ABOUT

I didn't set out to build a technology company. I set out to be the best clinician I could be.

Early in my career, I was treating an adolescent competitive swimmer for a shoulder injury. We had been working together for a few weeks when she just stopped showing up. No explanation. About a month later, she came back to resume treatment. It was her mother who pulled me aside and told me — her daughter had been hospitalized for malnutrition.

In that moment, honestly, my first thought was that this was a teenager with an eating disorder. I didn't look much further than that. But it stayed with me. So I started researching, and that's when I came across Female Athlete Triad — and everything clicked. Competitive female athlete. Adolescent. Signs of body dysmorphia. Primary amenorrhea. The shoulder was why she came to see me. But there was a much bigger picture that nobody had connected.

That case changed how I practice.

Over the next decade, working with athletes across every level of sport — from youth programs to professional teams to serving as a medical volunteer with the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee — I kept encountering the same pattern. Female athletes presenting with orthopedic injuries where Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) was a silent contributing factor. The signs were there. But they had become so woven into the culture of female sports that nobody was questioning them. Not the athletes. Not the parents. Sometimes not even the clinicians.

I couldn't accept that.

As a Doctor of Physical Therapy and Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist with over a decade of clinical experience, I've always known that performance, injury, and recovery are never the result of a single metric. When wearable technology took off, I saw its potential — and I saw its blind spot.

For years, the wearable technology industry has told athletes that Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and sleep are the keys to understanding readiness and recovery. And while those metrics have value, they are lagging indicators — they tell you something already happened, not why, and not what to do about it. A suppressed HRV reading doesn't tell you if it's from poor sleep, psychological stress, hormonal fluctuation, or energy deficiency. A sleep score doesn't tell you whether your body had the nutritional availability to actually recover. These tools measure output and call it insight.

But the deeper problem is this: the research that built these platforms was dominated by male physiology. Wearables weren't designed for female athletes — they were designed and then retrofitted. For a female athlete, readiness on any given day is shaped by where she is in her cycle, her energy availability, her hormonal environment, and her psychological load. None of that is captured in a HRV trend or a sleep stage breakdown.

That's not a minor gap. For female athletes — especially those already at risk for RED-S — it's a critical one.

That gap is why Shtark Metrics exists.

Everything we build starts with one question: does this actually help the athlete? MyTRIAD, our first platform, was designed to give athletes, parents, and clinicians a smarter, more complete picture of readiness and risk — no wearable required. Built on physical therapy, sports science, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but grounded in years of real clinical experience.

Women's sports has never been more visible, more celebrated, or more deserving of tools built specifically for it. This is the right time. And I'm committed to getting it right.

Be well!

Dr. Joshua Fede