Barbell Shrugged - The Bledsoe Show: The Brand X Method: Fitness For Future Generations And Coaching Kids with Jeff and Mikki Martin - #121

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

In 2004, Jeff and Mikki Martin (@thebrandxmethod) imagined a better future for youth and began working toward that future by developing the original strength-and-conditioning program specifically designed for kids. Almost 15 years later, they continue to do what’s best for kids on a daily basis with The Brand X Method™, the world leader in youth fitness.   The Martins teach and speak all over the world; sit on the boards of fitness industry-leading organizations such as StandUp Kids and TeenLIFT; and are partnering with OPEX Fitness, the International Functional Fitness Federation, and Kerri Walsh’s p1440. They recently launched the first seminar in their new The Art of Growing Up Strong ™ live seminar series. The Brand X Method is currently represented worldwide by dozens of official Training Centers.   With decades of collective coaching experience between them in fitness and self-defense, the Martins have developed a method for optimal youth athletic development that combines state-of-the-art movement skill training with classic principles of strength training, physical literacy, and play. To deliver this program effectively to the most kids, the Martins created the cutting-edge Brand X Professional Youth Coach Certification designed to provide coaches with the knowledge, tools, and passion to build formidable humans.   In this episode we talk about what the lack of play is doing to physical literacy, the spectrum of kids fitness, the Brand X ethos, why you can’t express what you don’t possess, how to get into coaching kids, and much more.   Enjoy! -Mike   Episode Breakdown:   ⚡️0-10: The misconception around what parents will pay for a good fitness program and what the lack of play is doing to the landscape of physical literacy ⚡️11-20: The spectrum of kids fitness experience and the Brand X ethos ⚡️21-30: You can’t express what you don’t possess and how lack of understanding this is hurting kids ⚡️31-40: The basic primal movement patterns used to teach kids fitness and teaching kids how to interact with the world ⚡️ 41-50: How to approach the nutrition conversation with kids and why we need parents to stop the “diet” conversation ⚡️51-59: How to get into coaching kids, asking why you want to work with this population, and the PYCC program   --------------------------------------------------- Show notes: https://shruggedcollective.com/tbs-brandxmethod --------------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @sunlighten:www.sunlighten.com "ShruggedCollective" for $200 off + free shipping     ► Travel thru Europe with us on the  Shrugged Voyage, more info here: https://www.theshruggedvoyage.com/ ► What is the Shrugged Collective?  Click below for more info: https://youtu.be/iUELlwmn57o ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

I don't have enough time. I'm tired. My energy is low. These are common phrases that used to come out of my mouth. It's as if time and energy are mysterious qualities that we've yet to master. So mysterious that we think by focusing on both time and energy that we're going to get better at it. Truth is, the more we focus on managing or trying to get more of both, the more we seem to lose in the long run. This is one of those things that you get better at by focusing somewhere else. I got better with both time and energy when I started paying attention to my attention. Have you noticed that some days are longer than others?

And most people report that the days are longer than others and most people report that the days seem shorter as they age that's because we're trying to pay attention to too many things all time is not created equal it is dictated by our attention the more we can focus our attention in a singular direction for a longer period of time the more effective we will be at what we're working on. We get it done faster and the results are better. If you're focusing your attention in a singular direction, you now have to make choices and

create priorities. It's a very adult thing to do. We have limited time on this planet and that's a gift. That realization can help you create priorities. We are limited on attention and time. We have to find what we want to make important. Slow time down by focusing your attention in a single direction. Still don't have energy?

Things we shouldn't be focusing on zap our energy. I track my energy throughout each day. That thing that drains me day after day, time to get rid of it. Maybe it's not a task. Maybe it's a person. By the way, don't throw your kids out. I cultivate my time and energy. I track where my attention is going and when my attention is going somewhere that is sucking the life out of me, it's time to make a change. It's a sign. We get to learn to listen to the signal. You can cultivate your time and energy by practicing where you put your attention and tracking how you feel when your attention is on certain things. The choices you make with the information you gather is how you cultivate. Now from our sponsors. I just got one of the coolest toys this week. My first sauna.

It's infrared. Top of the line and it's beautiful. If you're watching my Instagram, then you already know what's going on. The research is pouring in about all the benefits of heat therapy and infrared specifically. It just really takes the cake. I'm looking most forward to the recovery aspect. Hopping in the sauna is basically a time machine that helps you recover from your last training session faster so you can get back in and train with more intensity sooner. Sunlighten is a company that is making the best saunas around. Go check them out at sunlighten.com

and use the code SHRUDDOLLECTIVE to save $200 on your order plus free shipping. They'll drop it right where you want it and it assembles easily. Again, that's sunlighten.com and the code is SHRUGCOLLECTIVE to save $200 plus free shipping. And now, another one of my favorite topics, it's the green juice. You want more of that in your life. I started drinking Organifi a couple years ago and it changed the game. Getting greens in first thing in the morning

helps you make better decisions the rest of your day. It does for me anyway. It's a win right from the beginning. They put a lot of care into making the product super good for you and super tasty. That's rare. Go over to Organifi.com slash shrug to save 20% on your order today. Again, that's Organifi.com slash shrug.

Now we dig into training youth. The folks from Brand X, Jeff, Mickey, and Keegan Martin joined me today to discuss how training kids is different and, well, different from adults anyway, and what kind of coach it takes to make it happen. This is such an important topic because we have an opportunity to develop the next generation of humans properly to run the next iteration of our existence. Enjoy the show. All right, so how many kids do you guys have? Four. Four.

We got one of them here. Yep, one of them here. And you were saying just a minute ago, he's the crash test dummy? There were a few crash test dummies. Our three youngest had the benefit of experimentation, which does lead to adaptation. So I think we're good. Yeah.

You guys call it that, right? Like the benefit of adaptation, but it just got better as we got the younger went down the line. So my younger brother, he got the best, got the best. Yeah.

He got the best crash test. Yeah. How long have you been training kids? Well, my first job out of high school was a coach for swimming and water polo. So 40 years. 40 years. 40 years. 40 years.

Okay. In functional fitness, really going on 20 now. Yeah. And how long have you guys been Brand X? 20 years. 20 years. Yeah. Okay.

We opened a martial arts gym in 1999. Okay. And you guys went into the CrossFit kids for a while. You were the founders of that? No. No. We were the developers of that? No. No. We were the developers of it. Okay.

According to what we can say. Gotcha, gotcha. So that came and went. And I bring that up because my wife went through the program because there was a point when we were running our gym that we thought about running a kids program.

And then we did not. Yep. So what are the when we were talking before we hopped on the mics we were talking about how a lot of times people have an idea of how to train or experience how to train adults and then they want to bring that down to kids and uh y'all were saying you know it just doesn't work like that. And I don't have kids and I don't train kids. So I really have no experience in this. But I imagine that that's very, very true.

What are some common mistakes that people are making when they're training kids? I think number one is the fact that they see a kid's program as an extra revenue stream rather than actually going into training children with what's best for kids in mind. That's got to be the biggest mistake, right? Behind whatever you're doing to be successful at what you're doing, you've got to have some level of passion to do it. And what ends up happening when you watch people go down that road is it just ends up being a watered-down version of fitness for adults to kids and oftentimes now you see that not even being an optimal way to train adults now applying that watered-down version to kids. Right. So I think it's kind of this, this, this concept that people want to make money, more money off of, uh, you know, a new population and then applying a training system

that's, that's not optimal, even for adults and watering it down to children. I think that's the biggest mistake that people are making. Yeah. There's one mistake I've seen in the business is people offer classes for kids, but they charge less for it. And then I've watched the class and I go, this actually looks way more difficult than training adults. I look at it and go, I'd want to charge more for that, not less. Yeah, it's a hard market for that reason. Yeah. Because people go into it thinking, oh, I'll offer a family rate. But they assume, and probably wrongly, that people will not pay as much for their children's training.

But if you take a look at other programs, gymnastics and any kind of travel baseball or soccer, people will pay a lot to train their children well. And it's really the coach's responsibility to communicate why and how it's so important to train them well and that it has a value. So the problem generally is that the coach presents it or allows it to be presented to adults, to the parents, as an activity. So if you look at an activity, like we have music lessons, and I have dance lessons, and I have this lessons, and it's just an activity. And what we're trying to do with our program, with the Brand X Method, is expand physical capacity, expand physical literacy. Everything that we do helps the kid, helps a child do better at whatever activity they want to do in the future.

So we're the base. And trying to, you know, it's not an activity, it's a necessity. And in this day and age, it is a necessity because kids aren't getting the exposure to movement that they did 20 years ago. They're not playing outside. They're not climbing trees. They're not riding bikes. You have 12 years. Yeah. Strange.

I've had to teach adults. I had to. I didn't have to do anything. But I have chosen to teach adults some pretty basic physical skills. And really what I end up teaching them is, okay, we're going to do these physical skills, we're going to learn them, and then we're going to play. Like, no, let's go climb a tree or go play at the beach or something like that. And I think that is something that's happening as people are becoming way more sedentary at a young age.

And how is that impacting training for kids? I mean, you've been training kids for 20, 40 years. A long time. Have you seen that kids need even more fundamental training than they used to? I think there's two things off of that. One is the lack of fundamental movement patterns. The kids just simply are no longer experiencing it. Just like when we were young, parents said, go outside and play. That's not happening anymore. Screen time isn't a problem because of screen time. It's a problem because of what it takes

away. And it takes away the time that would have been spent playing with your friends or climbing trees or things like that. And we like to think of human movement like as a library. And you just kind of go in and check out a book like I need to shuffle sideways now. So here's my book. Well, kids today have lost the library card. They don't have it. Well, kids today have lost the library card. They don't have it. And we're seeing kids who can't come into the gym who aren't able to do just common things. And then they're trying to apply to sports. And that's what we're seeing arise, you know, injury in sport, in youth sports.

Second there, and really primary, the problem that we're seeing is that there's a lack of play with kids. And it's something Mickey can speak to more eloquently than I can. But there's all kinds of problems coming out of that. You just talked about it. But the idea behind what we're doing isn't to make kids good at being in the gym. That's not something we all want to focus on, right? We want them to be good at stuff outside the gym. That's the focus.

We want them to be whole. Right, and play is essential. And because of the screen time, we're losing that. And what's going on with play that I think that is lack of play. The lack of play is, you've probably seen and read a lot about it because there's so much current talk and research and buzz about what's happening because it's so obvious that kids are not playing in the same way that physical world and the movement problems that we're seeing because of no exposure to basic human movement through play and experimentation and exploration but it's even more comprehensively an issue because there's there's psychosocial development that's now missing so for instance

in the idea of play being voluntary if everybody agrees hey we're going to go play let's go kick the ball together and we don't have a ball we're going to use you. Let's go kick the ball together. And we don't have a ball. We're going to use, you know, a wad of foil or a broken ball we find in a lot. And we're just going to figure it out. We come up with the rules together. If one person doesn't like the rules, if the rules are not equally applied, somebody can quit. So you have to get consensus you have to learn cooperation you have to learn to listen to everybody's opinion there's all kinds of social stuff that's going on there that's so important to development that now we're finding kids are they're anxious and they're depressed and they don't know how to deal with people in real life socially and so there's it's

it's sort of a generational tragedy that's going on and and so there is there is a lot of talk about it but how do we how do we deal with that we throw play in there as much as we can and all of the positive elements that we learn about it how do we incorporate that we just make that it's a cornerstone of the brand X method. Our classes are set up in all those three fundamental things. We prepare, practice, and play. Prepare, come in. You might think of this as a warm-up.

But generally what we're doing is just telling kids, you know, I want you to roll. I want you to handstand walk. I want you to bear crawl. I'm just giving you a bunch of movements. A bunch of movement solutions. It's how to move around in the world, really. And let's get you prepared for movement. And then we come in and we practice a movement.

So we're going to do squats. We're going to practice squats. Then in the play, we'll do some kind of, in the older kids' years, we'll do some kind of workout that you would understand as a workout. But then we break and we play. So I might say to kids, like, here's some light medicine balls, throw them as far as you can, and then, you know, see who can throw them farthest in the five minutes. Well, let's play for them. And I'm not defining for them how to throw the ball. Yeah.

I'm defining for them, throw the ball, throw it as far as you can. They all have to figure that out. That's their movement solution. You know, play with this. Or we'll say, we'll make up a game, one we used to make up, what's called hillbilly basketball, which was a small medicine ball

thrown into an upturned jump box. And there was one rule and one goal. So the goal was get the medicine ball in the basket. And the rule was if it hits the ground, it goes to the other team. That's it. So you guys make up the rules.

You guys decide how you're going to play. Three, two, one, go. Do it. And we're trying to, in the older kids' years, and I can let them talk about the younger kids, but in the older kids' years, provide movement problems, provide opportunities to play and solve those movement or make movement solutions. about the younger kids, but in the older kids' years, provide movement problems, provide opportunities to play and solve those movement or make movement solutions.

And it's become a very different look to what's coming or what we're doing in the gym than we would have done 10 years ago. And what's coming out is really stunning. I think, you know, looking at play, the obvious problem with our society now is that a lot of kids aren't moving, right? But the less obvious to us is the fact that kids might be over applying certain types of movement and overdoing sport, right? So there's kind of two sides to this. You get the kids that come in that are completely sedentary all day. They haven't, they don't do anything other than sit on their phones or play video games. You know, um, they sit in class all day and then you have the kids that

have to go through that. But then at the end of their day, they're playing a single sport, doing the same motion over and over and over again, you know, 365 days out of the year. And so oftentimes what you find is you get a kid who's, who's sedentary most of the day and doesn't play a sport is actually better off sometimes than the athletes now because the athletes have been sitting and then, and then they have bad motor patterns on top of sitting all day. Right. So it's, it's, it's interesting to see, um, how society has kind of shifted that direction. Right. And, and, and people will think, Oh, that athlete is, it's healthier. Well, actually they're, they're setting themselves up for injury.

They have a lot more issues to deal with than the average child now. Yeah. It's a, I grew up in the sixties, long time ago, but, but we had PE teachers and the PE teacher would come and teach us stuff. So we taught, you know, gymnastics, we taught, we were taught a track, But we had PE teachers, and the PE teacher would come and teach us stuff. So we taught gymnastics. We were taught track, how to high jump, how to hurdle, how to throw the discus in fifth and sixth grade. And we had things like square dancing.

Just teach you. There's no thought in those classes about how fit are the kids. It was all introduction to movement, all introduction to play. Let's go and apply these things and let's play with this movement. Then you move kind of into the late 80s, 90s and you see PE kind of going down and being, physical education being pulled out.

And what comes in is ball sports and things like that. And, and sport becomes being defined as fitness and that's becomes problematic. And then you come into 2010 and 2011, 2012, and you see fitness being defined as sport. And then that being pushed down and, and wow, we're just headed this, you know,

careening off this path of what is not, you know, what's not the best way for kids to... To train. To train or to evolve. Or to have a healthy future. Kids need to see movement, to equate to see movement to equate movement and to equate movement as fun because they need to see, they need to, they need to get through high school and do whatever sport they're doing and then go like, well, I want to learn how to rock climb.

I want to learn how to, you know, they want to, they want to have the ability to be able to move from one intriguing physical activity to next to fully express themselves. Yeah. What do you think about, I mean, I have my opinion on this, but people use exercise as punishment. Like, oh, you messed up and now you got to do 50 push-ups or something like that. That's the wrong message.

Yeah. That's the wrong message completely. Well, and there's actually a chemical released in your brain when you exercise voluntarily. It's called BDNF. If you Google search it, that's the only thing that comes up. It's brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And that chemical that's released,

it starts at about two minutes into exercise, and it stays elevated for up to around 40 minutes. But BDNF, what it does is it increases the amount of dendrites on a brain cell, a neuron, and increases neurotransmitter activity. So essentially what it does is it allows brain cells to communicate more effectively and more efficiently from cell to cell, increases the ability to learn. And so when kids play voluntarily or they're having a good time exercising, they're actually increasing their learning capacity. They're not just having a good time and wanting to do the exercise. They're learning and they're learning more effectively, more efficiently than if they

were forced to do something. So from a standpoint of, can I, how, you know, we've always come back to doing what's best for kids. That's, that's the Brandex method, you know, ethos really is, is to do what's best for children. And from looking at it from that standpoint, it only makes sense that we never use exercise as punishment because not only are they going to hate exercise for the rest of their lives and see the exercise that was used as punishment as a punishment but we also can impact them positively outside of just physically we can impact them mentally as well if we do it correctly that's interesting um what you're saying about the bdnf i find that as an adult more I play, the more creativity I have in business

and, and my relationships improve and things like that. And so, um, I noticed that, uh, if I'm not playing as much and I'm working more, all of a sudden my work starts suffering. Yeah. And then that's, that's a red flag usually my wife goes hey you haven't been playing lately oh you're right and then i go do an activity that is completely creative and all of a sudden everything the juices start flowing again yeah so absolutely why wouldn't you want that for children right as they're developing it's compounded with kids yeah yeah but it's important for us but it's not specific to kids in that all those positive benefits are still there for adults. And, in fact, this generation that's lacking play or hitting adulthood and finding they're anxious and tense and feeling just the things are missing.

There's a gentleman named Charlie Hone. There's a lot out there on him who created something called a recess project, which is for adults, just what you're talking about. Oh, cool. Recess project. I want to get involved in that. I like to play. There's the concept of neurons that wire together, fire together. And so if you, you know, talk about exercise as punishment, if you wire that together, then that's what

the kid grows up seeing. If you wire play together, that's what the kid grows up seeing. As an example, I swam through high school and college. I see a pool and all I see is pain. That's all I see. You want to get in the pool? No, because all I'm going to do is swim laps. I can't get in the pool and play. All I can do is swim laps when I get in the pool. And to me, that's what's wired that way. Do we really want kids to see movement in that way? So if you tell a kid, do burpees because you're in trouble,

you're wiring it to the wrong thing. We watch kids and they'll come to a party where active parents and active kids, and they'll make up their own workouts or doing burpees and sprinting and stuff like that. And it's crazy, but somehow they've wired this, this activity to fun and they're playing,

working out. Maybe not the solution we necessarily wanted them to do, but look what they've done. Yeah. Movement is fun. I need to do movement. Right. You know, so it's funny your, your, uh, example of a pool for me, uh, it's, it's that like three, two, one countdown on a clock. You hear like the, it's got the beep, the loud electronic beep. If I hear that beep, every time I'd set it off, even if I was coaching a class, my heart rate just goes... It's going through the room. You trained yourself

to be stressed out. Full panic mode. I'm like, dude, this is going to hurt. I'm coaching a class. The sympathetic nervous system is just going crazy just from the noise. Keegan mentioned the BDNF and one thing about it is just what we're talking about, stress

reduces it. It starts to go away. So we want to keep that out as much as we can. And again, bringing it back to sports and the society moving towards kids have to play a single sport and they're playing it 365 days out of the year. If you take that BDNF and you apply it

then to, we had a conversation earlier with, um, with you about, you know, uh, dads getting overly involved inside a sport or wanting their kids to win, you know, that's a stressful situation now for that kid. And now the sport that they're playing isn't even fun. Right. Right. So now we're training in not only a suboptimal way, but now there's no way that any of those chemical benefits can happen mentally for that kid as well. Yeah. It's crazy. There's research to show if you played,

or some research show if you play multiple sports, you end up being a better athlete overall. But they also look at baseball pitchers and whoever threw the most balls ends up making it to the majors. But they're also going to end up with surgeries along the way and all sorts of stuff. Now, what do you think about, I mean,

I remember growing up and playing sports and thinking, I'm going to the pros. Like, what are you? I think that's children and dreams. And that's how they look at goals. But I also see with parents where the parents are like putting so much emphasis. Like why is a parent wanting their kid to go play at a college or whatever? And that's okay.

I mean there's nothing wrong with it. But it seems like there's a lot more people encouraging – wanting their kids to do that than there are kids making it that far. What's up with the – do you guys see like there's this something that's inappropriate that's happening or there's like this overemphasis on competition? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's an overemphasis on competition. I think that's what our society sees as fitness and sport in general, right? Um, now it's kind of shifted over the last 10 years to, you know, fitness itself being a sport. Um, I think that, that there is a huge push towards, you know, kids having to make it to the next level. And, you know, it's interesting that you said, you know, uh, there's a correlation, direct correlation between the number of balls that were

thrown by a kid and, um, how well they do in their baseball career, correct? Like something along those lines. Well, in the last 10 years, if you look at the increase in Tommy John surgery for young men, kids under 18, it's increased by 500%. 10 years. That's wild. Right? And what's even crazier than that is parents are preemptively giving their kids Tommy John surgery. They're having them go under the knife when they don't even need it so that their arms are stronger so that they can continue to throw. So it's an injury. That's insane. So you ask if it's inappropriate.

Yeah, it's inappropriate, right? And again, go back to the ethos of the Brand X method. That's not what's right for a inappropriate, right? And again, go back to the ethos of the Brand X method. That's not what's right for a kid, right? It's definitely not what's best for them with a kind of whole view. It's so myopic. All I care about is that one thing. All I want them to care about is that one thing. We don't believe in that.

But we do support sport. Oh, absolutely. I think, but we do support sport. Oh, absolutely. we think sports great. We just think that there's a, you know, there, there needs to be a base.

You can't express what you don't possess. So if you're not strong, you can't, you know, how can you play football if you're not strong? You know, there's a, you gotta have that base first.

You've got to be able to move well first. You know, you've got to have that base first. You've got to be able to move well first. You know, there's a rise in the ACL injuries in young ladies playing soccer. It's huge. It's along the same lines as Tommy John surgery. Those are, you know, ACL injury, Tommy John surgery are catastrophic injuries. You know, they shouldn't be something that people look at as, well, it's just part of the sport. It's just something that happens. That shouldn't be something that people look at as, well, it's just part of the sport. It's just something that happens. That shouldn't be.

You know, broken bones because you fell out of a tree, that stuff happens, right? It shouldn't be that you're driving into a high school and you see three girls getting out of a car, and one plays volleyball, two play soccer, and they all three have crutches because they have ACL surgeries. That's coming because they're not strong enough to withstand the rigors of the demands of the sport they're playing and because they don't move well. And so we have to fix...

It's threefold, really. Right. Like it's mobility issues, it's motor patterns, it's lack of strength. Right. When you're... I know you're training different age groups differently, but maybe we could walk through some of it kids, like my dad was saying, you can't express what you can't, what you don't possess, right? There's certain physiological markers that

indicate when a child is ready for certain modalities of training. And until the 12 to 18 year old range, they don't possess about 50 or more percent of those modalities of training. They can't actually even do them correctly, right? If you tell a child who's three years old to sprint, they only actually have one speed, right? They actually can only express an alactic or a steady state type training, right? Three to eight years old, we call that our explore group. They're all steady state. They've got one speed. It's like a little tap, right? They could run fast. They can't sprint. They can't sprint. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. And then you look, you know, up just slightly from that

eight to 11, eight to 12 years old. That's our, that's our express group. And, uh, that group has that, that steady state, right. But they're kind of learning gears. They're learning how to push the limit and, and, and, and start to develop that sprint. So we start to do something like an interval type training with them. Um, but the intervals are, are, are simple. We don't include, um, weightlifting movements inside of those intervals. It's all, uh, gymnastics or self-loaded movement and it's all cyclical. So, you know, um, like monostructural type movement, running, rowing, skiing, you know, double unders, um, just moving. Um, that's what their intervals look like. And then when you get to that 12 to 18 group, that's when you really start to see them be able to express, you know, different modalities of,

of training. Um, and you'll see once you hit that, that, that 12 to 18 group, that's our Excel group. Um, like I said, that's all covered really, really in depth inside of the PYCC, but to give you kind of an idea of the age groups that we're dealing with and physiologically what happens, you know, they can't express certain contractions until they hit that that that older group anyway um so you know we give the example of making a six-year-old um compete in the workout of the day where they're doing you know thrusters and box jumps it makes no sense as a training tool it doesn't it doesn't make any sense what about uh string training? When is it okay for a kid

to be doing one rep maxes? That's not training, that's competition. That's competition. One rep max is a way of testing strength, right?

Not developing it. I'll let you answer the question, but we have some pretty good backing here on strength training. So our little gym in Ramona, California, we had over 100 state and national powerlifting records with teens and kids. Down to eight-year-olds. Yeah.

The truth is that, again, what Keegan is talking about, and I'll let him talk more is that like they can't express it. So you're talking about an eight year old. Like if I said to Keegan, I want you to go pull one rep max, pull 600 plus. And then I said to him, okay, rest a minute, do it again. That's a non-starter, right? Right. Right. Cause he's truly expressing a one rep max.

You go to an eight year old and go, okay, go over there, lift that kettlebell. They lift that kettlebell. And then they go, oh, I lift it up. And that's heavy. Now try the next heaviest one. They can't lift it. You go, okay, go back to the other one, lift it. They lift it back up because they can't truly express that.

Yeah. So you want to talk about how kids get stronger and that kind of thing. I mean, if you're talking about what age do we put them on a barbell, right? I think that's different than when they can actually truly express it, right? So that's kind of that difference. Eight years old is when we start really working with kids on working with a barbell. We start to develop the motor patterns first. So the kids who are eight years old

coming into a weightlifting type class have always been inside of our S&C classes before. They've always had coaching prior to coming into these classes. Why? Because we need to make sure that they're able to understand and apply coaching cues. They're able to work hard, right? And they're able to understand and apply coaching cues. They're able to work hard, right? And they're able to hold attention, which for an eight-year-old is really rare, right? It's almost impossible to find an eight-year-old that can pay attention

through a set of 20 back squats. Or a 28-year-old. Right, yeah, exactly. So asking, that's a big ask, right. For, for an eight-year-old. So, um, the eight-year-olds that we have had inside of weightlifting classes, that's rare, very rare. Um, but eight years old is when we start to lay the foundation. Um, we start to work on gross motor patterns, you know, the ability to hinge, uh, correctly, keep a neutral spine from head to hip, the ability to externally rotate the femur at the hip, um, the ability

to drive the big toe and the heel into the ground evenly and press through the entire foot, right? Just gross motor pattern type skills. Uh, we give them a small barbell just as like a little carrot for their hard work, you know, and then we have some giant, um, plastic, like five pound plates that we put on every once in a while, like a pound barbell so it ends up being you know 20 pounds at their their top end um but that's that's that's really just introducing them to the concepts of how to move the weight yeah and it's setting them up for success to when when they do get to the age where they can express it their movement's perfect because they've done thousands of reps perfectly, right? We just hone the motor pattern, hone in on making sure movement's perfect so that the time that they can express it, they're ready.

But we also take into consideration in that age group. We also take into consideration in that age group that they are that age group. So what that means is can they think about, I'm going to work hard for a five-week cycle? And the truth is, no. Of course not. That's a long time for an eight-year-old. Yeah, they're eight.

Half their life. So we're going to do a four-week cycle. And on the fifth week, we're going to play. But we're going to play a little differently. We're going to have a little bit of load involved in the play. So they don't have to rest because they're they're not they're not taxed neurologically but they have to play or they're not coming back after the fifth week what does it look like very specific way of keeping them in um loaded play would be something

like you got a bunch of old bumper plates you know those things crack in the middle and those things are frisbees. You just stack them. First they jump over it, then they chuck the top one as far as they can. They go to the back of the line. Next kid jumps over it or jumps on it or however you want to arrange that. Throw the frisbee. Or you can take hula hoops, put some light kettlebells, light dumbbells, ab mats, pile some stuff in there, and they've got to switch the stuff from hula hoop to hula hoop. but they've got to do it with good form. They've got to pick it up in a good deadlift

position. They've got to carry with their shoulders in the right position. So we work on movement skills, you know, what do safe shoulders look like? How do we do these things? We have to make sure that they have all the base, but very importantly in that young set the only way we can keep them in there and engage is to allow for that psychosocial need to develop the right way keegan talked about expression earlier what they can express another thing to look at is you know how do the how do kids get stronger and young kids pre-adolescent kids don't get stronger like adults do. They get stronger from neuromuscular adaption. So loading them up is irresponsible. It's irresponsible to be doing that.

And you're just exposing them to risk and with little or no benefit. So why do that? You know, teach them the movement patterns like Keegan said. Make that rock solid and you have these kids who are coming into their peak height and weight velocity and all of a sudden you go like, okay, now it's time to load them up and these kids just explode.

All of a sudden, they're lifting tremendous amounts and it's all perfect. And they've also been trained that when something goes wrong, they put all perfect. And they've also been trained that when something goes wrong, they put it down because, you know, so, and that is,

you know, phenomenal. When you watch a kid start to deadlift something and they go like, Oh, I'm feeling a little something go wrong. They just put the bar down. It's not that they couldn't have lifted it poorly. They just don't want to lift it poorly.

Right. You know, what about, um, are you guys doing any working with a lot of rotational movements, lateral movements? You mentioned a little bit of that earlier. I think that a lot of coaches that listen to this probably don't have a lot of that in the training, even for adults. How do you implement that with kids? And is there a point? And it sounds like up until a certain age, it's mostly play, and it starts becoming more structured over time. How do you structure some of that other movement? That's true, yes.

It is a lot of play. We want to put play into all that we're doing, yet we are a movement program. We want to make sure we cover all the movements. We want them to hinge, to push, to pull. We want them to learn jumping. We're going to use pressing. So we have basic primal motor movement patterns that we're cycling in. And we do it in a fun way, maybe animal walks.

But then we're going to get up on boxes. We're going to press objects. We're going to carry objects. But we We're going to press objects. We're going to carry objects. But we're always going to cycle some fun in there. The question was about core work, rotational and anti-rotational stuff, and I think Keegan was

ready to answer that. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, well, going back to those primal movement patterns, right, like throwing, gliding, punching, kicking, flipping, all of those things we include inside of the program, but you're absolutely right. It starts with more just movement solutions,

how to interact with your world, right? Because life happens in 360 degrees. It doesn't happen straight up and down like most people train. If you look at a normal functional fitness training program, it's box jumps, box jumps, muscle ups, toes to bar thrusters, snatches, clean and jerks, uh, double unders, everything is happening straight up and down. And there's nothing that happens side to side. There's nothing that happens, um, forward and backwards, right? It's all straight up and down. Why? Because that's really easy to measure power output that way it's not easy to measure the power output on throwing a ball 30 30 meters yeah which if you take a look back at uh one of my favorite examples if you take a look back at the crossfit games

right a past champion failed to throw a ball 30 meters three times yeah right and then and he was he was crowned fittest man on earth a few years prior. Yeah. Like that's, that's not fitness, right? Um, we want kids to be able to move and interact with their environment, whatever environment they're in. And so that's where we start, right? Learn how to interact with your world. And now we'll start to structure that towards the motor patterns that we think are going to be the most beneficial for protecting you through the rest of your life. We'll include include, you know, in the, in the play prayer practice play we have, you know, especially in the preteen team group, we have what you would consider classically the work piece. And then we have the play piece. And in the play piece, we often put in things,

correctives and, and things that we think kids need to do that they probably won't, won't be doing if they don't do them here. So correctives are things that we think kids need to do that they probably won't be doing if they don't do them here. So correctives are things like we're seeing a lot of kids now in the last five years, kids coming in, they've got collapsed ankles. So it looks like a flat foot. And for us as coaches, that's unsafe. It also shows a lack of your diminishing power production. So a kid who's collapsing like that is going to have a harder time lifting or being safe. So we're going to program at the end of the workout things to strengthen the ankle and to bring the ankle back into the right position. But we're also going to program things like palloff press and rotational ball through med ball throws and um you know

anti-rotational uh work um because it's important yeah you know so so um you know have two kids one kid holds a band and holds it out here that's the anti-rotational piece and other kids does wood choppers with the chambers yeah you've got you've got the kids working together but they're they're, but they're specifically hitting things that are necessary for them to learn in the gym, we think. The idea of learning to hold yourself in a neutral position and being able to brace not only is important when you're lifting a large load, but it's also important when you are lifting a large load, but it's also important when you are making contact in football. Or dancing.

Well, true. The truth. You know, I can't think of a place where not being able to understand when your spine is in neutral position and brace is a good thing. It's just not. So we need to do that, and we need to have the correctives and the things to enhance that so kids can learn how to produce that over and over again, not just in this gym, but then to take that outside into the sporting environment.

Into a more dynamic environment, right? You look at injuries, and very rarely will you hear somebody say like, oh, I tore my ACL doing a back squat. Right. Like you almost never hear that. Never heard that. Right. But all the time inside of sport. And so it's really important to teach proper motor patterns there because then they're going to a more uncontrolled, a more dynamic environment outside.

And particularly when you're dealing with kids, right, because they don't have the strength. We're working on the motor patterns. We're working on the mobility. But they definitely don't have the strength yet. Yeah. We talk about this in the PYCC. One of the things that we saw lacking is just teaching jumping and landing. I mean, there's a bridge between these static movements that we learn in the gym, and then there's the unplanned responsive movements in the field.

There's a bridge there. One of those bridges is jumping and landing. And what you say is, well, every kid jumps and lands. Well, no, you watch them land, and their knees are caving in, and they're jumping, and their knees are caving in and they're jumping and their knees are caving in and they're landing and their foot is collapsing. What's that mean when you come over here? Because they know they're going to jump and they know they're going to land. Now I've got to respond to you trying to get a ball around me to kick it in here and I've got to respond.

I don't know which way you're going to go. I can't plan that. So we've got to teach them how to take stuff out of their, out of the gym, begin to show them how it can be, be used in an unplanned, unstructured environment, and then hope that when they move to the, to the, um, the field, that it becomes a second nature. And, and, and in fact, in our gym, in the 20 years where we're working with kids, not one kid who was working with us had an ACL injury on the field or tore their ankle on the field. You know, this is, I think it's easy to do if you have the focus and the right tools to teach the kids.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, every time I meet somebody who's like, oh, I tore my ACL or I, you know, jacked up my back. And I was like, oh, what were you ACL or I jacked up my back. And I was like, oh, what were you doing? Or why? And they point out to the moment in time it went out. I'm like, well, it was the 10,000 reps of shitty movement that got you there. That's his point all the time.

He talks about that all the time. I'm like, look, it wasn't that particular thing. It was that you lifted badly for three years my favorite is when somebody says they've got a bad knee right like i've got a bad knee well no you had a perfectly good one you had a perfectly good knee you know and now it's and then it was that yeah it's the movement it's like it peed on the carpet or something yeah it's a bad knee it's a terrible knee a bad shoulder yeah no you had a good one, right? It was perfectly good.

And then all the thousands of repetitions, like you said, right? Poor movement. Yeah, when someone says they have a bad knee or a bad back, it's interesting because they're putting their mind in a place where that's what it is. So it'll always be that way. So I always encourage people to, you know, if you're, if you've got a knee, instead of calling it a bad knee, it's like my knee is healing.

Yeah. It's more process oriented. Yeah. You go, oh, my knee is healing. So now you're in the mindset of now I treat my knee like it's healing instead of it's, you know, I have a bad knee. It's like now I'm just mad at it. Yeah.

It's a bad knee. Yeah. What do you, how do you guys handle the nutrition conversation? And that's gotta be interesting because I'm sure you, oh man. Yeah. I'm sure you see all sorts of stuff and then you got to work with the parents and.

Yeah. The parents are in control. Yeah. So, so you got, you have a second party involved. It's very different. Um,

and sometimes it's a whole family dynamic. Sometimes mom and dad don't even agree on nutrition. I'm going to let Keegan take the detail on this, but just as an overview, it's pancakes. It's fraught with emotion and family culture. And then just the fact that parents are controlling all of it. You know, you've got really it's an education piece that we can affect most and hope they carry it forward. But he can detail it. Yeah, so looking at our physiological age groups, right,

you've got three to eight, that's Explore. Express is eight to 12, and then Excel is 12 to 18. Matched up with those, we look at food as fuel. Really, that's all it is, right? And we want kids to leave our program with a better understanding of what food actually is. We don't want them to leave going, oh, I need to eat X amount of almonds every single day.

That's not the goal. The goal is to get them to understand what almonds do for them if they consume almonds at a specific time. Yeah. Right. Um, so education really is where our standpoint on it and, uh, getting kids to understand and get to the point of understanding that food is fuel. You put, you know, the wrong fuel into a race car for long enough, eventually the race car is going to die out. Right. Um, and, and, and, and so you could, you just kind of come at it from that, that standpoint, that, um, that direction is that it's gotta be from education,

right. And it's gotta be, um, geared towards getting kids to understand what food is. Now, like I said, you got those, those three physiological age groups, right. Explore, express, Excel matched up with that. we have base, build, and boost. And we're teaching kids to learn how to fuel themselves. Inside of base, our explore group, you know, three to eight years old,

we're teaching them exactly, you know, it's just food identification. There's a really cool video out there. I mean, it's not cool, but it kind of opens people's eyes a little bit. It's Jamie Oliver. Do you know who he is? Mm-hmm. He's not cool, but it kind of opens people's eyes a little bit. It's Jamie Oliver. Do you know who he is? He's a chef, right? Really well-known chef. And he went into school in LA and I think it was a second grade class. He was their first or second grade class.

And he's holding up flashcards with foods on them and asking the kids what the foods are. He'd hold up a pizza. Everybody, oh, I know what that is. He'd hold up a broccoli and it was just dead silent. Hold up a hamburger, oh, I know what that is. Hold up a zucchini, nothing. It just went on and on and on. It's like a three-minute video, a three-minute clip of him quizzing kids

and they just have no idea what these whole foods or real foods are. And so that's really our standpoint at that point is, our focus at that point is to get kids to understand what food is and introduce them to real food, whole food. Food where the only ingredient is its name, right? Like what's inside of chicken? It's chicken, right? Whole food. Food where the only ingredient is its name. What's inside of chicken? It's chicken. What's inside of Pop-Tart? You're going to get 12 different ingredients. None of them are pop or tart. It's not its name. You've got broccoli. Broccoli's in broccoli.

Then you go to Express. We're going to start to build on those concepts. Now we're actually even sometimes cooking with the kids inside of our classes, giving them a taste test of, of real or whole food. We're sending them home with packets to mom and dad about nutrition, educating them. And then you get to Excel, you know, 12 to 18 years old, we're going to start to teach kids how to, you know, look at nutrient density, look at nutrient timing, you know, really it's this whole process of understanding, okay, food is, is fuel. I should be eating these foods all the time. These foods, you know, are not the best fuel for me. I should stay away from that too. Okay. Now let's dive into and actually do that, actually practice it. And then how do I optimize it?

Yeah. That's awesome. Do you work with parents at all? So what's that look like when you're working with parents? Because that's a different. We're going to have a nutrition night. We're going to just talk about nutrition. And parents come and we give a short presentation on

uh nutrients macronutrients and and whole foods and sort of our broad recommendations and and usually there's a lot of questions i think most people haven't really looked at food necessarily as anything other than a family tradition or what I like as sort of a, you know, just I have a craving. I want that. And so we get a lot of good conversation, really. I wish we could get away from the word diet because it's got two meanings, right? And I think most people understand diets. Like, okay, I'm on a diet.

I'm going to have this. And what we want is your diet is this. This is how I eat. Right. And so people come to our, most of our parents, most parents come to these nutrition nights and they have an idea of what the diets they've been on. Right. That's their whole view.

Right. And we're trying to teach you, look, this is how you should eat to fuel your body. You know, and one thing, you know, Keegan is always talking about is that like, we don't want to come towards the kids with, you can't have this,

you can't have that. Because especially when they're teenagers, what do kids, if you tell a teenager, don't have this, what do they do? Going to go have it. Going to go have it.

So you say, you know, like we would say with our kids, like we go out to a restaurant or something like that, and can I have a Coke? Sure. Because I don't want to go home and find that, you know, now you've hijacked Cokes and you're heading them under. You know, have the Coke while we're out to dinner.

That's cool. Go ahead. It doesn't ruin you. What ruins you is the idea that that you're you know that your diet is bad i remember i remember being a little kid i forget how old maybe five or six my dad never let us have a sugar cereal in the house so we could have like cheerios or wheaties or whatever and he he had um he could have raisin bran, but that was his cereal. So I remember going to a friend's house

and spending the night and eating Froot Loops and feeling so guilty. I was like, oh, man, my dad knew I was eating this. But I'll eat again tomorrow morning if they have them. Yeah, I remember when I had the chance, I would do it. Right, yeah. yeah i remember like when i had the chance i would do it right yeah we had a we had a no sugar phase and uh that didn't really go well keegan found the way around that immediately well back back in the day it was like everybody was all about the zone the zone diet oh yeah and i kept telling

him i was like i want to be in the ozone like this is not for me the zone is not for me they uh yeah we went through the whole no sugar thing and uh it was exactly that it was you can't have this that's that's not on you know that's not how we eat anymore you can't you can't have sugar you can't have candy it's a restriction and so i went i would you know at lunchtime at school i'd go and i'd buy a bag of candy and i would i would sneak it into my backpack and into the house and I like hit it underneath my bed and like you know like I had like a little hole inside of the box spring where like I just like stuff it up underneath the bed for a couple months this went on and then they found it so they found the bag of candy and

they replaced it with like almonds and fish oil. And I remember being so pissed off. I came downstairs, and I had the bag. I was like, put it back. Oh, man, that's funny. That's funny. Yeah. We had a young girl in the gym a few years ago,

a high-caliber runner. So she's the first young lady as a freshman in Ramona to make state finals in cross country. They brought her in because she had no kick and they wanted her to get stronger and have a kick. And she just kind of came in at the time when we were getting ready to do one of these nutrition lectures. And I remember her dad going, like, she eats so clean. She is on track. So the first step to the teen class for having this class to have the nutrition talk was, I want you to have a week-long diary. Just write down everything you've eaten.

Write it down. Yeah. And so this young girl does. And then I gather them up and I look at their stuff for a week, and then we have the discussion. So it's like a two-week process. And I watch this young lady, and she brings her sheet in for me. And in the seven days, she had protein twice. Twice.

And I was so shocked. And she's like, I don't understand why I'm not able to recover. I'm so tired. Well, pick me. I have an idea. And I'm trying to explain to her dad. She needs protein at every single meal. She's not only lifting weights, but she's running tremendous amounts of distance. She's got to recover. How much is she sleeping? Oh, you know, because this is the next step in. Definitely.

Well, she's a straight-A student, so she's doing this and she's going to bed at 11 o'clock at night. Well, okay, that's not cool. I'd like her to go to bed earlier. What time is she getting up? Well, she gets up about 5.30. Okay, well, you see, no protein, not eating well. There's going to go to bed earlier. What time is she getting up? Well, she gets up about 5.30. Okay, well, you see no protein, not eating well. There's going to be a problem here. To his credit, her dad

sat through the lecture and went home and was like, okay, there's going to be chicken at every meal. There's going to be something here. She was the kind of athlete who processed it. We need more sleep. We need more sleep. With the kids, as Keegan said, it's a process from the kind of athlete who processed it. We need more sleep. We need more sleep and stuff.

But it is a process. With the kids, as Keegan said, it's a process from young age through this thing. It's a process. And as we learned just in our own family, telling kids you can't is not the way to go about it. It's got to be this is what this will this is what will fuel your dreams yeah if somebody wants to get into the coaching business of of coaching kids what's the best approach to getting into that say say they don't even they're not a gym owner or anything like that you know like i want to work with youth i think the first thing is to to for the coach to ask themselves why and really understand their own motivation and um also specifically what age group do they want to work at with because it's

wholly different working with preschoolers or elementary age kids or high school kids totally different so so i i think focusing on what drives them and then the population that they want to work with is key before taking any steps but um it's it's education on the specifics of you know what's developmentally appropriate. One of the things that the American Academy of Pediatrics and all the organizations, the Canadian organization, the British organization, they all say is when you're dealing with kids, the most important thing is that you actually are trained to deal with kids. So that's key no matter what you're doing.

So for us, it's all about education. They say that you have to be specifically trained to work with kids. So that's key no matter what you're doing. So for us, it's all about education. They say that you have to be specifically trained to work with children. And on top of that, the program that you're running has to be specifically designed for kids. And that's what the Brand X Method does. And we train people to teach kids specifically for developmental, biological, physiological,

chronological age. And we teach them how to create a program based around those principles. So do something like the Brand X method before even opening a facility or starting coaching, having that foundation. So first off, I can't tell you how many people who've done this, like they start off and they're training their kids and things aren't going well and they go through the course and they go like, I had to just go back in and just completely just change everything. And that's problematic. First of all, you've got problems with the kids you've trained, but also just taking

your program apart and starting over is, is tough. And secondly, you know, just apply it to any other, um, we don't apply our understanding of education to physical education, the way we would do to other,

other things. So like in physical education in high school, you get a C if you show up and you get, and you have your clothes on and you kind of walk through the program. Like if you did that with advanced calculus in high school, they go, dude, just because you're dressed and came to class doesn't mean you get a C. The second, you know, kind of offshoot of that is the idea that, you know, people who are adult trainers think, well, I'm an adult trainer. If you thought about that, a guy who teaches advanced calculus

in college wouldn't necessarily want to take him and go like, okay, teach math to a five-year-old. I'm not sure that he would have the tools to it. Not that he's not smart enough to, or not even that he's not motivated to. You've got to have the tools to it. Not that he's not smart enough to. Right. Or not even that he's not motivated to. You've got to have the tools. Yeah. To teach the five-year-old. You may teach college kids just fine, but that's a totally different set. You know, kids are little adults.

But you can't train them like they're little adults. You've got to come to them where they are it's also not optimal and and keegan said several times it's always our filter what is best for kids so what is optimal would be to know as much as you can about what they need in all those areas so for us it's it's irresponsible to us to say, oh, just go do it. Because it's a kid. It's a huge responsibility. People, parents are bringing their precious treasure to you.

And you've got to take that seriously and know what you're doing and know why. And know when and know how. And so, yeah, we're big on please do the research. Please find out as much as you can about what kids need before you start that. We think we finally did it, though, right? It's the culmination. The PYCC for the Brand X Method is the culmination of, you know, over 60 years of coaching kids. These two old people?

It's the culmination of, you know, it's biopsychosocial stages of development for children. It's the science behind what's going on in their brains as they're exercising.

It's all the reasons why they should play every single class. And it's all the movement that we're known for, right? You see a Brand X Method post or hashtag the Brand X Method 99% of the time.

Sometimes people are just trying to get views and likes. 99% of the time, you see perfect movement. to get views and likes 99% of the time. That's what Instagram is for. You see perfect movement, right? And, and so that's all,

that's all finally together wrapped under one, one big and a perfect course. Rad. Where can people find out about Brand X? The Brand X method.com. The Brand X thebrandxmethod.com thebrandxmethod.com and our Instagram is full of current stuff things that are happening all the time

Instagram is definitely the best platform if you're looking for like quick coaching tools maybe even some workouts here and there for kids that's definitely the best platform to find all that stuff what's the handle for that at thebrandxmethod good to go thanks for joining me today platform to find all that stuff. What's the handle for that? At the Brand X Method. Cool.

Good to go. Thanks for joining me today. This is a blast. Thank you. That was cool. Thank you very much. Awesome, thank you. All right.

Go to iTunes, Stitcher, wherever. Firestar reviews, positive comments. And remember, our sponsors. We have Sunlight and Saunas. Go to sunlight.com. Use the code SHRUGCOLLECTIVE to save $200 on your order plus free shipping. And get that green juice in your life. Go over to Organifi.com slash shrug.

You'll save 20% on your order over there. See you next week.