Barbell Shrugged - How to Teach Your Kids About Building Muscle w/ Bryan Boorstein - Diesel Dad Episode 15

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

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Welcome to the Diesel Dad. Today, we're hanging out and we're gonna talk about how to teach your kids about building muscle. And of course, the very first time we have an actual guest on here, the best man at my wedding, Brian Borstein. Probably like the, the reason I wanna do this show and that you have to be the first guest

is that I feel like our kids have a gigantic leg up in the world growing up in a household with somebody that has a professional fitness strength hypertrophy. I don't even know what the hell we call ourselves anymore because we know too many things about too many things when it comes to health and fitness. We could solve so many problems that I I don't really know how what we call ourselves I don't really like yourself I don't really like the box that they use of fit pro I feel like that's the worst of all of them yeah I always go to strength coach yeah I would say

uh strength and hypertrophy coach or strength and hypertrophy specialist or something along those lines yeah strength coach sounds the coolest, but that puts you in a box of like college performance coach, which I don't do. Yeah, and I care less about performance these days and more about hypertrophy anyway. So I think that strength is like, you know, a byproduct of hypertrophy. I think if I was to put you in a category,

I would put you in like a get jacked coach. Yep. I don't really know. Get jacked. Yep. Let's get shredded and jacked. Yeah. I feel like if I was going to do it, I would just – I would be like the – I want to be like the sportsman coach where you just get to go play all the time.

Totally. People feel empowered to go do things. The physical capacity coach. And everything's barefoot. Dude, I don't know how old. You're in your basement. I feel like you would love the barefoot. I actually love the barefoot.

And I think that this is a perfect transition into talking about our kids because Bryson and I are in a fight the last month or so because I picked a fight so so there's this saying that you don't have to pick very many fights with your kids but you better fucking win the ones that you pick right yeah so I'm losing first off I love that you say there's a saying and I've never heard it before but I like it yeah but it's very true too because like you really don't want to be that that parent that like is setting all these rigid boundaries and you have rules for everything

um but there are certain things that you do have to pick the fight with that are very important right and yeah i can win those so i picked a fight with him about a month ago maybe a little bit more it started getting nicer weather around here after winter yeah and um and he just didn't want to wear shoes so we go out on these walks every day they're probably two mile walks and we usually culminate them at a park somewhere and um he plays and you know we'll kick a soccer ball around or yeah so i picked the fight and i was like you have to wear shoes and he's like i don't want to wear shoes and i'm like well you're on the concrete and there could be glass and broken bottles and you know trying to be like a good parent and keep his yeah and he was throws a tantrum and basically

at the end of the day i'm just like fine we're not going for the walk end of end of that one we're not going to the park yeah then day two same deal i'm like you have to wear shoes and he's like i'm not wearing shoes i hate shoes blah blah and and i'm like well i really want to go for a walk today like i haven't gotten my steps in i gotta i gotta look at my watch says we have to go so so i'm like i'm like all right fine you don't have to wear shoes on the walk but when we get to the park you have to wear shoes you know so yeah so so we go we walk to the park whatever whatever get to the park and he completely ignores me and doesn't wear shoes and runs around and this continues for like the next few weeks and i've realized that like i picked a fight and i didn't win the fight and now i feel demoralized because

well why were you fighting the shoe why was that was it really because it's like dangerous so he um we we walk on the sidewalk and on the street yeah it's not i mean it's i think the reason for the fight was mostly because we also have like his scooter with him and you can't scoot without shoes on because he also used his foot to break yeah so so he has to have shoes on to break and then it really just became this thing of like i i want to walk okay i'm not gonna have shoes on i need to scoot dad put my shoes on i want to walk again take my shoes off i want to scoot put my shoes back on or i'm at the park this park has wood chips put my shoes on this park doesn't have wood chips take my shoes off um and so you were trying to create a standard

i was trying to create a standard and unfortunately i'm still changing the shoes every 10 minutes because i lost the battle and i feel awful about it uh we are big well ashton is not a big shoe off but adelaide and i are big shoe off people but it depends upon the activity um if we're just out we're shoes off sure if we're like doing something although i started the shoes off early here and now i can run on the concrete without them so it's a i'm like getting there bryson and i actually do a thing uh it started last summer and i hope that we'll continue it this summer but after dinner we go for like a walk run and we pretty much just take like a maybe a three-quarter mile or mile loop around the neighborhood and he'll like sprint until he can't run anymore and then we'll stop and then we'll

spray it and then we'll stop and so we always did that barefoot last year so I think that that's kind of where the precedent was set where he was like you and I do this run thing and we do barefoot so why should i have to wear shoes now you know and to your point like there really isn't any like massive danger it's really just like a standard and then the annoyance of having to put them on and off and on and off whatever yeah eventually like he'll learn how to put his own shoes on and it won't even be a big deal when did you start to recognize that he had a, a like legitimate running kick? Like not just like moving fast, but like an actual run. Cause this happened like 48 hours ago for me. That Adelaide likes to run.

No, not likes to run. Like actually ran. Like it was a, like the leg kicked the right way where i was like oh you're actually where that came from yeah like you're actually running you're not just like waddling faster or whatever it is like there was like an actual development to now you run now you have like legit ability to run properly did i lose you there for a second yeah Yeah, totally. Oh, word. I was saying you froze on me. Adelaide had like, it was the first time that she had like a real ability to run in a way that looked like a human being that can run. Yeah, I think it was probably on our runs

last year, like last summer. About the same time. Yeah, he was maybe like same age yeah yeah yeah exactly um maybe even before that but that was when i really noticed it because we would initially these walk runs they started just as walks like i would be like let's go out for like a post-dinner walk yeah and um and go explore go check out the fire station or whatever and then we would get to certain parts of the walk and he would sprint like he would just like be like so he has this thing this alter ego that i think he must have picked up at school but he calls it super speed and but because he can't say speed he says feed so it's super feed um and he literally he just like he'll start your engines super feed and then he just like, he'll start your engines, super feed.

And then he just like takes off, you know? Yeah. And that's his thing. He goes into super speed mode and he just books it and he runs well. So it's actually interesting too, because he runs really well barefoot. And when he puts shoes on, he distinctly does not run as well. Does feet go out? No, his right foot kind of caves in, actually. So his left foot's been fine.

Both feet are fine when there's no shoes on, but with shoes on, his right foot caves in. So I think, like, with that rationale, it kind of makes sense why he doesn't like wearing shoes. Yeah. It's been – so Adelaide ran a half mile straight with me on the beach out of nowhere. My mom and I were just going for like a light jog and she just took off with us. And we were like, well, this will end soon. And then it didn't end.

And then we turned around. The only time she stopped was to pick up shells for like three minutes. And we were like, giddy up, let's go. We got back and I was like, that, that was a long, and it wasn't like a slow kick. It was like, kind of like if you were just like to like go on a leisurely jog at the beach, but she was getting after it. It was really crazy.

It's super, do you find it interesting watching? So like when you're coaching somebody you're always thinking like how do we progress or regress movement to get you to the place that you're at but did you go through like a did you have these like light bulb moments when you saw them go from like laying on the ground tummy time to army crawl to like core development like not core development like we think about it but their ability to stabilize to like pulling up did did you find that whole process to be just so wild from like a movement perspective yeah absolutely man they're being impressive creatures it's so wild and i it's it's even more wild like to watch the

i don't know how long adelaide did this for but both my kids did the whole um furniture walking thing you know pushing things around no where you're holding on to like oh yeah so so both my kids did that for like six plus months and i thought like when they started doing it both kim and i both times we were like oh my god like look at them they're so stable like they're going to be walking in no time and then it was like six or seven months before they actually were walking yeah even within the the pattern of you know furniture walking uh they got better at it and like they would then do the thing where like they could move from one object to another object without going down into a crawl first.

And like, you can actually see the stabilization increases occur, which was just wild. That stuff's really, really cool. That was like, you could sit back and actually see the progression. And I,

I, it made me wonder like if we, when you see somebody walk into a gym and we used to see this all the time at the gym, somebody would walk in and they'd want to just start lifting heavy. But if they were to eliminate like so much of the ego that is involved and like, I want to do what's on the board or I want to, I want to be a badass and like, how much can I squat? And you, you just had like an actual blank slate with somebody that was 25, maybe 32, 32 35 years old but that doesn't move properly

but you but they said look you have a whole year i wonder like i wouldn't even known how far down the regression you could go to getting people but i used to think about it all the time of like oh that's like what a squat looks like when you're when you're two years old like that's so crazy to see and how they get there and how their joints move that if somebody gave you a year and and they weren't paying you money because nobody would ever go back to these regressions but like how how many problems could you solve if somebody just completely got rid of their ego and and how they coach and you were able to progress people along what typically is like this natural path, but none of us really ever follow it because we have to make people happy, for lack of a better term.

You totally missed that, didn't you? Yeah. No, you really only freeze for me for like two seconds at a time so it's not a big catch the gist of what you're saying but for some reason both times you've been at the end of your statement so you're just waiting for me to finish um but yeah it would be cool to see see how long it would take to get some people moving really really well if you had had these like specific regressions that nobody would ever pay you for because their ego would get in the way, but it would be fun to do some of it. Yeah, I think that the issue is that as we get older into the late 20s and 30s, that our joints become so stiff that you can almost not even regress

people back that far. When you look at the way that our kids are sitting in the squat position perfectly with like knees over toes and butt down and chest up like 90 of adults can't even get to that position no so you think about like oh if i could only regress you back to like you know just let's just do an air squat and do it perfectly but like shit man you got to regress even further than that because some people's ankles are in cement and they can't even get knee flexion at the bottom of the squat um so i mean you're looking at individual issues at that point yeah well i it's super cool to be able to coach as many people as we've coached and then see the way nature handles all this stuff for sure um when how do you talk to your kids about nutrition this is like the this is i would say this is where I'm at in the, in the, the most interesting

thing of this process. Yeah. It's the most interesting and it's the most difficult too. Yeah. I like chicken nuggets. Katie Bryson loves chicken nuggets, but you know, what's, uh, every kid loves chicken nuggets. I didn't know they were so

important to survival good you know i've talked to you before about how bryson doesn't like meat like he doesn't really like protein yeah and it like frustrates me to no end because i obviously know the importance of protein so so his top food choices are our bagels and mac and cheese those are his two favorite two. And then close seconds. Does he put up like a hard battle if he doesn't get that once or twice a week? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much gotten to the point at this. I mean, he's probably the most stubborn kid I've ever met. And I've, you know, seen a number of kids through friends, parents, and stuff like that. He's extremely stubborn. He outlasts Kim and I. So when we talk about like picking battles and

making sure that we're going to win, no, it's unbelievable. So, so every day for breakfast now, we've, we basically are meeting him in the middle. So I've explained to him how food is energy. That's the way I'm trying to explain it is like food is energy and different foods just have different energy benefits for you. Some are going to give you energy that's going to sustain you longer and some are going to give you short-term energy that's then going to dissipate and you're going to feel worse afterwards. And I try not to label foods like, well, this is sugar, so this is bad. I'm so happy you said that.

I'm going to go on a rant after you say this, but go ahead. Yeah, so we kind of meet him in the middle now. And so breakfast as an example, it's like I know you're going to have the bagel or you're going to throw a fit. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a whole egg and fruit and you're going to eat the egg and the fruit first and when you finish your egg and your fruit then you can have the bagel and then he more or less gets a complete meal so that's kind of the way that we're approaching it now is we're giving him a piece of what he wants but giving him also pieces of what we feel he needs i had the proudest moment this is not my rant uh but i had the proudest moment this morning as slowly trying to instill into Adelaide how important protein is. I make her egg every morning, and I put it on the table, and today, she nailed it. I go, why do we eat eggs in the morning? She goes, protein. I go,

what does protein do? She goes, makes you strong, and I was like, I did it. I did it. Sign me up. I'm the greatest dad in the whole wide world. This is so cool. But what you said, I think is like, this is why I wanted to interview dads that I think are really, really smart about how they teach their kids about being in shape because you mentioned good and bad and you don't want to label sugar as good and you don't want to label sugar as bad because there's an actual purpose for sugar if it's something that you want to have and when you have it and all these things and there's a lot of nuance to these conversations and the reason I wanted to start interviewing people that I think are really smart and how they raise their kids is because I was giving Adelaide a bath the other night and I asked her if I could use her comb and she goes, daddy, you don't have any hair. And then her face, her face transitioned from this like joking on me, like daddy, you don't have any hair to like this super curious dad, why don't you have hair like it was like a real like a real three-year-old going wait a second my dad doesn't have hair how how did that happen everyone has hair except my dad

like this is so strange and I had no idea how to answer I was like I don't know I've been bald for a long time like I'm not getting it back. I didn't have an answer. And it made me think like the net later that night, I was like, man, I bet there's so many questions that kids have growing like the most blunt humans on this planet, they don't understand the filter or the social niceties. And if you were an overweight kid and you went to middle school or you went to elementary school and somebody called your kid fat, and that kid came home and was like dad i got called fat today am i fat and you'd be like no or yes and now we're like right we and and it it super bothered me that um that would be like the label that you would be forced to have a conversation with them about it because yes and no is not the answer. It's, well, what do you think fat is? Like what's the mindset around your body and how do you have an important or how do you have like a healthy conversation about it. And I think that that is like the part that I, I immediately was like, oh, I need to like talk to people about this because there's so many nuances to the entire

conversation. And one, I wanted to bring you on to talk like the, the body image thing is a really weird one to me because I have a daughter and you have a daughter as well um but how i know you're not talking about body image to your kids like that's obviously not something that's happening but like do you think about how much control you have in the house for x number of years before all of a sudden there's like a magazine and facebook and instagram or whatever the hell kids are on these days where like you lose that control immediately as soon as there's a phone in their hand. Like, what do you think your responsibility is when it comes to that, that conversation in that period of time where you have to lay the foundation?

I don't know. I mean, you're,'re you're right it's a very super ambiguous and really scary topic to even consider um i know that they already have exposure to some of this stuff through phones yeah one of the things that bryson and i do every night before bed after he brushes his teeth is we we lay down on the floor and he gets to watch one live rock performance so he's like he's super into music now so he'll he likes the revivalists and he likes oar and like stuff like this so we'll watch like a live performance yeah he'll be like he'll be like dad that's an acoustic guitar and that's an electric guitar you know so he's like and that's a saxophone and that's a trumpet and like yeah he knows all these things

but he's already starting to be like why is that that person's hair funny? And then he calls this guy, I want to listen to the guy with the funny hair, you know, so he's, he's already labeling these people based on their physical characteristics. followers made a comment on one of your posts and i don't always go down the rabbit hole looking at comments but i did this time for whatever and it stuck with me he said from my experience most things are caught not taught yeah oh i know exactly what you're talking about mario kazeta he follows our programs he's like a he's a branding person out in Hawaii. He's awesome. So I thought that I've actually used that since I read that a month or two ago. I've actually used that in a number of situations when I'm talking to other parents about lifestyle and behavior and communication and stuff like that. Because I think that it probably is the most relevant piece of parenting is that the amount of influence that we have isn't about the way that we talk to them. It's much more in the way that we act because they're just going to

pick up on that and they're going to want to do what we do. So going back to like the conversation of I'm fat or someone called me fat or whatever, I feel like that's the result of a lifestyle circumstance. And not that that couldn't happen to our kids because it absolutely can. It for sure could. It for sure could, especially because like, so Vivi, my daughter, is like extremely food focused. If there's someone in the house eating, she has to be eating. If she's unhappy, food makes her happy.

And Bryson is the opposite. He doesn't want anything to do with food he could just go hungry and you know eat the bare minimum because he's so busy being active and having fun and doing things and like whatever so it's very real that despite the fact that we have these professions or whatever that that vivian could end up growing up and having issues with her weight especially as a girl especially as someone that's going to be a little bit shorter i think um she's gonna her as someone that's going to be a little bit shorter, I think. Her body style is probably going to be a little bit different than Bryson. And so these are just, I think, things that need to be integrated within the construct of our lives

over the next decade versus being something that we're like, oh, shit, our kid's fat. We should probably talk to them about this. Yeah, for sure. I, you know, it, that, that single question came to me and I was like, well, how would I answer it? And, you know, I think that that just like general mindset of it and was like the, the biggest thing that I kept kind of forcing myself to come back to of like, well, how do you feel? Because that really is what like this whole body positive image is about. It's like you either accept this is who you are, you don't want to put the work in to change it, and you're okay with the ramifications

of being unhealthy, or you don't like it and you're going to move in a better direction. And I don't know right or wrong compared to that, and I'm probably missing a lot of nuance as well. But in thinking about how I would answer it, I feel like I would, as maybe the best answer of like, well, how do you feel about being overweight? Or what does overweight mean to you? Like, do you feel good as a person, but then having the opportunity inside that question to be able to talk about your metabolism, and like, what a calorie is like, there's endless things that go into that conversation. But that, man, I often wonder sometimes

how many people get called something. And dude, this is actually super interesting. Did you listen to Demi Lovato on Rogan? Nope. So Demi Lovato was, she's super, super famous, obviously. But she was the, she was one of the child actors on Barney like that's how long that girl's been famous for and she had a giant eating disorder and the reason she adopted her eating disorder was because somebody in middle school after she had already she's like selling

out stadiums as like a middle schooler. But when she went back to school, some girl called her fat, probably just out of pure jealousy. But it wasn't just like she called her fat. She had a mom that had an eating disorder as well. So once she got called fat, now she immediately just started following the roadmap of how to have an eating disorder, which she had been witnessing and watching for so long. to this roadblock, us living a life to some standard of health and strength that we have

laid this foundation that they don't know another way or they only know a specific way for a very long time. It would be really hard to adopt an eating disorder at 15 years old if you have no practice in it or no visual thing. have your kids taken any interest in you doing your thing down in the basement? Yeah, they both do for sure. Um, they're actually both obsessed with my room. Like I keep it locked and, and whenever we go down in the basement, they're both like, can we go in your gym? And Vivi's like at the door, like it down nice um so she's i know that's your dojo it's so rad um she's only 16 months old now not even 16 months and she's um there's a couple times where a couple like a month or two ago she wouldn't take her morning nap when she was still

doing morning naps and so i would be like in the finishing up my workout and i'd have a couple sets left so i would kind of like set her down in the gym and she would watch or whatever and there for whatever reason the last the two exercises i always did when she was down there because they were at the end of the program were cable exercises where i would grab these little angles handles and and pull on them so she she caught it all you know she she walks in the room and the first thing she does is beelines for the cable machine and she sits down like I was sitting down and grabbed the handles and starts trying to tug on them

and goes, uh, uh, uh, you know, and she's doing this thing. And Bryson's obsessed with it, less from the side of wanting to lift the weights and more from the side of climbing on the machines and using them as play fire trucks. But he did express interest one day, and the smallest dumbbells I have are fives. So I was like, all right, what's the best – what can I have you do with fives? He'd already deadlifted them and farmer carried them.

So I was like, all right, let's try a bench press. And so he has these little five- pound dumbbells down at his chest and i i'm holding his wrists and he gets them up here and then he just drops them and i was like oh like i was dude mom's gonna get pissed if you get hurt and not only that but i felt awful because i guess I didn't think to explain to him that when you get to the top, you then lower them back down again. It's not just up and drop, right? Because in his mind, that's, I guess, what he assumed you would do. I lifted it. I couldn't have known.

I thought that because he sits in there and he watches me work out sometimes that he would just get it. But that's so absurd to think that of all the things that are going through his mind that he's paying attention to how I lower the weights down. So in retrospect, I was like, okay, this is a really good learning lesson. I'm glad I learned this with five-pound dumbbells. And I'm going to take a year off before we try this again. But he really doesn't show a ton of interest in it aside from picking the dumbbells up and farmers carrying them, which is a huge favorite of his. Vivi, for whatever reason, has shown interest though. She'll walk into the room and point at stuff. And when I'm working out, she just sits there and watches and stays out of the way until she's taken it all in.

So yeah, I think it's very interesting. interesting i had uh adelaide only so she's only really cared if to to like hang out with me in the gym specifically if one of her friends is in here and i get her friend like to hang on the pull-up bar and she immediately wants to do it she hung on a pull-up bar for 20 seconds the other day and i was like that's savage yeah you have your your arms around her like this to catch her when she fell? Yeah. But the cool part is like – so we have one of those little cars, and it's broken. The battery is totally dead. So I used to put her in it when she was a lot smaller and I would still do it,

but now she's got one that works. Um, and in order for it to go, I basically have to like sled push her down the street as fast as I could go. And it was like part of my workout. Like I would just throw her in there and I would just cruise up and down on this pink mini mouse car that didn't have a battery. It's like actually a phenomenal yeah lead and um we just threw it out yesterday because it was so annoying that it was broken all the time but she would put people in the car and start pushing them down the street and i'd be like that's what

daddy does that's the only thing and it just makes you that, you go, oh, if they don't know these things and there's only one way to get that car down the street, they're going to figure it out. And it makes me really think a lot about how much we challenge no, push the car down the street. Like that's the hard way to do it. That's going to make you stronger and faster. And I don't have to say all those things, but now she's got this dune buggy that goes like Mach four down the street. I'm like, this thing's doing nothing for learning, but it's way cooler. And if we can like, for like getting them out to the soccer field and and

seeing them seeing you do sprints and and things like that i feel like that stuff and having them just around it is insanely important for for just overall development and like exposure to it yeah for sure i'm sure adelaide does the same thing but whenever we go to the park there's always little kids like between maybe four and eight years old having soccer practice or baseball practice or whatever and he just kind of sits around and like stares at them and he's like daddy i don't want to play soccer and i'm like i always feel bad because i'm like man i really do need to get him signed up for soccer. Have you guys talked about doing any sports with her at all yet? No, we did.

We did 12, 13 weeks of gymnastics and then COVID hit. And literally like the Saturday morning that everybody was like, this is real. We were at the gymnastics studio or whatever they call it gym and the teacher was having her jump into the foam pit and we were like i don't think the foam pit in a pandemic is the when was the last time these things all got washed like how much sweat is in here as well just getting soaked up by these kids and uh so uh we've done a bunch of swim lessons but i i think that the like playing with kids obviously

that i think that the bulk of what i really focus on and like just trying to get a a general like physical capacity that that of athleticism is like um a lot of just wrestling and throwing like throwing her onto the bed having her jump off the bed um doing squats basically thrusters like dude body awareness is a really interesting thing that your brain – have you read – wait, hold on. I'm going to lose the name of the dude's book. Shit, we interviewed him. It was Spark. Have you read Spark? Who was the author?

Do you remember? John Rady, Dr. John Rady. I'll check it out. I think it's either Harvard or MIT. He's a super smart dude. He actually worked with Reebok when Reebok was in CrossFit pretty deep in the beginning. But he's a neuros books on this, is that our prefrontal cortex and the, gosh, what's the deep brain? The monkey brain is connected by, holy crap, I shouldn't have brought this up without remembering all these fun. BDNF.

And BDNF is the protein inside your brain that connects the two so that old brain and new brain can communicate with each other. The only way, I shouldn't say the only way, the most optimal way to get your brain to work more efficiently is through movement. And that BDNF is activated and connects your old brain with your new brain in a way that if you are waking up and go for a run or lift weights or just do something, that you just develop the ability to problem solve at a much higher speed. And over time time you become much smarter over all of the testing that they've done over the years to prove this and there's a school in san diego because pe is like pe is going to be dead like i don't even know if kids have pe

or how much recess time they get but there's's a school in San Diego called Spark that does all of this testing on kids. And there's like all their standardized test scores and all this stuff is like very above average just because they emphasize physical activity. But scientifically, when they go into the lab to test this stuff, like they know the protein in your brain that makes you smart. They know that that protein is what connects your old brain and your new brain together. And they believe that physical capacity, your ability to move, understanding where your body is in space is actually the like reason we have a brain to problem solve while we move and run and make sense evolutionarily yeah and i think that's why gymnastics is so important at such a young age because most people don't understand movement at all but but that's a very long way to ask, what is your physical activity and physical relationship with your kids?

Are you rough with them? I have gone through a period over the last six months where Bryson and I roughhouse a bit, but Kim has asked me recently to dial it back because he treats her the same way that he treats me he doesn't distinguish between the two and um he's like really rough with me and like there's a lot of me trying to like block his his attacks on me um like half of our wrestling is just me blocking him and pushing him over right and yeah and so so he does the same thing to kim but she's not

prepared like me and she doesn't want to be attacked yeah um he just thinks it's normal he just thinks it's what you do with adults because that's what he's been exposed to yeah um and so it's really kind of unacceptable and like we've had conversations with him and tried to explain to him that that you know mom is different than dad and he does the same thing with vivi dude like like she'll be walking and he'll just arm bar her like he'll just put his arm on just like boom and she just like crumbles to the ground um cheap shots so like he has like he has like a bit of this innate aggression inside of him so i think that you know it might be different if adelaide were a boy i don't really know it might just be a bryson thing yeah um but for whatever reason like i kind of need to temper

back some of that so the way that we try to to use that energy now um is we race we go outside and we run he's obsessed with his scooter now and the kid is like a savage on his scooter he there's a course around one of the parks that we're at that has like really sharp left and right turns like you know any race course would yeah he can take those turns on his scooter and like you know lean into it and like yeah this is really impressive to watch him maneuver that thing um so that's kind of like his main physical outlet at the moment and then you know we'll go kick the soccer ball around we throw frisbees and run after them um things like that i intentionally try to raise adeline in a very rough way like i think do you do it with vivi at all so a little bit but the thing is that like bryson does it so much with her that she's really, really tough already.

So I don't really need to do it. I mean, she's constantly on fight or flight response anytime her brother's around. He'll run at her sometimes, and she'll just go sit down and go like this because she knows he's coming. She's like hunkering down for the attack. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, I, like internally, I'm like terrified in a way of Adelaide. Like, I feel like society, at any point in time, you can take yourself and put yourself in the box. But the goal, as we've learned as being entrepreneurs

and trying to make it in this industry as long as we have and all this stuff is like, the goal really is to live outside the box as long as you possibly can. Because at any point, if things go really bad, you could jump in the box and go play for a little while and then hopefully break out again. But it's a real struggle to stay out of the box. And I don't want her to have the – I don't want her to be raised like a girl and buying into girl things.

I want her to be raised in a physical way that she knows she can handle herself in that in that manner knowing that at any point in time she could go back in the box and go play dolls forever if she wanted to like that that's a really easy thing it's not that we don't play dolls it's just uh when i am around her we have a very physical – many very physical interactions, whether it's like throwing her on the bed or like jumping and catching and just – it freaks my in-laws out a lot. Especially when she was a kid, like I used to – when she was like an infant and was learning how to crawl, she'd get like all the way across the room to get to her toy. And I would just pull her all the way back. Sorry, you don't get the prize today. And I would spend a lot of time, like not so far off the ground. But, you know, like holding her up.

And I never just, I feel like I understand how core strength works. I understand how stability works and that was like the key thing for me and raising her at the very very young age was like I just need whatever I can do to create stability in her body that will then be able to just build out forever and who knows she's going to turn into a whatever athlete. I don't really care. But laying the foundation of stability and core strength was quintessential to me, even when she was crawling. Did you think about things like that when they came out? Maybe not to the extent that you did. on the fact though that i think that building physical strength and having like a little bit of that aggression brings or breathes a confidence that that is is long lasting and i think that it expands to the emotional and the mental as well and it'll allow her to you know better handle

tough situations that arise throughout how do you you deal with Bryson being physical though? Like it, it, it, it plays into the same question of like, at any point, it's, it's easier to come back to the mean or regress to the mean versus teach him to play at his full capacity at all times. Like you can always try to dial it down and as he matures he'll understand where right is or normal is but do you when he's being over aggressive how do you do you are you like maybe i should let him go let him let him practice this a little bit yeah i do when it's he and i yeah um when it comes to when it comes to i mean when it comes to his sister and

his mom it's uh it's a bit of a different issue because they're just i don't want to use the word fragile because they're not fragile they're strong yeah they're they're just different haired yeah yeah exactly and you know it's it's also different with bryson i think there's like a lot of a lot of contrast in our situations, because I don't know if you remember, but when Bryson was like 18 months to 24 months, he went through a hitting stage where he would be at the park, and he would be hitting every kid that that he came across, to the point that we just didn't want to even take him to the park anymore, because it creates that awkward interaction with the other kids parents and like that whole thing so so he's always kind of had a propensity toward the side of being aggressive and physical so it's never really been something that i've had to to work to implement yeah have you taken him to like i don't know when this is you're even allowed to start this but like jujitsu class or anything like that no we haven't done any of that i mean right now i'm his punching bag and i just kind of like i'll push him over when he gets too aggressive and hey you hurt me you push me over i'm like what are you trying to do to me dude all right you

think this only goes one way you're gonna lose sometimes bud um yeah it's uh i we've had to do that with Adelaide a little bit, and I know it's my fault, but I'm very hesitant to, I'm like super hesitant to actually say calm down. I let mom say calm down way more than I do. Like, my bandwidth for her physicality to other kids is much higher like it needs to there needs to be like tears before i intervene or another parent around where i go well they probably they probably don't like this too much um but yeah i don't know it's an interesting thing because i i have you noticed your perception of raising a boy versus raising a girl towards that? Yeah. I mean, Vivi's not old enough for me to really know yet. I know that she was like this precious little sweetheart girl when she was younger.

It's weird saying that when she's 16 months old. But now she's like – She lost it all. It's all gone. She's a hoss now, man. And I think that a lot of it has been ingrained from the way that Bryson treats her. So I think that out of necessity, she's become more aggressive just as a means of like being able to defend herself and like put up with his torture. So so yeah it's all very different i don't exactly know i think this we should totally revisit this conversation with bivy's like adelaide's age now and she's like three and see how she is at that point because it really is interesting to see like such big contrast between like you're kind of promoting this aggressive

atmosphere and it might be because you have a girl or it might just be the same even if you didn't and then for me i feel like i'm having to be on the other side of it and almost like pull it back a little bit yeah i i um well and it's also really interesting because i see doug's kids and doug's like comes from an m fighting background, like actually in the octagon, not just practicing at the jujitsu studio. So his kids grow up in a manner where you just – you're not allowed to just go wrestle. You have to do it the right way. And in order to do it the right way, you might break someone's arm. Not that they break anyone's arms but like they're being taught the

right way to go about really aggressive things and it's it's like a standard conversation in their house like his six-year-old knows how to arm bar people that's gnarly he has all boys right three of them that's like freaking wwe match every night you hope it's wwe and not a real jujitsu battle in there like someone's gonna get hurt for real i wonder what mom thinks about that whole situation she's just so outnumbered she probably sits up in a room like god i hope they're okay like why didn't i have a daughter how did this happen um i think that yeah i don't know what's popping out of ashton in four weeks. And it's going to be really interesting if it is a boy just because I'm so interested to see what the just innate differences are and how boys and girls just the perceptions that, you know, like no matter what I do, like it would be so rad or like in some utopian world where you're like lifting weights with your kid at three years old and they just have this projected thing because you love it and they love it and it forever is – It's their future.

Yeah, it's like meant to be. Yeah. It's totally not true. But also like I'm not teaching her how to do tea parties, but she loves doing tea parties. Where the hell does that come from? Right. Where does that come from? Who. Where does that come from? Who did the first tea party with her?

I don't know. The internet did? It might have been Ashton's mom last year, and now all of a sudden she found the tea party kit, and we do tea parties every night. And I'm like, she's hosting tea parties outside of our house. I'm like, where did this come from? like she's pouring water and all the stuff i'm like i only teach you how to be physical that's all i know how did you get to the tea party yeah like you said

it's innate it's easy to go back in the box like yeah because that's kind of where you like where society wants you to be so you know you almost have to fight a little bit harder if you want to be outside that box yeah um i brought i wanted to talk to you specifically about how you're going to teach kids how to build muscle when when do you think you're going to want to like uh actually start i don't know if like training with them or coaching them or anything that is like the right terminology but um when they when you i could compare it to like mash's kids you see mash's kids doing clean and jerks yeah for sure and it looks pretty good like when when do you think is like the rights the the right first step in in getting them to actually understand lifting weights? Where do you start the program on day zero of zero? Yeah, I think that I need them. I, at least with Bryson,

I'm going to need him to come to me and express desire because he's shown a tendency to be like flaky with things already. And, you know, we haven't even put him in sports yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if we put him in sports. And then like a later he's like oh i don't actually want to do this um so i think with him like i it's not something that i can i can bring up like he sees it he catches me doing it he knows five days a week i'm down in there for an hour and a half like he's fully aware of that so awesome yeah he um so i think too, and this is another piece of kind of like movement in general, but you know, I see MASH's kids doing, doing cleans and there's like a side of me that's like, wow, that's so dope. They're getting explosive at such a young age and they're learning movement

and how to create energy and all these different things. And then there's another side of me that looks at that and it's like, you know know one of my biggest regrets going through crossfit in the early days was that i put so much priority on egotistical numbers yeah and it didn't matter if i had knee valgus or if my hips shot up and I rounded my back and went reflection on a deadlift or like anything like that, like none of that mattered because I was chasing numbers and, and I don't want that for him, man. I want him, like, I see mash his kids and the reason I brought that up is because he'll catch

the squat and he'll go into knee valgus when he comes up and he's fucking five, like, or whatever, whatever he is like totally move perfectly i get it i'm not hating on his kid he's got loose joints still right right right but i would much rather start at like the ground level and be like look i know you can sit in a perfect squat because you do that shit all the time so we're going to start by standing up and sitting down and we're going to do this 10 or 20 times and you're gonna do it perfectly um you're going to learn to hold a plank and then you're going to learn to hover and hold the bottom of a pushup with good form. Your elbows aren't going to go out like a T and you're not going to internally rotate. So I think starting

with movement patterns and exercise execution is in my mind, what's going to set the base for health and longevity. Because any of the injuries that I have, and I don't have very many considering I've been training 24 years, I have very, very few injuries, but anything that I do have is, is from trying to move weight from point A to point B and not paying attention to the form as much. Yeah. Doing it for a number or to beat somebody else. Yeah. Um, yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that there's, I think that that's like, it almost goes back to like, what's in the box and how long can you stay out of it? a much more optimal place to teach from and do things right for the long term than the very, very easy thing to say, okay, now it's time to go. Now it matters. You're 17 years old. You've only got six years to go be a savage. The juice is flowing, dude. Go. Because you know that's going to happen. That's like a stage of life I like I think

what you said about like I if there was a thing that I wish I could go back to it's because you're so mature now I don't mean that to be a wise ass but you're super mature like you're an adult you have you have real you have a value set that changes throughout your life of now you're in this kingdom phase where you've already been the warrior you've already got the girl you've already built the business you've already got these these boxes that you were interested in checking um and you now are in the protector mode where you go to the suburbs and get your yard and you like want to play on you know like you you build space so that you can protect your family which is the most important thing um but we have to go through that warrior phase so the longer you can

keep people away from that box of pushing numbers and pushing intensity and pushing all of that stuff it's like you have a a longer ramp to be able to create really good movement patterns, knowing that at some point he's going to be 22. Like at some point he's going to, he's going to go, all right, dad, I get it. I'm going to go, I'm going to go be a monster. Right. But he'll have the base. Like that really, I think, the goal for me is to like how big of a base can I create before I have no control. Yeah, because I mean if you set like – like my basketball coach used to say, practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

It's really, really hard to break bad habits if you practice poorly you're gonna play poorly and you're gonna have to break these bad habits that you have and i don't think that's something that we should need to do if we just learned the proper way to begin with yeah and dude how many times have we had to go back and watch video and go, oh, I suck. I got to go back and do the thing, and now I'm going backwards when I'm supposed to be going forward. That's like a big part of it. I mean even like using the example of snatching, man. Like I snatched 255 at one one point and I spent so long.

The number is so crazy to me. Ridiculous. Right. But I spent, I always in my head, I was like, if I'm not snatching at least two 25 on a daily basis, what's the point. Right. So I would sit there sometimes and like, I'd be having a bad day. And it would be like eight snatches at two 25 and I make like three of them. Yeah. And, and, and I feel awful about it. And what I really

should have done was just gone down to like 185 or 205 and done perfect reps. And it's not like I'm weaker because I use less weight. In fact, what I'm probably doing is creating better motor patterns that are then going to help me do better at higher weights. So these are all kind of like lessons that we know and we learned, and these are the things that we need to pass on and maybe he acknowledges them and he learns from them and maybe he has to learn the hard way and knowing my kid he'll probably learn the hard way i'm gonna learn the hard way i think also and we can wrap up uh i going all the way back to the beginning of this talking about uh training barefoot it's one of the things that i am the most uh interested really in in learning right now is shedding as much as i possibly can

and just doing the most basic version of everything in that there's no olympic lifting shoes there's no shoes at all there's i i i'm not worried about bench pressing i want to do like really good full range of motion push-ups um like the further i get away from being the a performance thing i feel like i i shed i've shed all of the extra stuff that I do and I try to go back to like what is like the most fundamental basic thing that I can do to stay healthy and strong for a really long time and that that question just it it makes it for me a very simple piece because I completely agree that like so many things we did when we were competing and pushing and doing that as hard as we could like i wasn't i was banged up all the time i still have

a weird hip i still could have a bad knee i still have a bad ankle like i remember when i fucking shattered my toe and then yeah you dropped a snatch on it yeah like competed at regionals three weeks later or something it's like all those things are still there but by shedding everything you get to go back and rewire all the movement patterns and i feel like that that's almost like the big goal i feel fine i don't feel injured but i still only want to go back and like rewire and rewire and make those better and better. And then when I feel really good, then I can go lift weights. Perfect. Just really cool. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you only cleaned perfectly all the time, then you would never do like a sloppy 315 pound clean. You would just not clean it.

You would just stop at whatever weight you could do perfectly, and your body would thank you for it. I mean, movement is the basis of everything. So that's where I start with the kids for sure is going to be just establishing movement that makes sense, that will set them up for life. Do you ever deadlift 315 and go, how the fuck did I clean that? Yes, every time I deadlift 315. Yes, every time. You go, wait wait a second i put that over my head no way how i didn't put that over my head by the way i only cleaned it i only did it once

once or twice yeah had to seen it was in the house what a dude right when you got married there you got to did he that's right that's Ashton told me. I've seen no public... I've only seen pictures. Now he's skinny, man. Different dude. He's super skinny. He is super skinny. I barely recognized him. That Super Bowl commercial, I barely recognized him.

I had to text you. I was like, look at this little ass dude. Look at this little ass dude. Probably weighs like 240. I want to know what his maxes are now i wonder if he's gonna have kids yeah when we were with him i feel like he he didn't really seem like that was his future he didn't really like talk about it at all in that way um i'll never forget that plane ride when we were talking about kids and I was still like really up in the air if I even wanted to get married or have kids, even though I was like dating Ashton at the time. Uh, I really didn't know if I wanted to have kids at all. And you were like really into it. You were like, I definitely want to do it. And his response to both of us was, you can never, it was like, you can never undo it. And you can't.

And he was like, I'm not willing to trade my career for other, basically other people right now. It's an opportunity cost. Yeah. Yeah. And that was like, I actually like specifically remember that where he was like, it was like very adamant and then even more so on the show, dude, remember when they came in and did you watch the show that our gym, him and Nicole were sitting next to each other. We were like training with them. Yeah.

And I remember them sitting there and then i was going back and watching the show and they were having a conversation about freezing her eggs in our gym and i wanted to be like where the i was like right there i don't remember that happening i don't remember any of that like how did they do that there was like a storyline it was scripted i mean the whole thing was scripted all of it we lifted with him that day while they filmed us for like two hours, and we didn't get a single lift in the segment of that show. And they were there for one segment of the show. Yeah, 45 seconds or a minute or something, just so they could talk about her eggs.

Just so they could set up the scene where they went to go get food afterwards to carry on the fight. Yep. Hollywood. They were there for like two hours that day for a minute of film i know brutal dude tell the people if they want your kid program yeah we don't have kids training kids evolved kids right um evolved training systems.com brian borstein on the gram and uh i now do the podcast thing so if you guys haven't seen i have a uh i have a microphone sweet microphone yeah eat train prosper is the podcast we um we focus on hypertrophy and optimizing body composition so it's a little bit nuanced but that's what we focus on these days did you listen to the show

we just put out with striker and galpin have not yet it's on my downloaded episodes yeah it's pretty solid love those two guys straker so rad his life i'm really glad his life is one of my favorites to watch the the travel around the world man if only i didn't have kids i would be doing that too do you want to i every time i talk to him first off it's so rad that we get to talk to Straker. Just of all the people from the gym, that he's still someone that we get to talk to is so rad. Every time I see him and Jenny post a picture – oh, I have to tell another story too about J-Law. This is such a bad podcast. This just went like super inside.

Someone's still going. I'm sorry. These are our friends. I see them and I go, oh, like everything they write, I'm like, oh, you don't have kids. Got it. You're like canoeing in Austin. Yeah. You don't have kids.

I get it. Um, from the nutrition standpoint, I texted J-Law, or Ashton texted J-Law, and this is our old acupuncturist from San Diego. And we were talking about food with Adelaide, eat organ meat and – what was the other one? Organ meat and bone marrow. I said, J-Law, you don't know shit about kids, and you should never talk about them ever until you have one because the highest quality thing that i can try to get down my kitchen right now is prosciutto chicken nuggets and hopefully an egg in the morning yep that's where we are too and string cheese i consider that a protein endless spring we could eat string cheese with paw patrol on it because it's got enough protein to get to 20 grams a day and that's all i care about yep no totally that's really funny um jay law still follows my programs and she's referred me a couple people but that is that

that is pretty absurd and you know my brother actually does feed his daughter organ meats so jay law would be really proud. They need to connect. God, that's hysterical. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged. Get over to barbellshrugged.com forward slash diesel dad. All the busy dads getting strong, lean, and athletic without sacrifice in family, fatherhood, or fitness.

And if you are in Walmart, San Diego, Palm Springs, Vegas, or LA, we're in the pharmacy. Three programs on the shelf. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.