybe detracting? And they're just so talented they can push past it.

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I think unfortunately social media makes it worse. It used to be I used to call it the Sports Illustrated effect because Sports Illustrated used to love to write articles about all these guys and how great they were and how much they trained and how they did everything right when a lot of that wasn't probably even true. But I always say, as a sports writer, you don't get to write bad stuff more than once. If you want to keep writing for a career, then you kind of have to write things in more rose-colored glasses.

But I think, again, the biggest thing with kids is one—realizing that they're kids. I was critical of a nutritionist on Twitter who came out and said something to the effect of if your kid isn't getting up and making their own school lunch every day, they're not really committed and they're not going to be successful. And my first question was, do you have kids? Which the answer was, no, I do not. I said, well, you have no idea how incredibly unrealistic your statement is.

With kids, kids are kids and they're going to be kids and they're going to eat like kids and they're going to act like kids. And you should expect them to do that as they get older. You should expect them to start to have slightly less childlike behaviors.

I think when you get—I had very high expectations for our players in college because they're in college now. They're 18 and 19 and 20 and 21, and they have aspirations to play in the NHL. I think you can put a certain level of pressure on them, much like your situation. But I think, you know, maybe it's kind of like if you can get kids to eat halfway decent half the time, you're probably doing a pretty good job as a parent, trust me.

KEVIN NEELD: Speaking of kids, I'm sure you've gotten this question a lot over the years, but having young kids myself, I find myself having this conversation more frequently recently. At what age should youth athletes start coming to a place like Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning to start following a formal strength and conditioning program?

MIKE BOYLE: So we're 11. And I always tell people, we will not take kids younger than 11 under any circumstances. As soon as I say, I'm going to let Kevin's eight-year-old in here because he's really good and I think he's got potential, then I'm going to have parents beating down my door because every parent has, unfortunately, a crazed, unrealistic view of their child. It's part of being a parent, I think.

So we go 11. The time when we would make an exception is if a kid is having maybe adjustment problems in school, a kid who's overweight, a kid who I think really might benefit from our environment from a social, emotional standpoint, I might make an exception there. I will not make an athletic exception under any circumstances.

So we're 11. And I mean, I tell people all the time, next year, you know, we'd love to have them. And you could take the girls younger honestly, because their behavior is so much better than the boys. But I mean, even 11 and 12-year-old boys, they're the worst clients that we have. I say this all the time. There is no one I want least to train than 11 and 12-year-old boys, because they're really not socially, emotionally ready. Generally it's their parents that are socially, emotionally ready for them to be there, but the boys themselves aren't. And so they tend to be a huge pain in the ass, honestly. And they need way more supervision and coaching.

We were just talking about this yesterday in our staff meeting. You have to be much more stern when you have a group of young 11, 12-year-old boys than you would with anybody else that we're going to train.

And so that's the age. We used to be 12, but because all of the age groups are 11-12, we were getting situations where we basically were saying, we won't take half your team, we'll take this half your team. And that just from a business perspective didn't make any sense. So we said, okay, we're going to bend the rules here. We'll get down to 11, but I won't bend it because then it's 9-10, right? The next age bracket is 9-10. And if we take ten then we get to take nines. And I think if you're into 9-10, I always say you're in the childhood-stealing business. These are kids that should be riding bikes and climbing trees and having fun outside, and suddenly they're at a place like Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning on some formalized training program.

The exception, I think, is if you can run a Jeremy Frisch-esque program. If guys aren't familiar with Jeremy, they should follow him on Instagram. But I couldn't do it. We couldn't do what he does in our space. It would be total mayhem and I wouldn't do it anyway because I get concerned liability-wise. But he's got kids tumbling and jumping over things and it's sort of like an insane version of a kids' gym or something on steroids that these kids are behaving.

KEVIN NEELD: Yeah, I mean, Jeremy does great work. He seems to almost have privatized what used to be physical education and then just made it a lot more fun and engaging.

MIKE BOYLE: Yeah, it's like the fun-based stuff. Yeah, I mean, I look at it sometimes and I think, wow, I wish—I just don't—because of the number of adults that we have, I don't think we could ever be able to do what he does and be successful at it. So we don't even try. And then we just stay kind of on the relatively—I don't know, serious is probably the wrong word—but the strength and conditioning side. And we start at 11. If you look at the sort of long-term athletic development models, this is the beginning of that learn-to-train period.

One of the things I always say to everybody is that year one is always year one. And that could be when you're 18 years old. If you're a Canadian kid who's never lifted a weight and shows up at the Boston Bruins camp, you got to go through year one with that kid where you're teaching bench press and goblet squat and all the things that you wanted to know. Or year one could be at 11 and they're learning the exact same skills. But year one and two have to be the same. And it would be much better that they're 11-12 than 18-19 in terms of the overall development of that athlete.

KEVIN NEELD: What is it about the age 11 or age 12 that you feel comfortable with those kids coming in? You've mentioned the social maturity aspect a couple times, and I guess when this topic comes up, I actually just got this question over the weekend about is there a physical maturity aspect of being ready? And the old feeling that weight lifting too early can stunt your growth, I think, is pervasive. So what is it about that age group that you feel comfortable bringing them into that environment?

MIKE BOYLE: You know, it's funny, I think just experientially we found—I think we started at 13 years ago. And then because people were always trying to get us to do it younger, we started taking some 12-year-olds. We said, okay, these kids, they're a little harder to rein in, but if we do a good job, we can start teaching them, and it does seem to have some benefit.

I just think 11-12 is now when suddenly cuts become more realistic. This kid is going to go to middle school. Making teams is going to become harder. I think it's a good time for a kid to start to learn that there's an investment involved in being good at sports. Like, if I want to be good at this, I'm going to have to do more than simply show up for practice and games.

And I think just as I'm looking at it, I think 9-10 is probably too young for that, for those kids to understand that. But at 11-12, I think kids are looking at this and thinking, wow, I'm going to be in high school soon. And I got to try out for the freshman team and there's going to be cuts. The pyramid starts to narrow at that point.

And I think that's where kids will start to benefit from the physical preparation part of it. Not that they wouldn't at 9-10, but I think it's more significant at 11-12.

It's also, interestingly enough, where the boys and girls start to diverge a little bit because initially at 11-12, the girls are very often the physical equal of the boys. And then suddenly at 13, 14, there's this massive maturation thing that takes place.

I used to tell my son Mark all the time, testosterone will win the race. We had a young lady, Mia Bonner, who plays at Dartmouth right now. She's almost the exact same size—she was at 12 or 13 years old, playing college hockey at Dartmouth now. And when she was there, she was on the first line on the boys' team. She was a great little player and everybody was, you know, five feet tall, 120 pounds. Suddenly she's now maybe five-three, 120 pounds playing college hockey. And those same boys are six-one and 190 pounds playing college hockey or playing college lacrosse or whatever it is.

So I think there's also—it's a good time for boys because I think getting them—and I said this and people look at me like I'm a little crazy—but I think strength training in puberty may have more benefit than we think, in terms of I honestly think it enhances height versus the total reverse of what's been said. Not only does it not stunt your growth, I had my son Mark and his friends probably from that 11-year-old point all the way through.

Even I still have some of them now and they're 20. They're all taller than their parents, than their fathers. Every single kid without fail. And I kind of look at that and think, is there maybe something that we don't know about stimulating long bones during that maturation process that, much like when you think about Wolff's Law and some of these other things, it would make sense.

People say, no, it doesn't happen. But I look at it and think, we don't know that it doesn't happen because nobody's really done those kinds of studies. Nobody's said, I'm going to do a long-term study, I'm going to take kids at 11 years old, and then I'm going to track them through 15 or 16 and see where they end up in their height projection or where they end up in height relative to their parents.

So I think there too, I think there's definitely an enhancement that goes with training during that puberty process.

KEVIN NEELD: Yeah. That's interesting. I think at a minimum, I just want to emphasize resistance training does not stunt growth. And maybe based on the Mark experiment, may in fact enhance growth.

MIKE BOYLE: I know, and the good thing is, I actually did an Instagram post about this maybe a couple weeks ago, a month ago. But there is zero evidence and there never has been any evidence, which is the crazy part in that occasionally things get said and unfortunately they get said by a doctor or by an authority person, and then people just repeat them.

I've asked people over and over again, send me any information that you can find on weight training stunting somebody's growth. Zero. I've never had anybody send me a study or a piece or any piece of data that says, hey, yeah, somebody did this study.

Someone was saying that it comes from the idea that maybe, I guess if you had like kiddy powerlifting, there's a chance that you could damage a kid's growth plate and then that long bone would fail to grow. But that's not what anybody's talking about these days. Although there are people dumb enough to do kiddy powerlifting. So I should say that I watch some of the—Instagram will show you the overwhelming level of stupidity of the population.

KEVIN NEELD: Yeah, that was my understanding, is that it was growth plate fractures that were the major concern, to which I've had a similar experience. I haven't been able to track any documented case of that actually happening. It sounds maybe more like a theory that a doctor had several decades ago that has stood the test of time for whatever reason.

I want to circle back to—you had mentioned earlier that you would rather have somebody that maybe comes in with a little bit less effort but consistently, compared to somebody that's max effort balls-to-the-wall on Monday and then you don't see him for the rest of the week. And I think that there may be an analogy there for the off-season as a whole where I've been thinking back to some cases where players are like, I have tryouts in three weeks and I want to get ready, or our season starts in a month and I want to start training to get in shape for that.

And you've often said that training is like farming and that you can't speed farm. So for the listeners that maybe aren't familiar with that analogy, can you expand on that a little bit and then what are some of the dangers of athletes attempting to cram for the test from a training standpoint?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, the big danger of cramming for the test is that you get hurt. That's one of the reasons—it's funny at Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, I always say we don't take somebody who shows up with two weeks before the season and says, I want to enroll my kid. We tell him, no, too late. I always tell him, I can probably get your kid injured, but I can't get them ready. And then you're going to blame me because your kid went to tryouts and didn't do well in tryouts and got hurt.

And it's exactly what you said. I've used that—Stephen Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talked about the law of the farm and basically the idea, like you said, you can't speed farm. You can't wish for a lawn and say, okay, I'm going to roll outside. It doesn't work that way in training. You've got to literally plant the seed and water the seed.

And then there's your time period. I always think whenever you put grass seed down, you look for a really long time and think, wow, did anything happen? And then suddenly one day you come out and think, oh wow, there's little bits of grass on here, there's little blades of grass. And then you come out a couple days later and you think, wow, I've got a lot of grass. And then you come out three months from now and you think, wow, I got a lawn.

That's training in a nutshell in terms of it takes time and effort and you can't rush it. You can't look at it and think, how do I make the grass grow faster? Well you don't—it doesn't work that way. And training is the same way.

And that's why we have these sort of nine-week and ten-week offseason plans because like I tell people, ten days off and then start again. My son Mark's team, they lost in the Final Four game and said, okay, we started, you know, a week from Wednesday. We're starting back up again. And that's what we did.

Because if you let yourself have longer off from training now, you're going back in the wrong direction. There could be a week where it's recovery and compensation and think, yeah, we need this. But you get beyond that week probably and now you're starting to go in the wrong direction. And what I realized in college years ago, you're starting to develop bad habits to fill that time because you start to realize, oh, I've got all day. And maybe that's golf, maybe that's video games, maybe that's whatever. But it's not the things that you need to be doing. And it's not establishing that routine.

That's the one thing when I look at when I talk about whether it was Donnie Sweeney or Chris Drury or Jay Pandolfo or any of these guys that trained with us, these guys got into their routine and they maintained that routine. They didn't miss days. They were very, almost religiously meticulous about doing what they needed to do.

And it's interesting—a lot of these guys have gone on to become really successful, either as coaches or as management people in the NHL. I can remember even Billy Guerin—Billy's general manager in Minnesota now. And I can remember Billy literally saying, make me a list of what I need. And he had it in his trunk of his car. Billy traveled all summer. Billy would work out at his house. He would work out at the gym. He'd say, I'm going to buy what I need to do the workout. You look at that and think, hey, that's why he had a long career. That's probably why he's in management and doing well. And I've seen other guys who, as I said, were not as diligent or were not as attentive. And those results also spoke for themselves.

KEVIN NEELD: So I would echo the same sentiment that the players that I've had an opportunity to cross paths with that have been the most successful establish their routines, and then they go through them repetitively. It's almost the opposite of some players where it's like, I'm too tired today to do it, I'll do it next time. Or I was home a little late, so I just ordered takeout or whatever.

And I think the best players that I've had an opportunity to work with, they don't let those thoughts even creep into their head. It doesn't disturb their habits or their behavior at all. It's almost like they get on the assembly line and they just do all of the right things, because that's what they've established as their routines and their habits on a daily basis. Instead of thinking like, I'm tired today, hopefully tomorrow I'll feel better and then I'll do the right things.

MIKE BOYLE: Right? And some people think that it's like your secret or it's my secret. But the bottom line—I've seen guys, whether it's Matt Nichol's guys or Gary Roberts' guys or whatever it is—the guys that find some place to go and then go there consistently do well. And I don't know that there is a secret formula that works better than another secret formula, but the secret formula is the Jeff Olson formula, right? Show up, show up consistently. If you go someplace that's got a good program, and it doesn't have to be my program, but you've got someplace that's got a good program, you can then look at those people and say, hey, do the program. Don't miss days, and everything's going to be fine.

KEVIN NEELD: I think one of the benefits of having an opportunity to work with athletes throughout different stages of their career is you get to see how they grow and evolve as people. And I'm curious, what have you heard from the athlete's perspective on things that they've done over the course of their career that's been the most helpful for them? And maybe some things that they've said that they wish they would have started to do or take more seriously earlier?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I think the biggest thing that they've done is that they've listened, because I look at it—and I keep going back to Jay. But I wrote an article called "Training an Athlete for 17 Years" and talked about how when we started out, our program was really conventional, kind of squat and clean and bench press, kind of a program. By the time we were done, it was dumbbell bench press, single-leg squats, and plyo for our explosiveness.

And it was that ability to kind of surf the wave, I guess, and realize that as I get older, I can still play, but my body doesn't tolerate—there's sort of the 18-year-old's workout, which can be a pretty conventional meathead kind of workout. And then there's the late 30s guy who's trying to stay in the league. That guy's not on the same workout program anymore.

So I think it's that ability rather than to fight back with you and say, oh, no, but I really want to do this, to think, hey, like my guys, one of the things that my guys did really well is that they just accepted the fact that I probably know more about this than them. And when I said, this is what we're going to do, that's what they did.

And you keep going back to that particular point, but it really matters that you get a guy who is willing to listen, willing to alter the work, willing to say, okay, yeah, this may have worked for me when I was 18 years old, but it's not—the funny thing is, it wasn't guys coming in telling me. And that's the difference. The guys who told me, well—that tended to not be successful guys coming back and saying, oh, this doesn't work for me. Those tended to be guys who were looking for excuses.

But the guys that I went to and said, hey, we need to change this because this isn't going to work for you long term—those tended to be guys that were successful.

KEVIN NEELD: The last thing I want to dive into with you is just some advice for parents. You've obviously had an opportunity to work with a ton of kids. You've raised two great kids yourself—one has completed college and moved on to the working world, one's in the middle of it now. You had mentioned, I think the phrase you used was "stealing childhood" for having eight and nine-year-olds in a formal strength and conditioning environment.

And I think one of the things that I've seen already with my son, who just turned eight a couple weeks ago, is the pressure for year-round sports participation. Obviously in the New England area, there's no shortage of opportunities to play hockey. There's summer league, spring league, there's camps all summer long. It's the longest season of any of the youth sports that we've had an opportunity to engage in.

And I'm just curious, what's your advice for parents that are maybe not sure what to do in those situations because they're just not experts in long-term athletic development? And they're just seeing what's going on around them and thinking, I—my kid needs to be doing skating lessons and camps and clinics and really investing a lot of time and energy into those areas.

MIKE BOYLE: You're probably too young to remember the Nancy Reagan "Say No to Drugs" campaign. But, you know, it was "just say no." Like, I think that's the number one piece of advice to parents. Just say no. When somebody tells you that your kid needs to do this to be successful, just say no. Because it's not true.

And it's crazy because what we're getting to now—I had this argument not too long ago with somebody about baseball. We're at the point of self-fulfilling prophecy where people have done these things for so long. So now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your kid can't play public school hockey and get a college scholarship. And that's become true because it was said so many times that everybody whose kid had a chance to play at a higher level, at college hockey, pulled their kid out of public school and put them on a junior team for a year or prep school.

But it wasn't because the system was inferior, it was because they were made to believe that the system was inferior. And we see that—I had a dad tell me, same thing. If your kid doesn't play travel baseball, there's no chance that he plays Division One baseball. And I said, that's not true, but we've got an island in the Dominican Republic where they're turning out baseball players like hotcakes. And they're certainly not traveling off the island to play baseball. There's lots of systems that will produce success.

But we in America have started to create these self-fulfilling prophecies. Soccer does the same thing. If your kid doesn't commit to soccer at a certain age, he's not going to be able to play professionally. And so as a result, people just go along. And the reality is the best athletes rise to the top.

The best thing I ever read—so there's a book, very oddly titled book called "Hope You'll Be Very Happy: Lessons from a Lifetime in Lacrosse," written by Dom Starsia, who was the old Virginia coach and Brown coach. And one of the chapters is "Can My Kid Play D1?" And he said, whenever a parent came to him and said, do you think my son is a Division One lacrosse player? His question was, is your son the best player in his high school in at least one other sport? And parents would always look at him like, what? What do you mean?

He said, is your son the best player in his high school in at least one other sport? If he's not, he probably can't play Division One lacrosse. Like if he's not starting on the basketball team, if he's not starting on the football team, he's probably not a Division One lacrosse player.

That still is happening in lacrosse, but it's happening less and less in other places because kids are just being pulled out. So what I would say to parents, yes, at some point you may have to specialize. That point is probably 14-15. If you think, hey, my kid really has potential. And I think we're going to think about specializing in lacrosse, we're going to think about specializing in hockey.

But again, I would go back to the Dom Starsia thing. If your kid isn't the best player in your town in at least one other sport, don't worry about it. He's not a Division One athlete. So if you're not looking at your kid and thinking, well, darn, I got to pull him out of baseball and that's really going to piss off the baseball coach, or I got to pull him out of lacrosse and that's going to piss off the lacrosse coach—if that's not the decision you're making, don't even worry about it because your kid's not a good enough athlete to make it.

And that's what I think parents have to realize. Leave the kids—it's like leave them in the melting pot a little bit longer to figure out. Like in our case, we wouldn't have figured out that lacrosse was where my son was better, except that we continued to sample. He was playing baseball at the time and baseball was boring, and he wasn't loving baseball, and we got him involved in lacrosse. And relatively quickly you realize, oh, I like lacrosse more. And relatively quickly we realized, wow, he's way better than a lot of these kids at lacrosse. And he just got here.

And suddenly we saw potential in a sport that we didn't really know anything about. Mikayla never played girls' lacrosse. I'd never played boys' lacrosse. We just kind of chucked him into lacrosse with a bunch of the kids in the town program, and suddenly it was like, he sticks out here more than he did in baseball. And he sticks out here more than he did in hockey. But he was one of the better players in baseball. He was one of the better players in hockey—he made the golf team as a senior just by trying out for golf.

You need to let your kid's level of athleticism come out. But we think—and sorry, I'm doing all the talking here—but as adults, visualization makes sense, right? You need to select a field and then work really hard at becoming good at that field. That is not the child's route to success. The child's route to success is a broad sampling idea.

People sometimes say, well, the only thing he likes is hockey. And I tell people, what if we just replaced Coke with that? Said, well, the only thing he likes is doing coke. Would you let him do it? No, you wouldn't let him do it because you knew it was bad for him. You can't let a kid make decisions because this is what they like to do best, because that could be gaming at some point. There's a lot of things that could come along—drugs, alcohol. And if your excuse is, well, they really like to do it, you're going to have problems.

So I mean, even I did it with my daughter. We made her—I made her play her last youth 15 years soccer, literally made her. You're playing in the spring. She's like, I don't want to play. I said, I don't care. You're playing spring soccer. And then when this spring is over, you don't ever have to play again. She wasn't happy when I made her do it, but she had a blast playing soccer. And she was really good at it. Would have been a really good high school soccer player. But eventually she got to that point where she said, no, I want to specialize in hockey.

But she was a kid, and I tell this story all the time. She did not play a summer tournament till she was 13 years old, and she got a full scholarship to college when she was 15 years old. People would always say, oh, if she doesn't do this, if she doesn't do this, she's going to fall behind. I'd look and be like, no, she's not. It was kind of terribly cocky of me. But I would be like, she's going to show up in September and be better than your kid. It's not going to make any difference at all that she didn't play in the whatever super elite, triple A, bona fide Lake Placid tournament in July.

But people get sold all this basically bullshit, and they get sold by people who need your kids either to make money or they need your kids to have tournaments for their kids. So that's what you got to look out for.

KEVIN NEELD: Mike, I know we're up against the clock, but just two things. You mentioned—I'm hoping you can expand on one. If parents have kids that are playing multiple sports, they want to play multiple sports, but they also just love hockey. And there is spring league and summer league and there's an opportunity to maybe play soccer while you're also playing hockey. Can you quickly just touch on what are some of the risks involved with that, with being kind of over-leveraged from a scheduling and physical activity standpoint?

MIKE BOYLE: Well, I think the risk obviously is seeing adult injuries in kids. When you start seeing adult injuries, I always tell people, when we see adult injuries in kids, that's a big red flag for me. When suddenly someone comes in and I got a 12-year-old and he pulled his groin or he pulled his hamstring or his back hurts or his elbow's sore, I'm always like, ooh, these are clear overuse signs. Kids don't get these. Kids are very wonderfully self-regulating and as a result, they don't tend to hurt themselves.

But when they do tend to get injured is when they're allowed or maybe even encouraged to be in too many environments. So our rule was never more than two things in a day, no matter what it was. So yeah, there might be a situation where, whatever, you went to soccer and then you went to hockey or whatever it was, but we never went over two hours a day of anything.

And I think that helped. And we just—we always had like whatever season, whatever season you were in was the priority, because our kids did overlap all the time. Eventually lacrosse becomes almost a year-round thing where you're having practices all winter and hockey becomes a year-round thing because they want you to play in the fall league and do these things.

But we always made time for strength training, and it was always no more than two things in a day. And for us that tended to work. We didn't have a lot of problems. But it was like I said, when it was lacrosse season, it was lacrosse season, and we weren't signing up for hockey tournaments in addition to lacrosse. And we would make the odd exception here or there. But in general, that was it.

The other thing is I would make more time for practice than games. So Mikayla, my daughter, really liked—she liked to practice. Her club team would have summer practices Tuesday, Thursday night, they'd have skill sessions. So even though I didn't like her to play in the summer tournaments, she would go to skill sessions. And she'd say, I'm going to do U12 skills. And then I want to stay for U14 skills. And I would let her stay and just let her do two hours on the ice because she hadn't done anything else during that day.

As a general rule of thumb, two hours a day was the limit. And ideally, if it was two hours, I wanted those two hours to be two separate activities because, you know, you start getting into—as you know—surface change, pattern change. What tends to get these kids is the same thing over and over again. And that's where the injuries tend to come in.

KEVIN NEELD: The last thing I just wanted to touch on quickly—you've mentioned a couple times the messaging to parents that if you want your kid to play Division One or if you want them to make it professionally, that you need to do these things. And I can't help but wonder if we may be missing the point of youth sports participation in general. And there's certainly a point where competing at the highest levels may be the priority for the kids that are evolving throughout their careers. But when we're talking about eight, nine, even ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen-year-old kids, do you think that that messaging has trickled down to too young of an age?

MIKE BOYLE: No question. The good thing is, and you may see it better in your age bracket—for Mikayla, for my daughter, they were still allowing them to offer kids in the ninth grade. And so it was a very realistic—Mikayla went on a visit to Northeastern when she was 14. You couldn't take official visits, but you could go on campus if you arranged it yourself.

So it was a legitimate concern. Lacrosse was doing it. Lacrosse was offering kids at 14 years old and committing kids to Division One scholarships. Imagine at 14, you've decided that you're going to go to Virginia or go to Syracuse or whatever it was. And hockey was doing the same thing. We were having kids in eighth grade when I was at BU that were visiting.

The good thing is the NCAA has finally gotten ahead of that and gone back to—I think it's now the summer going into your junior year, I think is the first time they can talk to you. And that's a much better situation. And that probably is going to lower the temperature and bring some parents back down to earth a little bit.

But at the time when my kids were growing up, people were legitimately concerned about that because they were looking and thinking, well, so-and-so got offered. You know, so-and-so got to go to Syracuse. And you were like, you know, that's crazy that they're 14. But everybody was trying to project out.

But the bad part, too, is that every parent does have that unrealistic expectation for their kid. Everybody would love to not pay for college. And so some people see the athletic route. The athletic route is much more fun than—there's the standard story that if you took all the money you put into youth sports and put it into tutors, you might not have to pay for college anyway, but it's not as much fun watching your kid get tutored as it is watching them play in a hockey game or in a lacrosse game or whatever it is.

And the difference for me with parents is trying to explain to them that the route you're being told is the right route is the wrong route. The specialization route does not work. Like, I don't know if you saw, but the Hockey Think Tank guys did a really good breakdown of every part of the country and how many kids were playing at, I think at the NHL level. And one of the things that they found, which was really interesting, was that Massachusetts numbers dropped as Massachusetts went away from town hockey, and the relative age effect went up in Massachusetts as Massachusetts went more towards the select hockey model, because you were eliminating too many kids too early.

And now, again, like people will tell you, it's rare—like there aren't that many towns where people say the town hockey is good enough to leave your kid in town hockey. Everybody's kids are playing for, you know, the Wizards or the Shamrocks or whatever the local select association is. But that takes away—it narrows the pyramid too rapidly a lot of times, again, promotes the specialist, which is what we don't want.

The specialization should occur—like I said, you should be at 14 and at 14 it should be a hard decision. You use your line all the time. When people talk about what team their kid should be on, you told me one time your kid should be on a team where they're one of the five best players. I remember you saying that. And I tell parents that all the time.

If your kid's not one of the five best players, don't move them to another team because you want them to be in a situation—no matter where they are. And this really helped my son in hockey. We kept him because he was December of '04. So he was very young. He was as young as you could be, basically. December 20th of '04, he was only eight days away from actually being an '05 birthdate.

And we deliberately didn't try to push him into the toughest playing situations because we wanted him to be able to be kind of on the top two lines and be able to have puck possession and be able to do a lot of those things that might not have happened on a better '04 team.

And that's what parents need to look at, is what you want is for your kid to be in an environment where they're getting better. The other thing is I would select teams based on better coaching versus better competition, because that's going to make a really big difference. Kids learning to enjoy practice and kids being coached by people that really understand the game—and that doesn't mean they played professionally, it doesn't mean they played college. It just means that they're good coaches and they understand kids.

KEVIN NEELD: This has been awesome. Just to wrap up here, where's the best place for people to engage with you and interact with you? You obviously have a wealth of resources and information out there to help strength and conditioning coaches in particular—where can people find out more about you?

MIKE BOYLE: I like Twitter more than Instagram, but I have more Instagram followers than Twitter followers. Twitter I am @MBoyle1959 and I'm @Michael_Boyle_1959 on Instagram. Those are the two best places. Then StrengthCoach.com—if you're a coach and you really want to interact, StrengthCoach.com I always say is the best deal in the world. It's $14.95 a month and we answer anybody's question almost on a daily basis. It's really rare that you don't get a good answer within 24 hours for 14-15 bucks a month. And yet people—they say people would rather pay $1,000 to somebody to be in a mastermind group than pay 15 bucks to get any question they want answered. Which doesn't make any sense to me.

KEVIN NEELD: Maybe you have to raise your prices.

MIKE BOYLE: I know, seriously, you're probably right.

KEVIN NEELD: Awesome. Thanks so much. I can't thank you enough for doing this.

MIKE BOYLE: I know, this is great. Thanks. I wish, like I said, we could—I could talk to you all day.

KEVIN NEELD: All right, let me let you go, because I actually have to do another one.

MIKE BOYLE: All right. Take care. Yeah. I'll see you.

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END OF TRANSCRIPT

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Resources: StrengthCoach.com