Barbell Shrugged - Foundations, Milestones, and Growth for Youth Development w/ Dr. Matt Otteman, DC, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #747

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Dr. Matt Otteman, DC, is the co-owner of KinActive Kids, a globally renowned pediatric intensive clinic that combines physical therapy and chiropractic care to help children reach developmental milestones. As a chiropractor and former Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners, Dr. Otteman combines his sports-focused foundation of the human body into a unique treatment style to help children increase their mobility, enhance their body awareness and achieve new gross motor skills. He previously worked with a multitude of world-renowned athletes, spanning the domains of Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), Collegiate Football, the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA), and Major League Soccer (MLS) as a strength and conditioning coach. With over 14 years of industry experience, Dr. Otteman has empowered thousands of individuals to optimize their physical well-being. In 2021, he joined forces with Dr. Emily Heisey as the co-owner of KinActive Kids and its newly established parent company, KinActive Health. Dr. Otteman earned his Bachelor’s Degree in exercise science from the University of Texas at Arlington and a Doctorate of Chiropractic from Parker University. He is based in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and their three children. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Dr. Matt Otteman on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Dr. Matt Audiman is coming into the show. What's really cool about having a podcast like Barbell Shrugged is now, for like many, many years, all we cared about was the meathead of meathead things, getting as jacked as possible. And then these little critters showed up in our house called children. And now we also have this awesome outlet where we get to go meet some people that are doing some really cool cutting edge stuff in the health and fitness space for kids and talk a lot about youth development, which, you know, as a now 41 year old man, nobody really cares about my athletic prowess. Nobody cares, kind of including myself outside of just general training, staying healthy and loving training. And what I'm really focused on and concerned about, maybe not concerned, but enjoying the opportunity to do is watch my kids grow up

and be able to give them as much cool information, whether they want to listen to it or not, on how to eat, how to train. And being a part of Barbell Shrugged and having the ability to reach out and talk to people that are doing some very cool things. For Dr. Matt, he owns a cool company called Connecticut's out of Texas, working with childhood development milestones, etc. And then working. And what's super interesting is being able to kind of expand that conversation out, not just from like little kids, two, three, four or five year old, but like kind of in the youth development side of things. And like when we should start bringing in strength training, how, how that worked out in his life, when, when he really started to kind of hit the gas pedal, realizing that he was going to be maybe not a pro baseball player, like he turned out to be, but at least going to be like good at sports and athletic and in his progression. So very, very cool stuff to, to be able to meet him,

to be able to have the opportunity to speak to kids in kind of the youth development side of things, as well as a lot of the muscle and health science physiology stuff that we're typically bringing to the show. As always, friends, make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis, and you can access that free report over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson, Dr. Matt Ottoman. Welcome to the show. We're going to be talking about the thing that I end up talking about the most in my life now that I have a six and a three-year-old, and Doug's got three boys, childhood development. When it comes to really their physicality,

which is obviously we're kind of like meatheads at heart. One of the most important things to us is making sure we've got kids that are wired up and move well and hopefully eating enough to build some muscle. But you actually brought in a really cool piece of this on like the brain health. I'd love to hear kind of like your path.

You played pro baseball and now you own a, it's called Kinactive Kids, correct? Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah. So I'm Dr. Matt Ottoman. I am a family chiropractor. I work a lot with pediatrics with kids, but that's definitely not where I wanted to go in the early on in my career. I played professional baseball with the Mariners for a couple of years outside

of that, did some strength and conditioning, went out to California, worked with a company called their XOs now where they basically just train all kinds of combine guys. So yeah. Had some great mentors just with development and training and all of that. And then helped start a gym up in New York. And then I decided I didn't want to lift weights for other people anymore. So I was like, I got to do something else. So I ended up going to chiropractic school back down in Dallas, which is where I went to college. Very cool. Yeah, I'd love to kind of understand,

as our kids are all young, how old are your kids again? Four, two, and seven months. Yeah. You haven't slept in five, four plus years. Like you're, uh, you're, you're sleep deprived for sure. Um, the, um, but I, you know, one of the, one of the things that like, I think all parents share is like hoping and making sure that their kids are just on track and hitting specific milestones. I know when I go into like the, the pediatric doctor for their like checkups and they,

they give you this like sheet and you try to check all the boxes and try to make sure everything's like moving in the right direction, but they don't have one of those for like, when is your kid supposed to walk? Or like, when is it supposed to hit a baseball out of the air? Those are the things I care about. When should we start deadlifting? Like those things need to be on the checklist, but nobody in the pediatric clinic really cares about that. Like I do. I know. Yeah, definitely. So the reason why gross motor development,

things like walking, crawling, rolling over are important is it gives us an inside look at how they're developing, specifically their brain. So a child's brain will grow 1% every day for 90 days. So for three months, they're just constantly growing. That's a lot. Yeah, it'll double in size in a year. And then at two years, even though their brains are smaller than ours, they have more synapses or connections. It's kind of like the hardwiring of the brain than we do as adults. And that's because it gives us a really good look at, okay, where are they? Are they making these connections along the way? Are they, even if they're not, then you'd want to start diving into, okay, how's the nutrition? Are they gaining weight? Things like that, all within zero to two. And then, yeah, outside of that, I mean, the next, there's not really big milestones that

happen after that. Jumping on two feet happens at like three, but yeah, your big ones are, are going to be zero to one, zero to 16 months or so. Yeah. How, how does kind of all of that go along? Like your brain's growing 1% a day. That's crazy fast. I would never have guessed that. Plus we have all the like motor development. Is there

like a priority list that the brain is telling the body to go do? And how fast should kind of kids be going through that process? Yeah. So there's definitely some big ones that you want to keep track of. Rolling is going to be big. They should roll belly to back, usually around that like four to six month mark, all of these. So if you're listening to this and you have a young child that you're in it, right? Like me, I'm a seven month old, all the dates that I'm going to say, give it a sliding scale. So there's not really, I can give you the textbook, what it's supposed to say, but you're typically going to have a month either side, sometimes two months on the later side. So

if you are concerned with that, you know, just take this as information. One of our missions at Connective is we want to empower parents through education. So I'm just providing you with education. You can kind of deal with it as you need to. But so rolling belly to back is a big one. They start pushing through their arms. That happens like four to six months rolling back to belly. So going from their back, flipping their legs around getting into their belly, that's going to happen usually around six, seven months or so. And that's a really big one, because that gets them ready for crawling, which is going to be their next sitting will be the next goal. That's like seven months, seven, eight months, they

should be able to sit without putting their hands on the ground. And then crawling happens after that, that's 10 to 12 months. And then walking typically will happen. We look for it to happen around 16 to 18 months, but it's common that kids will start walking around that 12, 13 month mark. So again, there's this wide range and it's not a hard, fast black and white. What you're really looking for is, are they attempting to do these things within that timeframe? If they are great, you're doing good. If they're not, yeah, we want to go and dive a little bit deeper and figure out why. So I went through this very quickly at three kids in three years. And we were just kind of always in this phase of like trying to get kids to progress through crawling and walking, et cetera. And i remember some of those conversations where um like one one

specific example is like you know those like kind of like you put them in the doorway it's like a bouncy thing you put your kid in it and so it kind of like they're on springs and it kind of makes them light and so they kind of bounce around they're standing but they can't actually stand up yeah on their own i remember some people were um saying that's not good for physical development for xyz reason and i don't remember all the reasons but are there things like that you can comment on that specifically but are there things like that that are like mistakes that kind of seems like it's helping your kid develop correctly but it's actually putting them slightly off track or yeah so the the jumper like you just

described hangs from the door that is the one thing that we typically don't like up until, I mean, two years old, like later on. And that's just because their hip sockets haven't fully developed yet. And so if they're taking this load and doing jumping before their hip sockets have developed, you can run into some issues with that. As far as some of the other things, the things that you want to stay away from are just too much of one thing. so if that's like a container containers aren't bad containers are like what you put your kid in to eat or you know

you're you have an older child and you just need to put them in something for a second so you can do something else like i get it i'm a i'm a dad of three um but if they're in that for too long you know long periods of time and that's all they're doing is the same thing over and over, then you can develop some asymmetries, some tightnesses, restrictions, compensation patterns, even at that early age. And when you're talking about that much brain development at zero to two, any type of compensation or restriction in their movement is going to not turn off that section of the brain, but it's going to be a little bit fuzzier, they're not going to understand, you know, they're trying to figure out how to interact with the world.

And if they're not fully connected with what their body can do, they're going to start to develop these asymmetries and patterns. And we see it even with like walking later on. Are people, are babies starting to walk later? Like instead of month eight, it's month 10. And then now it's month 11, month 12. Over time, could they go from the high chair to the stroller, to the car seat, to the stroller, back to the car seat, back to the high chair? And they're kind of just in this cast for many hours a day?

So the CDC did something very interesting this last year. It made some changes that I don't necessarily agree with, but take this for information. It took off crawling as a gross motor milestone. I think that's a big one because think about when you're training, I love doing bear crawls. I think that's a great way to activate your core. You get right and left side of your body, front, top, and bottom part of your body. So I think crawling is a very important milestone to keep track of. The other thing that they did is crawling and then walking are like the milestones. Right. How did they take that one off? You know, I think, so I'll get to that in a second. The other one that they did is they kind of pushed all the milestones back a little bit. And I think

instead of them saying, we have an issue going on, you know, this was during the pandemic, right? So all of that going on, more people working from home, more containers, kids are getting stuck, you know, placed in things because we're just trying to survive. They're getting placed in things. Then they're not, they are restricted. They're getting stuck in places. So instead of saying, hey, we have a problem, we need to get your kids outside more. We need to get them moving more. They just said, well, given everything that happened, we're just going to push all the

deadlines back two months. And again, I think they didn't address the initial problem of what's actually going on, which is they're restricted in their movement. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working

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You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com,

watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. Yeah, it seems like the wrong direction. Like, instead of just promoting more health, just lowering the standards, it seems counterproductive. You know, if you're actually fixing anything saying you're just accepting a worse result. Right. Yeah. And that's how, that's the same way that I feel with that too. So what we focus on again, that's, you know, take that for what it is. What we focus on is what we

can do, right. As parents, what can we do to help them with their development? And that's where we came up with this. It's called purposeful play, or you can think of it as proactive play. Kids are very motivated by their external factors. So if you can strategically place toys or things around them, you can help facilitate their movement patterns and help with their development as opposed to just letting them kind of just roll with the punches. So again, me type A, I look at the body, you know, I think everybody should be moving as much as possible. We can set up their surroundings for success. Let them let them just be a kid and play.

They don't know that they're working on something, but as a parent, we can take a little bit of that control back and say, okay, yeah, we can do things to help with sitting and rolling and crawling, walking. Yeah. Yeah. This, this will go well beyond the baby phase, but at what point do you, do you transition from just like, I'm trying to just let them play or finding ways to structure play for them versus like actually training them, you know, teaching you how to squat versus I'm just like letting you play in the yard and just getting lots of activity in the day. Yeah. So squatting should actually happen really some pre-walking. So walking again happens at that 16 to 18 month mark sometime earlier, but squatting should be something that they should be really good at, really effective with even at one year. That's kind of one of the things they

do to get off of the floor is learn how to squat up and down on a couch. Maybe they hold onto the couch, they'll reach down, pick something up, squat down, pick it back up. Um, so they're intrinsically designed to squat. It is such a natural movement for them. Now adding weight, I think, you know, you can add a toy, you can have them hold something with two hands. It doesn't have to be, you know, heavyweight, but you can start doing things with them, you know, early on. Yeah. Once you kind of get out of that, like baby phase of this thing, I value athleticism. I think it's awesome. How do we start building athletes at childhood or what kind of always have like really believed in mike boyle's approach of like having gymnastics be like the base of athleticism that kids kids grow up and almost staying away

from like the um the sports side of it until there's until they're seven eight nine ish years old um and having like that base of gymnastics. And for my daughter, we think about that in like more of like dance and gymnastics. Would you buy into that? Are there other kind of like, how do you start to build kind of that, that foundational, I like to just call it like wiring your kids to be able to move properly and understand how their body moves in space. Yeah, I think the big one, and I believe it was you, Anders, that said that a couple podcasts ago, just about being outside. Like when you get home, you have your garage, you know, your offices in your garage, like

you're very, you get home from daycare. And the first thing you do is you let them go outside and go play. And I think that's a huge piece that we're actually getting into this. It's called an outdoor play deficit where kids are just getting stuck inside. They're getting stuck on screens, TVs, phones, tablets, things like that. And again, kids are motivated by their surroundings. So if that's what they see from a parent perspective, if all I do is sit on a couch and watch TV, even when they're there, they're going to be like, well, this is just what we do. They don't understand. I have a real, you're, you're an ex professional athlete.

When you were growing, how old are you? 37. I'm 41 now. It's crazy what happened from 40 to 41. One year feels like a lot more. But when you were growing up, you just had like a bucket of balls and likely just went to the field with your friends and everyone played home run derby. Like that was just like what you did.

I did it in my backyard. My dad built this like backstop and a softball pitcher's mound for my sister and it turned into our base like it was just that feast or you're like this is who who's gonna win today in the neighborhood was the most important game we could possibly play that was the world every day i can't imagine if we ran the numbers out from like 20 years to today from today i don't think the percentage of professional athletes from the united states is going to just fall off a cliff because so many people sit inside and i i will drive by baseball fields and there's just very few people out just playing home run derby there's very few

soccer fields that have kids just like on them i it kind of drives me crazy but i also feel like the the overall development not only do we have like the obesity trends going crazy in the wrong direction and now that's reaching children and a it's increasing exponentially, which terrifying, but you also just don't have like the upside part of we're actually creating athletes. We're actually creating kids that have an ability to be freak athletes in the future because they they're inside and they're on screens and they don't, they don't know how to interact and play. Yeah. And heavy backpacks. I had an eight-year-old in my office with headaches and eight-year-old with headaches. And I was like, Oh, I just felt so bad for her. And that's a whole,

you know, herd thing that she had going on. We were able to just fix it by getting her some movement. But to go back to what you said, um, you know, as a, when I was playing with the Mariners, we had a lot of guys coming up from the Dominican Republic and they, they didn't have, they had baseball class and that's just what they did. They went to baseball class. Now I do think, you know, they're trying to get out of their countries and, and, you know, do something big. So that's kind of all they needed. Like that's all they live for, but man, I would love to have a baseball.

Well, that's how you get good at it. The person has got to be really good and you got to try and take their lunch all they live for but man i would love to have a baseball that's how you get good at it the person next to you's got to be really good and you got to try and take their lunch money every day when you're a kid that's like the way it happens and the other thing is i would imagine those kids don't have ipads at home like they're they're in the dominican and they get two baseballs a year and they got to go figure out how to play like it's part of i just can't see a way that we are developing athletes that are able to go and play a sport and now this is probably when do if we're able to develop like the the base of fitness through gymnastics dance like

learning how your body moves in space and having this like, whether you know what's happening or not, but a conversation with how your body just works in general. And then when do we start to insert coaches? Not like sports specific coaches, if that makes sense. Like when is kind of an ideal time to start bringing in like a baseball coach instead of just like throwing the ball. Now we're like really learning how to separate our hands, et cetera, and have like an elevated conversation about mechanics and bringing those pieces. It doesn't have to be in baseball. You just like baseball. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. I think,

I think early on getting as much different sports, as many different movements as you can do. So not just, you know, from that five to 10 age, really doing a bunch, a couple of different sports, you know, pick the seasons and you can kind of do each. I think once you start finding out that your child really likes baseball, really likes football, and that's what they really want to do, you know, you can start to narrow it down to, okay, this is what our specialty is going to be. I think once you have that specialty, then it's a good time to invest in a, in a, in a, you know, skill specific coach. But outside of that, when you're still developing, you know, the age of our kids,

get a golf club in their hand, get a baseball bat in their hand, get a tennis racket in their hand, you have them kick a soccer ball, climb a tree, go rock climbing, like do as many different things. Because from a biomechanical standpoint, you want symmetry, you want them to be able to use both sides of their body. You don't want, you know, baseball is a great sport, but it's very asymmetrical, always one side of one side of one side. So so that's all they do you can run into some injuries later on just because it's the way their body has developed and grown into yeah and i feel like that is like uh tiger woods like changed sports or like kids sports like all of a sudden everybody thought we need to specialize in whatever that thing is starting from the age of like four on just because Tiger did it. Yeah, it makes it really again.

It kind of gets back to that Boyle model where he was like, you know, in up until seven, eight and then just go play all the sports you possibly can. Have you one of the things that I I think about a lot is not necessarily like what the sport is that they're playing, but like, how do we effectively kind of teach kids in that call it my son's three. So he just goes out and swings a golf club and I just tell him to do it as hard as he possibly can. And that's it. Hopefully we get something. But probably one of the most important athletic things that you can train if done well and you're able to communicate effectively to your kids is like really the ability to create power, like jumping. And how do you transfer force in our nerdy terms, like driving through the ground, which then creates power through swinging

a baseball bat or a golf club. And like, without overthinking it, how do you get your kids to start being able to develop those skills without it being this like going and hiring a strength coach to teach you how to do a power clean? Yeah, I think, I think two things. One, they need to see you move your body as, as their parent guardian. They need to see you do that, make it a priority. And two, there's things that are on the playground, like grip strength. Grip strength is a great thing for kids to do. Every playground almost has monkey bars or something that they could hang from. Just, we know all the science behind what grip strength can actually do longevity of life, but also like penmanship and, and fine skill, fine motor skills. Um, and then things at the playground, they're going to have, you know, a slide that they have to go down and something that they can

climb up. I love doing like slide climbing. Once they slide down, have them turn around and start climbing back up it. Bilateral coordination, they're using their legs. It's kind of like doing a little sled push up the way. I think that's great. I think seeing you do things, they're going to want to do it. If I'm doing cleans in my garage gym, I have a little broomstick that my four-year-old will take and start mimicking me. And I think just the mimicking that they can do early on is really great. And then keep it

play focused where, you know, they're jumping to try and touch something and make it fun. They're not going to, you know, you can, they're not going to understand, yeah, drive through your heels, keep, you know, but if you say whatever clicks for them, you know, put, you know, push through your legs, whatever it is for them, figure that out. And then you can do them. What are like the age eight to 10 milestones, like jumping, landing, sprinting, kicking, throwing, punching, dunking. Yeah. Yeah. Dunking. punching dunking yeah yeah dunking 100% yeah dunking the five foot rim

no those are gonna be your more right your your older like sprinting they should have good form at eight to ten years old they should not look like they're stumbling and tripping they should be able to um you know jump all the metrics i don't know did you guys do this when you were younger like the metrics in your gym class where it's like see how the broad jump see how far the fitness awards exactly yeah that kind of stuff they may not be able to you know crush 30 pull-ups maybe maybe they can but you know at least doing the movements to some extent that's that kind of age range eight to ten and then anything after that i mean that's you're getting into older kids strength training and things like that yeah

doug you want to know what the newest addition to the uh the varner playground is i'm ready a rope to climb nice yeah yeah little diesel's out there man every time she gets to the top and she gets to hang it on the pull-up bar that it's a it's like a it's like an eight foot rope it's sick highly recommend it rogue fitness get after um you know when she gets to the top of that thing and hangs up there i treat it like it's she just won the world series i want it's always because you go into gymnastic class and these little six-year-old seven-year-old girls are sitting there doing L-sit rope climbs. And you just, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Where did you develop this upper body strength and core strength to be able to do something like that? But there's like a whole gym of them. And it's crazy when they, when you see them going up there,

like things that adults just cannot do at all. It's such a good reminder of what our bodies are designed to do. When you look at a kid, when they're playing, using their body, it's such a good reminder of what our bodies are designed to do when you look at a kid when they're playing using their body it's such a good reminder of like oh man i used to be able to do that i need to keep up this right if you can't do that anymore you should work towards getting to that play like you should be able to go to the playground and if you're whatever movement your child is doing you should be able to do it at what age do you think kids should do like more structured workouts even it's just like basic calisthenics they're doing they're doing push-ups and lunges and box jumps and that type

of thing oh i mean body weight stuff they can do early seven eight early on um you know you'd tailor it to to what they can do um you know when I was training in New York, I had six, seven year olds and, you know, we do the different box jumps or different like agility drills and things like that, just to have a move and we'd go outside. I make a little ladder, have them do the ladder, throw a football to them, like just make it fun, but they can, they can do all of that stuff early on. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there, there was like was like a big thing you know this is probably still going on to some extent but like kids shouldn't do plyos it was like a big conversation in the strength conditioning world or

maybe outside the strength conditioning world but then like but then playing a whole soccer game is totally fine it's like what do you think they're doing for an hour and a half on the on the field they're running running and jumping that's like all they're doing and they're totally fine i think that's where you get into a little bit of the the educate you know the level of coaching that you're at if if you're yeah you shouldn't just have you know your kid do a thousand box jumps and that's the only thing that they do but i think you can be really structured you know box jumps is an explosive movement we're going to start with explosive movement we're going to do three sets of five and that's it and then we move on to something else but you can tailor their you can definitely include that into their workout routine

or you know their activity routine yeah i mean or and or just strength training in general we mentioned gymnastics like that's a very large component of gymnastics is just getting stronger you're just doing pull ups and push-ups and dips and and then any routine you're doing is has a very high strength component to it if you're doing skin the cats as a kid there's a lot of muscular tension going on there and kids seem to deal with it just fine yeah i want to um anders you had brought up a little bit ago about the parents with since tiger woods getting stuck in like one specific sport yeah we're doing one one thing only i think the reason what that all comes down to is this comparison society

that we have with everything's on social media they're like oh little tommy down the street can do this well we're just going to focus we're just going to take our field of vision we're going to shrink it down and this is what we're going to focus on this one thing. And that's where we get hyper-focused as parents and we want all of this. And yes, that's all good. But at the same time, they need to just be kids at that early, you know, say anything below 10, just let them do different movements, figure out what movement feels best for their body.

Yeah. I'm like, just get it with my, my six-year-old daughter. Some of the like boy friends and like kids in the neighborhood, I like already see it. It's like that, whether it's soccer or baseball and everyone's just starting and it's like four days a week. And I'm like, Oh, settle down. What about just hanging out, running fast against your friends? Like we don't, it's a lot. We're already on travel teams. I have one of my lifelong best friends, good Lori as a kid playing coach pits, travel baseball. And I'm like, bro,

do you remember when we played sports? Do you remember what you were like when you were seven years old? Can you just, let's go play some hockey together and try and score goals. I didn't even, I didn't even play baseball until I was nine after, after coach pitch and all that stuff. And I played professionally. So yeah. Younger isn't always better. Probably worse. And, and many, many of the models i actually um i there's the ability to i for me and this is actually why i was like somewhat good at cross but i feel like it's like i i played all of the sports there was never a season that i took off there was never a season that I took off. There was never any specific focus until I kind of had to choose a game to go play.

And then CrossFit showed up after they told me I was too small and too slow to be able to go play hockey anywhere. And it was like, wait, there's a sport for people that are slightly above average at everything? Sign me up. This sounds like my wheelhouse. I think that's perfect. When somebody asks me, like, what is my definition of fitness or being athletic? I do things to work out so that I can do other things. So if a buddy says, hey, come run a 5K with me.

All right, great. This weekend? Cool, let's do it. Hey, come do this CrossFit workout with me. All right, I'm not embarrassed. I'm not ashamed. I can get through it. Let, you know, let's go do, uh, whatever it is. I want to be, I want my body to be able to do whatever it is that it's called to do. And I think going back and start, you can start your kids with that and, and have that mentality with them too. Um, if we were kind of, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I was going to say, I'm not sure this is specifically your wheelhouse, but how do you get kids, say, say a 10 year old who just isn't interested in sports to still do something that's physically good for his health? That's a great question. And yeah, that's a lot of like the mental component. And I'm sure there's more mental health experts out there than me. But what I will say is, again, modeling,

so making sure that they see you do it. And then to making it, just getting them outside, having them go do something. Once they start doing it, they're probably going to like it. Now, they may not like that specific sport, or something, but they're going to start liking it. It's usually the hesitancy of, well, I just don't know what I'm getting myself into. but they're going to start liking it's usually the hesitancy of well i just don't know what i'm getting myself into maybe they're a little shy once you help get them into it take away the screens that that's just not what they're they're not used to just sitting in front of a screen they're used to being outside the more that you get them used to that the more they're going to want it yeah like i have three kids my my middle's easily like the most kind of naturally athletically

gifted and has and it also has conveniently has the most interest in playing sports and so he's easy he he wants to play baseball he wants to play soccer etc and then i then i have like my my six-year-old i can't even get him to try to ride a bike he refuses to even like attempt it he has no interest whatsoever we go to the park park, he'll play, he'll run around. He's not, he's not afraid to go out on the trampoline and do some activity, but like any, any signing him up for any type of structured activity, he's just like, it's like a hard no, he just refuses to do it. I'm like, it's a problem that I have yet to solve.

Maybe he'll grow into it. Well, and, and riding a bike can be challenging. And I think that's a good insight um not everything is going to come easy for every kid so you know give them a little bit of grace with that because riding a bike it'll take sometimes seven eight years old they're gonna fall they're not gonna get it they're not gonna want to do it and then one day it's just gonna click and then all of a sudden they love riding their bike so just keep pouring into them and showing them, you know, giving them a little bit of grace. Cause they're probably,

that's probably coming from some kind of fear, frustration of why they don't want to do that. Maybe they're again, shy. Maybe there's something they're not as good at as somebody else that they see. And they don't necessarily want to do it. Maybe it's hard for their body to do riding a bike can be challenging. Cause they can be frustrated and then not want to do it, but just keep pouring into them. Yeah. I'd love to kind of understand. I feel like many times I live in a bubble. I hang out with Doug. We talk about our kids. We're always trying to get them outside and running and

draining the batteries so that they actually sleep at night. What is like, like an average case, like an average kid that walks in that is looking for answers? And what is what is kind of like their environment conversation around fitness, health, nutrition, I feel like I'm just slightly out of touch with probably your average case, because I sit and hang out with Doug all the time. Yeah. So our, our business model, Connective Kids, we specialize in helping kids with gross motor challenges. Typically the kids that will come to us, we have our, our program that we've created combines chiropractic with physical therapy in a pediatric world, which is very taboo. That doesn't happen a lot, but we've kind of worked through some of the challenges with that.

So a lot of the kids, because we're the only one in the country that does that actually travel from all over the world to come see us. We've had 40 States and 20 countries come see us. Um, the reason why they're traveling so much, isn't just gross motor development challenges. It's usually to have some kind of genetic component, some kind of diagnosis like cerebral palsy, um, things like that. Cerebral palsy is where your, your brain loses oxygen at some point. And because of that, you have a neurological, uh, abnormality, either increased tone, decreased tone, uh, and it can cause some real challenges with

them. So that's primarily what we get into is we help these kids learn how to walk, learn how to crawl, learn how to sit. Sitting is a big one for these families because, you know, think about it for me and you, we can have dinner out at a restaurant because we can put our child in a seat. If the child can't do that, you're always having to hold them. You can't go on date nights. So that's a big challenge for the families out there. And that does CP, cerebral palsy, is about one in every 350 kids is what happens. So talk about like the bubble.

Yeah, I mean, that's not something I ever really thought about until I got into this world. So that's kind of one aspect. The other aspect is the family aspect where we see, you know, moms and dads, high school athletes track, you know, the whole gamut. But when we look at that specific population, we do help a lot of kids with neurological diagnoses typically. Yeah. Do you feel like those, are all of, maybe not all, are many of those kids born with those neurological deficiencies?

It's not something that's like adapted or created. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So early development. So that can happen from, so a genetic component is a genetic component. They have a missing chromosome. They have missing or duplicated chromosomes, whatever it is. They can have birth traumas that can cause this cerebral palsy or, you know, things like it with increased, decreased tone.

And that's where when you talk about gross motor milestones and the checklist that you have, if they're not doing, you know, at six months, they're not attempting to roll. They're not attempting to do that. That's why they're there so that you can figure out, okay, is there something going on that we need to start addressing at the six month mark? But yeah, that's, yeah, it's a, it happens. It happens. Yeah. Um, as you start to kind of get, um, you know, more, more into that high school development, um, and kind of, I'd love to hear like your, your experiences and what, what that looked like in your path to becoming a pro athlete. Um, how do you kind of like create that balance and the mindset around,

um, obviously real competition starts to show up and start to have to hit the gas pedal on like, now you're not just having fun or training. Like we have to go get better. Um, when did that, what do you feel like that happened with you? And then kind of on the backdrop of like, like an average parent being able to sit down and have a real conversation with their kid about like, if you want to go do this, now you got to start working. Yeah, that's a great question. So I, like I said, didn't start playing baseball till nine years old, even around then I would take a tennis ball and go throw it against my garage. So I think I had a lot of this intrinsic motivation of just, I enjoyed it.

That's what I love to do. One of my best friends is who got me into baseball. So just surrounding myself with people made me start to have that competitiveness. And then growing up into high school, I mean, I went to my buddy's garage gym and that's all we did. Like other kids were, you know, partying and stuff out late. We were in the garage hitting baseballs till 2am in the morning. So that's just what we did. I think a lot of it is the getting in the right groups of the, you know, friends, the people that you're with that are more competitive. And then, yeah, having that discussion, you know, I think there's a lot of

intrinsic motivation that happens where you see it, you want to make yourself the best. I think that's definitely something that as parents, we can start to show them what to do. But I think it can be challenging. You know, if they don't have that mindset, yeah, you have to sit down with them and say, look, this is where you're at. This is where you do like doing this. Do you want to keep doing it? Yeah. Okay. I will get you every resource that you need to do that. But you, this is a 50, 50 50 process i'll get you the resources you have to put the energy in yeah earlier on when i was you're on the same topic i was going to go to a new topic go ahead you got it uh earlier when i was giving the example of like the the baby and the little

bouncer you said that their hip sockets weren't weren't developed to the point where they should be doing that um on a similar note if if you, if you, you're, you're 20 years old and you've never played a sport, you've never kicked a soccer ball. You've never thrown a punch. You never swung a baseball bat. You're never thrown a baseball, et cetera, et cetera. Do you, are your, for your physical development, like your bone structure, is it different because you haven't done any of those physical activities where

when you try to get your act together, when you're 20 and start to train and work out of course you can always get better but are you are you in a physical deficit where like your bone structure is such that like you just can't ever make the progress that you would have made had you done it your entire life yeah man y'all are asking some some good questions yeah that is so when we look at the development of bone structure let's say right we know when the growth plates close typically 18 or so is when the growth plates are going to start you know fully closed closing that's a really good marker of okay we have to be putting some energy in to build that bone mass. But we talk about full development, development, especially our brains don't finish developing to like 25 for males. So as much as we can do within that

zero to 25, you can keep pushing the development of these bones and muscles and things like that, because you're still developing, your brain is still developing. Kind of on the brain development side of things, do you see, or we'll just call it kids, on the iPad, on the screens that aren't out playing and developing physically, do you feel like that plays more into the behavioral health side of things and just not having the practice and confidence

that is developed by just getting out and being around other kids and just not even doing anything like practice or structure, just getting out and going and just draining the battery every night and being around other kids. So they have this social side of life. Oh yeah. So TV shows, especially some of the TV shows today, very bright colors. And the frame rate is something that you really want to watch as a parent. Frame rate is how, you know, if you're watching Coco Melvin. Disaster. Oh, it's awful. It's like a carnival mixed with all the bright colors.

And you can't even count to one in your brain before they're on to the next thing. The Japanese shows too, like Dragon Ball Z and that type of thing. It's like a strobe light in your face. Yeah. So what that's doing is it's training their brains to always be looking for that next stimulus. So it's very much like attention deficit, right? You're, you're always looking for something else other than what it is that you're focusing on. So yeah, I think screens play a big role in it. You want to look at like markers,

toe walking, having kids around two or so two to three, if they're continually walking on their toes, you really want to get ahead of that because there's a correlation between toe walking with ADHD. And again, I think that we start talking about into... Hold on, what is the relationship there? So we start talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, right? Sympathetic is your gas pedal, parasympathetics, rest, digest. When we're always sympathetic, you're being chased by a bear. When you're getting chased by a bear all the time, think about it. You're on your toes, you're constantly like moving. So they're not able to slow down. It's good to have both of

those. You need to have both gas pedal and brake pedal. But if you're always pressing the gas and not able to switch off onto the brake, that's where that rest digests, that contemplation slowing things down. You can see that. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember seeing a lot of that when my kids were younger. We're around a bunch of other kids that were also two years old. And I saw lots of kids that walked on their toes. I don't remember ever really seeing it before I was around little kids as much as I was for those those few years. But is that becoming more and more common over time? I've seen it more lately. But there's a lot of factors that go into that. So if you see your child that's walking on their toes,

don't automatically go to that. So I should have prefaced with that early on. So if you're listening still, don't, don't freak out. For example, if your child is just starting to walk, you're going to see, you want them to actually go up on their toes and squeeze the ground with their toes because that's how they're starting to get a little bit of strength in their feet. So that can be a good thing if it's prolonged. And that's the only thing that they're able to do whether they have shoes on or not then you then that can become an issue a lot of kids too will have a little bit of a sensory uh component to it where maybe they just don't like grass uh they don't like being barefoot on hardwood floors um but going back to the biomechanics of it typically there's not a neurological component typically it's just biomechanical of it typically there's not a neurological component typically it's just biomechanical that they're that they're getting up on their toes right then the gastroc shortens

and that's just easier for them to do that you can stretch and work out some of those muscles early on and then get them squatting again is a really great tool because you're going to lengthen out all of that that poster chain in their in their calves and their legs yeah um i actually have two kids with adhd and one kid that has adhd and and autism and i could i could see the sensory thing for sure especially my oldest has a bunch of sensory issues like if he's a kid and can't really explain himself and and the texture of the ground is all weird it's like i could see walking walking on his toes purely out of the sensory. He doesn't have anything wrong with his feet.

He just has that sensory thing. He doesn't like it. And so he just walks a little bit different just to relieve that sensation. I can 100% see that being the case. Yeah. And in that case, again, there's just a lot of processing going on in the brain, right? They're getting a lot of input. Think of all the input that's coming into us.

They're having trouble digesting what that input is in their brain. Yeah. They can have easily frustration, easily, you know, agitated, but also constantly seeking something to hold onto and lock onto because it's a lot of when there's that much sensory, it's kind of like white noise. If you have something like, you know, this water bottle right here, I can hold this water bottle and I can focus on this as opposed to just having a bunch of things going into my brain at all at the same time. Yeah. Do you have any kind of training tips for people that have children that are neuro atypical? Like I was just mentioning? I do think I, and again, as a chiropractor myself, I'm a little biased, but I have seen some really good results with the kiddos that have come in with us, especially with ADHD, you know, and spectrum, just trying to get them to connect with their brain and their body as best as they can.

If there's any kind of break in the chain between what their body or their brain is telling their body and what their body is telling their brain, then that can lead into that frustration. That can lead into restrictions, compensation patterns, things like that. We know exactly where those nerves come from, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, so we can do things to facilitate those. For example, the parasympathetic is going to come from your cervical spine. So up in your neck, also your sacrum down at and lumbar at the very, very bottom. So by stimulating those areas, so probably like a heavy workout would be good because you're going to stimulate the muscles that those nerves also go to. Wait, what do you mean stimulating the cervical region or the you say cervical and lumb, as we just said?

Yeah. So like I have like I have a nine year old kid who has autism, like what would be an example for a nine year old in this case? So have you ever been to a chiropractor? I have personally. Yeah. OK, so the chiropractor can use I use an activator or an arthro stem, some kind of tool at the top, and I can stimulate certain areas of the body. For that, you know, I can adjust the atlas. Atlas is the biggest one. Every nerve in your body runs through that bone before it goes to everything

else. So if there's anything that's off up in here, that's, they're not getting that message up and down from their brain to their body from their body to their brain and it can cause again i'm not saying that chiropractic is going to fix this but i can help them understand what their body is doing better gotcha okay yeah so like just like a chiropractic adjustment was your what you're basically referencing that's at the top the thing at the bottom like again with, with those nerves, sacrum, we know, right. The, the sciatic nerve, all the muscles that are innervated by the nerves that come off of that. So hamstrings, um, calves, glutes, right. All of those, if we stimulate

those, that's still stimulating the same nerve and the same area that that's coming from. So heavy work, leg work will probably, again, I'm not a neurologist. I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you that you're working the same areas to stimulate. That's why when we have a heavy lift day, we're more, it's easier for us to fall asleep. Gotcha. All right. I got some heavy sled pushes for my boys coming up this afternoon. Matt, this has been fantastic, man. Where can, where can people learn more? So you can go to our website, connectivekids.com. We have a bunch of free resources there. We have a gross motor checklist.

If you're looking for what should my child be doing when that's a great resource. If you are, if you're looking for more help, we have our connective community. We have masterclasses for gross motor development. And then if you're a chiropractor, PT, OT that works with kids, we also educate and train other clinicians through our Connective University. And that's all through our website, connectivekids.com. Fantastic.

Doug Larson. You bet. I'm on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Yo, I really appreciate this. Anytime we can get some high-quality information to help make our kids healthier. I'm on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Yo, I really appreciate this. Anytime we can get some high-quality information to help make our kids healthier, I'm all for it. So thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like I spent the first 25 years of lifting weights talking about lifting weights,

and now I talk about just trying to get my kids jacked all the time. This works well. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. And make sure you get over to rapidealthreport.com.

That is where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that you can access for free over at rapidealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.