He Played His Sport Almost Every Day for a Decade. The Gym Is What Moved Him Up the Roster.

Milo was seven and a half when his parents signed him up for a junior squash program at the LA Athletic Club. There was no grand plan behind it. He was a kid doing all sorts of sports, a new program had just started, and they threw him in to keep him busy.

Then something funny happened. Baseball went. Soccer went. Basketball went. Squash stayed.

"Not sure why I picked squash, but it's been a very unique but rewarding and fun journey."

He's 20 now, almost 21. He plays college squash on the East Coast. And when he's home on break, he's in our gym in Pasadena.

First, For Everyone Who Just Asked "What's Squash?"

You're not alone, and Milo knows it.

"A lot of people don't know what it is, especially here in Los Angeles. It's not big at all. It is very East Coast dominated."

His own elevator pitch starts with a question: do you know what racquetball is? From there — you're in a box with four walls, hitting a ball off the front wall, moving around your opponent, and the ball is only allowed to bounce once. You hit low, high, whatever it takes to keep your opponent under pressure until you either hit a winner they can't retrieve or simply outwork them.

That last part is the part that matters here.

Squash is decided by who can still move in hour two. Matches routinely run past an hour. It is, in Milo's phrasing, "just nonstop running, running, running, running."

The Gap Nobody Talks About in Youth Sports

Here's the detail in this interview that should stop every sports parent cold.

Milo played squash almost every single day from the age of seven. He trained hard enough to get recruited to a college program — the goal he'd set for himself in high school, and one he hit.

And until he was 16 or 17, he had never been in a gym consistently.

"I didn't have a trainer at all. I was just literally on court every day training. I was never really in the gym consistently before I started coming here."

That is not unusual. That is the default in most youth sports, and it's especially the default in smaller sports that don't come with built-in strength and conditioning support. The assumption is that the sport is the training. More court time, more field time, more reps of the thing you're trying to be good at.

More of the sport makes you better at the sport — right up until it doesn't. Then it just makes you more tired and more injured.

The number behind that

This isn't a hunch. A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at what actually prevents sports injuries. The finding: strength training reduced sports injuries to less than one-third of the rate seen without it (RR 0.315), and cut overuse injuries by roughly half. Proprioceptive training helped meaningfully too. Stretching on its own showed no protective effect at all.

Read that again with a young athlete in mind. The single most protective thing you can add to a kid who plays one sport year-round is the thing most of them never do.

Source, Cause, Stack. In a young athlete, the SOURCE of a problem is usually the tissue taking the beating — a knee, an Achilles, a low back. The CAUSE is almost always upstream: a body that has been asked to repeat one sport thousands of times without ever being built to handle it. The STACK is what we deploy against both — hands-on work when tissue needs it, strength work as the foundation, and regenerative tools when the tissue itself needs help healing. Together, from Day 1, not one after the other.

The Summer Everything Jumped

Milo started training with Coach Allister at 16 or 17. Allister had been running off-court training at Milo's squash club; when that program dissolved, Milo followed him to HealthFit.

"I was like, okay, well, I still need to probably get in the gym because I was getting older."

The payoff didn't arrive all at once. It arrived in a specific summer — the break between his freshman and sophomore year of college.

"Last summer is where I feel like I found my biggest jump within my game. I had jumped a lot up on my roster position within my team. And I do credit that a lot to just getting stronger within the lower parts of my body. I just felt stronger and more stable."

In a sport where the winner is whoever's legs hold up longest, lower-body strength isn't a nice-to-have. It's the sport.

And notice what moved. Not his technique — he'd had a decade of technique. His roster position. In college athletics, that's the least sentimental scoreboard there is. Nobody moves you up because you worked hard. You move up because you started beating people you used to lose to.

The Second Thing He'd Never Done: Actually Eat Like an Athlete

The other blind spot was fuel.

"I never really focused on my eating, like down to the pulp — really looking at all the macros and stuff like that, and what that does to my body and how that benefits my body. When I started actually focusing on that, I actually did see a lot of growth just from that."

The specific change, and it's a good one: he'd been avoiding carbohydrates.

"Especially last summer. But this summer I've been just, like, stacking them."

This is one of the most common mistakes in a young athlete's nutrition — importing a general-population fear of carbs into a body that is doing an hour and a half of high-intensity training a day in season. Milo's own read on why he struggled to add size is exactly right: "I'm not keeping a lot of the muscle that I'm trying to gain because I'm doing so much moving all the time."

You cannot build tissue in a body that's running a calorie deficit. Training is the stimulus. Food is the material. Show up with no material and the stimulus has nothing to work with.

"I just grew more knowledgeable about everything and took more care of myself."

The Word He Kept Coming Back To

Ask Milo what he's learned about himself and he lands, over and over, on one word.

"I keep etching the word discipline. That's it. It all comes back to that for me."

He is not talking about motivation. He's talking about 6:30 in the morning.

"He was getting me up at like 6:30 in the morning to come here almost every day. Through that is where I think I built a lot of discipline — and through other things too, like eating and training."

Then this, which is the most honest line in the interview:

"It's a lot of harder work, a lot more time management. Getting here 30 minutes to an hour before, warming up, getting on the treadmill, whatever it is."

That's the real curriculum. The lifting is the visible part. The thing that actually transfers — to school, to a job, to a marriage, to the decades after competitive sport ends — is the practiced habit of doing the work before you feel like doing it.

Milo has about two more years of competitive squash. He knows it.

"After I graduate, I'll always have squash to come back to and play with whoever, but the competitive aspect will be gone."

The discipline isn't going anywhere.

What He Actually Got From a Coach

We'd be leaving out the best part if we made this only about sets and reps.

"He's definitely more than a trainer for me. He helps me with all sorts of things. Obviously here in the gym, but also my nutrition."

And then he talks about the place itself:

"I've grown to know everybody who works here, and that's been a really cool thing to just be around. I come here what, three times a week, and you guys put a smile on my face. It's like a whole family. I come in here and they're like, 'You again?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm here.'"

This is what a young athlete needs that no program written on paper can deliver. Someone who knows them well enough to know when to push and when to back off. A room where they're a person, not a client number. A relationship that lasts from age 16 to age 21 and holds all the changes in between.

Anyone can write a training program. The program isn't the moat.

If You're the Parent of a Committed Young Athlete

Four things worth taking from Milo's story:

The sport is not the training. Reps of your sport build sport skill. They don't build the athlete underneath it, and after a certain point they mostly build wear.

Strength is the most protective thing you can add. Less than a third the injury rate, roughly half the overuse injuries. That's the best return available to you.

Feed the work. A teenage athlete training daily is not a body that needs to be careful with food. It's a body that needs raw material.

Pick the person, not the facility. The thing that kept Milo showing up at 6:30 a.m. for a summer wasn't the equipment. It was who was waiting for him.

You're the staff for your young athlete. Strength coach, nutritionist, sleep manager, scheduler, and the one who decides what's enough. That's a lot of hats. You don't have to wear all of them alone.

Ready to Build the Athlete Underneath the Sport?

Whether your athlete is 14 and specializing, 17 and chasing a roster spot, or 20 and home for the summer trying not to lose ground:

1. Learn more about our approach → www.healthfitinc.com

2. Book online → healthfitinc.com/book

3. Talk to our team → 626-365-1380, or submit an inquiry at www.healthfitinc.com/contact

HealthFit Physical Therapy & Chiropractic serves Pasadena, South Pasadena, Altadena, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, San Marino, Monrovia, Alhambra, San Gabriel, and La Cañada Flintridge.

Milo's parents put him in a squash program at seven and a half to keep him busy. Thirteen years later he's on a college roster, he's stronger than he's ever been, and the thing he talks about most isn't a match he won.

It's the mornings he showed up.

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Source

Lauersen JB, Bertelsen DM, Andersen LB. "The effectiveness of exercise interventions to prevent sports injuries: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials." British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2014. Strength training RR 0.315 (95% CI 0.207–0.480); overuse injuries RR 0.527 (0.373–0.746); stretching RR 0.963 (0.846–1.095, no effect). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK169555/

Disclaimer

The information in this article is intended for general guidance only and should never be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Individual results vary. Always seek the advice of your physician, medical provider, or physical therapist with any questions regarding a medical condition.