A deep dive on PHEC
“What’s the dang point of all of this anyway?”
You spend all your time at practices and games. You’re investing swaths of money into your kid’s sports, (because everything costs so much money now.) You’re tired, like really tired. Your battery is drained from the physical and emotional toll that these sports come with.
Plus, it’s confusing. People are giving you all kinds of conflicting advice.
- “She needs pushed harder.” vs “She really just needs to take a break.”
- “You need to play fall ball or he’ll get behind.” vs “If you play fall baseball, his arm will be shattered.”
- “She should be playing 3 sports.” vs “She really needs to narrow her focus if she’s going to compete at the next level.”
Do you every just stop and think, “why am I even doing any of this?”
You’re not crazy. When done right, a child’s athletic career can be the single most important tool to shape the rest of their life.
But, with how complicated and busy the youth sports world is, it’s easy to get lost and forget where you’re going and why any of this really matters in the first place.
We need a north star to keep our priorities straight.
PHEC: A compass for navigating the youth sports wilderness
The entire purpose of a meaningful, well-designed athletic career can be summed up in 4 “North Star” Domains.
Performance:
- Objective: Make athletic performance match athletic potential.
Health:
- Objective 1: Minimize injury cost during playing career
- Objective 2: Instill healthy habits for lifelong use.
Enjoyment:
- Objective: Take pleasure in one’s athletic career, both in the moment and in memory.
Character:
- Objective: Instill character traits that lead to professional, interpersonal, and personal success.
PHEC helps you identify what the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve through your kid’s athletic career are, and then make decisions that are in line with those outcomes.
First Principles
The PHEC model relies on a few foundational premises. We call these first principles. Three of which I’d argue are inarguable, while one can be debated.
Let’s start with the inarguables.
1) You can’t fit infinity into finity.
There are an infinite number of things we could choose to do in life. However, life itself is finite. So, while the theoretical number of options we have is infinite, the number of options that we can actually execute is finite.
That means we have to make decisions. Doing everything is a literal impossibility. We have to choose “or” more often than we get to choose “and.”
That’s easy to say and easy to grasp in theory, but decision making in the real world is hard. Every time you say “yes” to one thing, you are saying “no” to a million other alternate realities.
Furthermore, you aren’t choosing between important things and unimportant things. You’re choosing between a bunch of important things. That means you are going to have to intentionally neglect some important things.
How this plays into the PHEC Model: You are not going to be able to maximize all of these domains simultaneously. Each domain will be prioritized differently. The prioritization of these outcomes is fluid. What is most important one year might be least important the next.
2) Uncertainty is unavoidable.
Our brain craves certainty, but we live in an uncertain world.
Even things that we think of as absolute truths, are not truths. Richard Feynman paints this sentiment when he told us, “statements of science are not about what is true and what is not true, but about the degree of certainty.”
We’re constantly playing a game of probability. Decisions that have no hidden information, like a game of chess, can be made with a high degree of certainty.
Most decisions in the real world aren’t like chess, though. We’re surrounded by hidden information and complexity. Having near-100% certainty in real world decisions is irrational.
This means that we’re going to make bad decisions sometimes, and that’s okay. It also means that sometimes we’re going to make bad decisions and have good outcomes and sometimes we’ll make good decisions and have bad outcomes.
How this plays into the PHEC Model: You have to untie the outcomes from the decision that you (or someone else) made and focus on the decision-making process. If little Johnny made it through his youth sports career heathy while throwing 120 pitches every game 3x per week, that doesn’t make it a rational decision for your athlete to follow suit.
3) “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” – Thomas Sowell
PHEC doesn’t tell you what to do. It can’t possibly tell you what is right and what is wrong, because right and wrong answers don’t exist.
For every outcome that you work to, there will be a cost on the other side.
Some people will call you crazy for sacrificing your family (interpersonal success) and health for the sake of maximizing performance success, but that’s the price Tom Brady was willing to pay to win the title of greatest quarterback of all time (performance).
Others will call you crazy for sacrificing millions and millions of dollars earned by playing a game (performance and professional success) to minimize the chance of an injury that we’re not even entirely sure exists (health), but that’s what Chris Borland decided was best for him.
These examples are the extremes, but you and your athlete make these same genre of decisions every single day. You decide which trade-offs matter most to you and act accordingly.
How this plays into the PHEC Model: Different people will be faced with the same situation and be seeking different outcomes. You decide what your specific North Stars are and filter decisions through the PHEC model to help you get there.
4) There is purpose to life.
Some will disagree with this premise. I believe this life has purpose and that we’re here for a reason.
I have my beliefs as to what that purpose is (to know Him and to make Him known), but agreement there is not necessary for the model to hold true.
You just need to believe that there is some meaning to this life; that we’re working towards something. If we’re not working towards something, then none of this matters at all anyways.
How this plays into the PHEC Model: The whole premise of the model is to answer the question: “What’s the point of all of this anyways?” If there is no purpose to life, it would follow suit that there is no purpose to athlete development. If there is purpose to life, then our North Stars should align with that purpose.
The North Star Domains 1) Performance
Objective: Make athletic performance match athletic potential.
Each of us has an athletic potential range- a genetic predisposition for how good or bad we can possibly be at a skill.
The better your training and preparation, the more your performance will match the ceiling of your potential. The more you just skate through doing the bare minimum, the more your performance will match the floor of your potential.
Performance is the part of an athletic career that’s most intuitive to us.
It’s winning. It’s getting faster, stronger, and more explosive. It’s developing a better jump shot or blocking technique. It’s understanding and executing the X’s and O’s better on game day.
The pursuit of excellence is a worthy endeavor in and of itself.
Maximizing our God-given abilities needs no further justification, but there are times when relentless pursuit of performance becomes costly to the other domains.
2) Health
Objective 1 : Minimize injury cost during playing career.
Performance and health have a direct correlation for awhile, but at some point they diverge. To believe that you can achieve elite performance and stay injury free is to delude yourself.
We need to be aware of the injury cost and make informed decisions about when injuries are likely to occur, what injuries are worth playing through, when they’re worth playing through, and when they’re not.
If your athlete has intense low back pain and we suspect a possible stress fracture, the context changes how we might view the situation.
- If she’s 12 years old and has another summer travel softball tournament coming up, then pushing through that has an unfavorable risk/reward ratio.
- If she’s 18 years old, has no plans to play in college, and has a high school state championship coming up, then pushing through that has a much more favorable risk/reward ratio.
Objective 2: Instill healthy habits for lifelong use.
The two strongest predictors of mortality are VO2 max (conditioning) and muscular strength.
Movement is the closest thing we have to a panacea at our disposal. Movement reduces morbidity, obesity, cardiovascular disease risk, and musculoskeletal pain while improving mental health, physical function, and longevity.
There is no better way to build a competency in and positive association with movement and exercise than a kid’s athletic career.
This is where strength and conditioning/ sports performance training is exceptionally important, because it can be used for the rest of their lives. If an athlete understands the general principles of how to design a strength program, how to execute movements properly, how to condition condition themselves, and has a positive association with the weight room, they’re going to be set for life.
If you want your kid to have a long, healthy life, then instilling these habits early is paramount.
3) Enjoyment
Objective: Take pleasure in one’s athletic career, both in the moment and in memory.
This ones short and sweet, but still important.
Most people’s meaningful athletic career expectancy is 13 years (from the ages of 5 through 18). Bump that up to 17 years if you play through college.
It’s a short, special, and beautiful window of time in someone’s life. You want to make the most of it. You want to enjoy the short time that you get to compete in a meaningful way. You want to look back and say “man, that was awesome.”
4) Character
Objective: Instill character traits that lead to professional, interpersonal, and personal success.
Real life is hard. There’s no way to truly replicate the stress and sacrifice that comes with building your career, providing for your family, and figuring out your place in this world.
But, I’ll be darned if your kid’s athletic career isn’t the best way to simulate the stress and sacrifice that develop the character traits needed to be successful later in life.
“Success” is a word that’s thrown around a lot, but rarely with any concrete meaning behind it.
Let’s test that. Answer the following two questions in less than 20 seconds:
1) Do you want your kids to be successful?
Most non-sociopathic parents would say “yes.” Easy peezy.
2) What exactly does it mean for your kids to be successful?
Not so easy now, is it?
The literal definition of “successful” is: “accomplishing an aim or purpose.” If you want your kid to be successful, then we need to clearly outline a purpose. I can’t establish that purpose for you, but I can share research and personal frameworks.
As alluded to in the objective, I’ve identified 3 main realms that an athletic career can help develop characteristics of success.
Before we dive into each of the realms, I want to be clear that these are the most under-developed topics of this model. The overarching realms are clear, but the specific character traits will need to be further researched and iterated.
Professional Success:
Professional success is what most people picture when they think of success. Good grades, good job, nice house, enough money and then some, etc.
Researchers have identified some characteristics that lead to this kind of success: persistence, self-control, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.
The characteristics that lead to wins on the field correlate strongly with the characteristics that lead to wins in the professional world.
Interpersonal Success:
Interpersonal success is being a good child, sibling, friend, spouse, and parent.
Can you be reliable? Can you put the needs of others in front of your own? Can you read the emotions of another person?
These are skills that are developed by being a member of a team.
Personal Success:
Personal success is achieved when someone is content with who they are, how they feel, and their place in the world.
A strong argument could be made that this is far and away the most important realm of success.
In addition to being the most important, it’s probably the hardest to cultivate. Getting to a place of personal success requires a lot of trial, error, and existential thinking.
I tell people that I want 3 things in life for my daughters: to be happy, to be kind, and to be gritty. I think that sums up success nicely.
Decision Making Tools
Now that we’ve identified our North Star Domains, I want to go over a few quick tools that we can use to make decisions that are aligned with our North Stars.
Mental time travel
I cannot emphasize this enough: Get out of the never-ending-now.
We, as human beings, place an irrationally disproportionate amount of importance on the present moment.
In the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, little kids were given a choice: eat the marshmallow directly in front of you right now OR wait a few minutes and eat two marshmallows. Kids couldn’t wait.
Unfortunately, this tendency never really leaves us. That random softball tournament in the middle of January seems really important, because we don’t want our kid to get behind, right?
Also, your kid can’t lift this week, because they have a game on Saturday and you don’t want them to be sore for that. Except they have a game on Saturday every week for the next 12 weeks, so now you’ve missed out on 3 months of physical development.
In her book “Thinking in Bets”, Annie Duke tells us that we need to become mental time travelers to make better decisions.
To do that, we can use premortems and backcasting.
Pre-mortems involve killing your journey before it even starts.
You imagine that you’re at the end point of your journey and you’ve failed. You look back and identify all of the possible things that could have gone wrong to derail you.
For example, if I wanted to screw up my kids athletic career, what would I do?
- I let them play one sport year round (or 9 months out of the year).
- I punished them for their performance, even if their effort was there.
- I pulled them off the team every time they had a coach who they didn’t like or who was unfair to them.
- I let them skip practice or training every time they had a minor injury.
- I never let them lift weights.
- I used conditioning as a punishment.
- Etc.
Now, since I don’t want to do screw it up, I just do the opposite of all the above.
Backcasting is the same, but opposite. Instead of imagining that you’ve failed, you imagine that you won. Now, you look back and identify all of the things that went right.
Group Building
“Well, everyone else is doing it. I don’t want her to miss out.”
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is one of the biggest drivers of poor decision making in the youth sports world. It comes from a place of good intent. You truly want whats best for your kid and you don’t want them to miss out on an important activity.
Whether we like it or not, the people we surround ourselves with influence the decisions that we make. That means some of those crazy sports parents might be influencing us to make decisions that we otherwise wouldn’t.
One of the best ways to counteract that pull is to surround yourself with intelligent, well-informed, unbiased peers.
What if we created a community for sane sports parents? A place where you can get answers to questions like:
- My daughter’s AAU team costs $2,000 for team dues alone, is that a normal amount?
- Recruiting is slow for my son. We’ve tried x, y, and z. What should we do next?
- My son tore his ACL, who’s the best surgeon in the area? What should we look for in a good physical therapist for his post-op rehab?
- My son is talented, but lacks self-confidence and discipline. Do you guys have any strategies that have worked to help build some confidence?
- My daughters both play the same sport, but one’s talented and works hard and the other is less gifted and less committed. They’re constantly being compared to each other by coaches and players. What advice would you give them both (and myself) to handle this situation?
- How hard do I push my kids? When is it too much and when is it not enough?
- My daughter has a lot of technical skill, but she’s too slow right now. How can we help her get faster?
How much interest would you have if I created an online community for sane sports parents?
- A ton of interest. I could really use that.
- I have a little bit of interest.
- I don’t have any interest in that.
So, what’s the point of all of this?
Youth sports are a wild ride, and it’s easy to lose your way. But when you do it right, sports can shape your kid’s entire life.
That’s where the PHEC model comes in. It’s your compass, your North Star, guiding you through the chaos. Use it to make choices that line up with what you truly value.
The point isn’t just to chase fleeting victories and keeping up with the Joneses.
It’s about building a strong, healthy, happy kid who’s ready to take on the world.
A couple of important things…
- This newsletter is completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, and illustrating (okay, maybe the drawings don’t take that long). The best way you can support it and allow it continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to gtperformance.co and they can subscribe there!
- Everything in these newsletters and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or your athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.
Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!
Be >,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS