Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 192 - Brand X Method's Jeff and Keegan Martin

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Jeff Martin is the Co-owner and CEO of The Brand X Method™, and Keegan Martin is the Director of Education of The Brand X Method™. As the world leader in youth fitness, The Brand X Method™ offers a strength-and-conditioning program specifically designed for kids and adaptable to any environment. They strive to help protect kids and teens against sports injury, boost their sports performance, and push back against the forces behind obesity. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

That one. That one. Hey, Jeff. And then she says, do you want me to grab your glasses? I can't see them. Yeah, we'll get this figured out, I think. So you start interviewing or enter um introducing uh from that movement patterns you start introducing physical skills like i said rolling jumping um hanging climbing

things like that in three to eight eight to to 12, you start to introduce how to lift correctly. And then from 12 to 18, we have really our focus was always on or became on getting strong, so it's always strength training. But there was strength training could also be body weight. So we had a significant portion of body weight movements in there as well. It depends on how much you weigh too, right? Might be a little harder depending. How come body, you know, I always wonder why body weight movements are so bad.

They just kill, you know, like a, like a, like a wall sit, for example. You can't scale it. It really is part of the process for us was learning how to scale body weight movements so that people could do it. I mean, a push-up is hard. I guess maybe if they were doing a squat, they could hold on to a band or something or a rack and use their arms a little bit. Limit the range of motion. There you go. Start with limiting the range of motion. Start with keeping them safe within that range of motion.

Then slowly increase the range of motion. I with keeping them safe within that range of motion. Then slowly increase the range of motion. I'm super excited to have you guys here today. Today we're here with Jeff and Keegan Martin. I've known them for quite a long time. I'd say we probably go back like 8, 10 years or something like that. I went down to your gym. Is it Ramona? Where are you guys at?

That's where we were. That's where you were, right? And I remember going there because I was doing a lot of stuff with CrossFit at the time. I was doing some of the powerlifting certification courses and stuff, I think, with my big fat friend, Jesse Burdick. And, you know, as we were going around the country and as we were working with different people, whether it be CrossFitters or powerlifters, it didn't matter who it was, working with adults on a squat was hard. So when you invited us down, I was like, this is going to be a nightmare. I was like, we got kids powerlifting. I'm like, this is truly going to be a nightmare because I didn't know you at that time. And I didn't know what you guys had going on.

But man, was I surprised at the way that these kids could move. I was like, this is the best class I ever taught. And I'm like, I had to make a, you know, small change here or there. And you're like, that's stuff I've told them before. But it was all a very minor stuff. And the kids were moving great. And, you know, Jesse and I were like, well, I guess it makes sense. You know, if you start out moving the right way, then maybe you don't develop bad habits. So how long have you been passionate about some of this stuff, training kids and things like that? Oh, geez.

I've been training. My first job out of high school was coaching swimming and water polo. And so I've been doing that a long time 40 40 years about 40 years and then got into martial arts and I always had a I always liked working with kids in the martial arts and then as my kids started to get into middle school

and we started you know they were in the martial arts program and they were active athletes but I was seeing or we were seeing my wife and I were seeing a problem, or not a problem, but a lacking, I guess, in middle school PE. And my kids couldn't do things that I thought were normal. Like you should be able to do pull-ups.

You should be able to climb a rope. You should be able to do these kind of things. And we started looking around for ways to help our kids get better and stumble across functional fitness. You're like, what's wrong with my offspring? This shouldn't be possible. I mean, they should be genetic freaks like me. No, I needed to get them beyond what I could do. So, you know, I'm the kind of stand and look at the rope and go like, well, I don't know

how I'm going to get up there, but I want my kids to be able to do it. And we found functional fitness and functional fitness for us always was about, wasn't about having the kids work out in the gym, but was about helping them within the gym to do whatever they wanted to outside the gym. And that really was kind of the genesis of how we got to where we were, you know, where we were. Yeah. I think it's, it's, uh, you know, it's great to be working with kids cause it's confusing on like,

you know, if you have a young child or even if you have like a niece or a nephew and you're trying to figure out, you know, how do I get them involved in something where they can improve on their sport? I think the only thing people can kind of come up with is to send them to something that has more of that sport. So they send them to like a camp or something like that. Strength and conditioning is kind of not really thought about much, especially with how young some of the kids that you guys work with. How young are some of the kids you guys work with? Down to three years old.

Doesn't get much younger than that. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Right. We don't want to change the diapers. Yeah, it doesn't get much younger than that. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Right. We don't want to change the diapers. Yeah, pretty much. Right. But right when they really start to explore movement, that's when we're starting to work with them. And, uh, at that age, it's really all about just

exploration, um, them learning how to interact with their environment. And once they can do that efficiently, then we start to layer in, you know, motor patterns. Okay. Now how can we get you to interact with your environment correctly in a way that you're not going to injure yourself and kind of set it up in a way that when the parents do take them to those camps, because it's inevitable, right? They're going to take them to those camps. You know, I want you to get better at baseball or soccer. Um, and that might make them a better player, but they're always going to be a safe player. Um, and then as they start to progress, you know, they gain, gain some different,

uh, abilities as they get older. It's really focusing on strength because we found strength is just a base for, for all fitness. Um, and it, it positively impacts every other physical skill. If you can make somebody strong, then you can make them, um, really that transfers over to any other, um, endeavor that we try to accomplish inside of the gym or outside of the gym. You know, they say it takes a village to raise a child. And I think in this case, when you're talking about trying to have a kid be successful in a sport, this also kind of takes a village. It takes the, it takes the coach. It might take the experts, you know, strength conditioning. It might take a lot of involvement from the parents.

Do you guys have involvement with the parents as well as maybe the kids' baseball coach or soccer coach? Sure. It starts with the parents because the parents have to bring the kids to the gym. Circling back to what you said before, strength and conditioning for kids is the, I want to say like the lost piece. Like people see that if they want their kid to be good at baseball, they should put them in baseball and they should go to the baseball camps. But really, what's the base? The base is moving well. The base is being strong.

The base is being able to apply those things then to whatever sports you want. So really, what we want to be is that base. You know, if the sport is the top of the pyramid, we're the base of that pyramid. And you know, what we see with parents is parents understand that and they start bringing their kids to the gym and they see these, you know, great, um, you know, kids starting to express really, really well. And then the coaches don't understand it. The sports specific coaches don't understand it. So then they start to limit it.

Well, I can do the same thing. I'll have the kids do squats or I'll have the kids do this. Well, I don't teach the kids how to throw a baseball and I don't teach the kids to play football. I teach kids how to get strong. I teach them how to move well. And then I teach them how to apply that to different things. What have you guys seen with like, you know, sports specific movements?

Like, you know, sometimes somebody will take something from a field or a court and then they try to like add weight to it. Are you guys fans of that? Or are you more fans of like, hey, let's just like squat, bench, deadlift, bend over row, overhead press, like kind of more of the basics of strength training definitely definitely the basics it's funny that you say that you know they try and add weight to it i saw a guy in the in the uh in the gym the other day he's on the cable machine and he's got one of the one of the spongy handles just a single handle but he's hooked it up to the cable machine he's like throwing pitches right it's gonna make you you know he's gonna gonna be able to throw faster now man um if that guy

can survive that though he might throw some heat right he's injury free right a hundred pound uh pitches you know wild um the the basics because they they they apply broadly to everything else you know if you can uh if you can teach a kid to get in the proper position of the deadlift it's easy to teach them then the first position of the clean or the snatch. It's really easy to then teach them how to jump correctly. You know, those dynamic, more complex movements become super simple if you master the basics and the positions of the basics. So that's really where we focus. And we focus for a large amount of time on that.

The problem is it's not sexy. Oh, yeah. You know, that's, that's, that's the problem, right? So you say, uh, I've got a, you know, six week agility camp for eight year olds. Well, can the kid really express agility and get better at agility going to your camp? Well, especially when they don't have a basis of strength. Right. Right. Well, isn't, isn't a big component of agility strength being able to stop yourself and go the other way. Right.

So, but agility and the speed camp for a 12 year old, that's, that's sexy. You're doing something on the minute, every minute. And there's a lot of movement and it's fast and it's not a power lifting where you might do a lift and then rest for four minutes or five minutes. And as Keegan said, what we, what we do is, you know, I want the kid to learn how to squat well. Then I want them to learn how to squat with a lot of weight. Then I want them to learn how to apply that to agility. Is that usually where you guys start is with the squat? Squat, deadlift, and press.

Like a body weight squat? You said you've got kids at three years old, so imagine maybe they're just moving around their own body. Inj and bracing is usually where we start. Inj and bracing? Just teaching them how to actually contract with ab flexion rather than hip flexion. So differentiating those two becomes extremely difficult. You said brace and hinge, right? Yeah, brace and hinge is usually where we start.

Teaching them how to breathe correctly, squeeze and control their core. usually where we start teaching them how to breathe correctly, squeeze and control their core. And then we teach them how to, how to move their hips and the way that their hips are meant to move rather than breaking at the spine. So we, we teach them those two patterns first because we think that those apply to kind of globally.

Right now, we can't really teach a squat without a hinge, right? What we see with the kids is that, that in the squat, squat, when they start to squat, they break here, pull the pelvis back this way, and then they do their squat. And with the deadlift, picking something up off the ground, which is a deadlift, picking it up off the ground, they hinge at the SI joint and not at the hip.

So really, you've got to learn how to control the spine like Keegan's saying. We have ways we do that with a five-year-old and then ways we do it with a you know older kids and those are different but and then you they have to learn how to hinge and how to move at the hip um because it's unsafe to do either way right and most people what they want to do is quick let's get them to the weight that's quick let's get them to the weight because that's important no learning to learning to control the hip, right, and learning to control the spine, that's important. Then we'll do the other thing. And Seema, did you get into lifting kind of simultaneously with soccer, or did you get into soccer at a pretty young age?

I got into soccer when I was six, and when I was thinking about all of the stuff that they do, I was just realizing how lucky it was that I started a sport so young just because if I didn't start doing that sport, and especially with the coaches I had, all of my athletic, everything I do athletically right now would not be possible. I have kids watching this right now like, I should play soccer.

Yeah, and I just think about how crazy beneficial it is of what you guys are doing because I didn't start lifting until I was 13. I was kind of lucky to start that, but that aided so much into when I returned back to the field because I was so much bigger and stronger than everybody else that wasn't lifting. And then all my other college guys started lifting in college when I played with them. So the fact that you were going to be building all of these mutant kids, right. To get on. Yeah. I bet you it would have been different too. If you would have met up with guys like this, cause you had a lot of knee problems, right? Oh my God. Yeah. It would have been different too. If you would have met up with guys

like this, cause you had a lot of knee problems, right? Oh my God. Yeah. I had Oscar slaughter. So I mean, okay. Yeah. You've probably, you guys would have been able to identify that and probably help guide them in a different direction. Yeah, absolutely. It's crazy. You know, I think coaches and parents always push towards doing just more sport, more sport, and they don't see the benefit of the SNC program as the base. Um, like he said, you know, the, more sport, and they don't see the benefit of the SNC program as the base. Like he said, you know, the sport should be the peak of the pyramid. It's not your base, you know, but the wider and the greater you build a base, the further the athlete's going to be able to go inside of their sport. You proved that with soccer, right?

And, you know, I think parents look at a camp and they're like, oh, I need to send my kid to this Tiger Woods golf camp because they're going to be a better golfer. And that might be true, right? Like they might come at the end, at the end of that camp, they might be a better golfer, but if you hang 50 pounds and on their, on their squat and deadlift, they're a different golfer completely. Right. And then they have the ability to go further inside of that sport because of

that. So building that base is just, that's what it's all about. And I mean, that's, that's kind of cool that So building that base is just, that's what it's all about. And I mean, that's kind of cool that you experienced it personally. Two kids playing soccer. Balls out there, they have equal skills. Same size. One kid is twice as strong as the other one. Who's going to get the ball?

Well, the kid who's stronger is probably going to run faster, get the ball. If they meet up in the middle and they're struggling over the ball, who's going to get the ball? The one that's bigger and stronger the one that's stronger so why wouldn't you want your kid to be stronger you know that was you know it just seems to me like in every way strength is going to help you in a specific sport in every single way what do you guys think about like you know um like field strength you know like strength that's, uh,

that you can clearly see on the court or on the field of play versus, you know, somebody squatting four or five for reps, you know, in the gym, I'm sure you guys have had some mutant high school kids come in before and probably had a couple of guys maybe bench close to 400 pounds, like on their way out of high school or, or, you know, squat five, 600 pounds or some crazy weights. Right. And then that's cool. But a lot of times that's not like, you know, the best guy on the field. And, and, uh, so what are some of your thoughts on that? You know, you know, trying to get that strength to really translate into the, onto the field. It translates in the way that they can express it, uh, best. So you take that athlete that's maybe strong inside of the gym, right? The, the, our,

our perfect example, we had an athlete that was benching, you know, he's benched three 65, his, um, his, uh, junior year of high school. Wow. That's a pretty strong kid, right? Really strong kid. And, uh, you know, he was one of the best players on the football team, but if you take away that strength, now look at him on the football field, right? He ended up going in and playing D1, right? But let's take a, let's take a, another athlete, like just your average athlete, right? Maybe we have a 400 pound deadlift at the end of high school or, you know, a decently strong kid and, and, and take that athlete, but take 200 pounds away from all of those lifts and then apply

it to their sport. Again, you have a different athlete, right? But in the opposite direction. So I think, I think that they're able to apply to the, the, the best way that they can express it. And,

um, it's, it's, it's, it's never, it's never going to hurt them to have that strength. It's only going to aid in their, in their,

uh, athletics. It's how, it's also how you set up your class. So if I set up my class, we're going to do our, we're going to do our squats and they all do their squats and say, okay, see ya. You know, they, what do they got? They've got stronger. They've gotten stronger, but we set our classes up. So, you know, they do the squats. Then maybe we go outside and we do high box jumps. Then maybe we do something where we do some sprints. And, uh,

you know, as soon as you come back in from the sprints, you're going to do high box jumps. Then maybe we do something where we do some sprints. And, uh, you know, as soon as you come back in from the sprints, you're going to do high box jumps. And then maybe you do some sprints and come back in and do some rope climbs and you do some, uh, some mirroring drills with your partners. So we get all of that. And what we're doing is being able to apply that, um, strength, you know, athletically, I'm not doing it on the football field because that's not what I do, but I can, I can give them, uh, movement problems and require that they come up with their own movement solutions to things. And, um, and that takes them and, and forces them to use their strength that they've acquired in a, in a different, in different ways.

So, you know, take a medicine ball and say, okay, for five minutes, I want to see who can throw the ball the furthest. Well, you know, some guys, some guys are going to learn how to use their body, throw the ball far and kind of saunter over there to pick the ball up. They've thrown it 30 yards or something. Another guy might not know how to use his body. Well, he's throwing, you know, five yards, 10 yards because very exhausting for that other guy.

He's going to start to have to learn how to how to use his body in a different way and you know really setting up your class to give them you know opportunities to use that strength in different ways how do you guys uh defining strength how are you defining it in the athletes so again like just as example like you got this one kid who's like super strong on like one movement but kind of sucks and a bunch of other ones are you guys you know kind of um but the kid again the kid's not great on the field are you guys kind of trying to address more of that like you need to be like more over here doing this rather than like in that squat rack type deal we don't um you know we kind of went through a as a lot of functional fitness gyms did uh went through a history of like you put the workout up

on the board and uh everybody does the workout right and then we got to a place where a lot of pluses and minuses to that style yeah yeah for the first couple years and then after that you've got to individualize right so we started to look at it and go well we individualize strength training don't we i don't come in and go like okay everybody we're doing deadlifts today everybody's gonna do you know 300 by 10 you know that that no yeah a bunch of people are already out right yeah well some people are going to be out other people are going to be, that's not going to do a thing for me because I'm not going to have any training adaption to that. So why don't we do that with the rest of the program? We'll put up the workout and then I'm going to go, well, you know, Keegan needs to be a little bit faster off the line.

So in accessory work, I'm going to have him doing like get up sprints and somebody else needs to know, needs to know how to push somebody around. So maybe we'll have a couple of guys working together and do, you know, King of the Ring or something like that. push somebody around. So maybe we'll have a couple of guys working together and do, uh, you know, king of the ring or something like that. Why don't we do that and individualize the training a little bit so that we can, um, take the, uh, what is, uh, what's necessary for each kid and, and adapt to that. And I think that's part of what we're trying to do with teaching coaches. You don't just look at the, at the classical, okay, today, everybody's going to do cleans. Everybody can do cleans. Some people can't do cleans maybe kids doing you know dumbbell hammer curls because that's that's his version of a clean right now but then on top of that what does each kid need

and as you if you work with kids if you have 30 kids in your in your in your gym you know those kids and you know what where they're where their problems are and you know, where they're, uh, where they're, where they, what they excel at. And so you should program accessory stuff to focus on those things. You know, what's really cool in this video, this kid doing this hip hinge, um, in college, my strength and conditioning coach never let guys deadlift because he was scared that they'd injure themselves because the deadlift is like, and I've noticed that with a lot of college strength and conditioning coaches, they'll be like, no, we don't deadlift. Now, obviously you're having kids deadlift and you're teaching them the right movement patterns for

that. But is there anything that you guys avoid or do you just teach overall movement so that they can learn how to navigate themselves with these loads in space? Like, is there anything that's avoided? Yeah, we avoid, uh, a lot of things based on their age and where they're at developmentally. Okay. Um, so, you know, it's, it's all based on where they're at, uh, uh, physiologically where their anatomy's at, uh, biologically what they have a bail available to them. Um, and that changes at different stages with the brand X method. We have three stages of development. We have our explore group, which is three to eight years old. We have express, which is eight to 12. And then we have

Excel, which is 12 to 18. And at those different stages, they've got different, uh, gears you can call it. So let's say with, uh, explore. So the youngest group, right? Three to eight years old, they can express a lactic type contractions. So they've got steady state and that's it. So having, uh, them do deadlifts makes no sense. Yeah. Right. Having them do something like an obstacle course money, right? Cause they're learning to interact with their environment. They're learning how their body moves. They're growing the entire time. It's that's awesome. Right. But, but having them do something like a snatches and box jumps, it makes no sense. Right. And then progress on up towards

eight to 12 years old, they can express like a interval type training now. So you've got that, that slight progression towards now you can do a, almost a semi-type sprint, you know, and they need a little bit more time to recover now after that. So they're kind of learning that next gear to 12 to 18 where they can express max contractions and they need a large amount of time to recover. So it's all based on development, you know. What they can actually do is based on where they're at developmentally. And it's based on where they're at in terms of their training. So we might have a 15 year old come in who can express a max contraction deadlift, but he's not ready in terms of his movement patterns, right? He's moving. Like we have a six year old that's been training with

us for three years. Right. So guess what? He's, he's working, uh, you know, lightweight might be, maybe a kettlebell to, to, to remove the bar path, take out some complexity. But there's several layers to it in terms of, you know, where we start, what we're doing based on their development and what they've got available in their movement patterns. Keegan talked about different ages. So you have like your chronological age, kid's 13. His biological age, he's developed fast, so he's 16 years old. Developmental age, he acts like he's nine. Training age, he's been with you six months. That's a kid that we would be limiting the range of motion in deadlift.

We'd be teaching him how to control his spine, that kind of thing. A kid with a chronological age of 13, he's a biological age of 16, he's a developmental age of 16, and he's been training with us for 10 years, that kid's on the platform on USAPL pulling a state record. The problem with the deadlift is people call it the deadlift. When you're four years old, you should know how to pick stuff up off the ground. So we start with a soccer ball. Let's learn how to pick up stuff off the ground.

When you're six years old, you've got a 30-pound backpack that you take to and from school. You should learn how to pick that up. It's not a deadlift. It's learning how to pick something up off the ground. We teach the, uh, we teach the sumo stance deadlift almost entirely. That's what we teach in the, um, in the, in, in our class, unless somebody's competing and their levers require that they, uh, are a better standard stance. We teach the sumo stance deadlift because the wide stance is how you pick stuff up in the real world. Like you don't, there's nothing that you can bump your shins up against and go like,

okay, I'm going to pick this up. So it's not cheating. No, it's not cheating. And, and power lifters aren't fat. So,

um, those are not all of them. No, that's, that's, that's two things that we want to make. If we, if you come away from this with two things,

I said, sumo is not cheating and powerlifters aren't that. In fact, it has more application to the real world than a standard stance deadlift does. The sumo stance, we found kids who train wide can lift narrow. Kids who lift narrow don't necessarily lift train or are able to lift heavy wide. can lift narrow kids who lift narrow, don't necessarily lift train or lift, are able to lift heavy wide.

It transfers to a strong man stuff, which we think about what he just said for a second, you know, in terms of like a squat, you know, we've seen people squat with a close stance. Yeah. And a lot of times people that squat with a closer stance,

they're like, for lack of better terminology, they're like hips are kind of closed off. They're just super tight. And so for them to try to go wide, you know, it feels like their legs are like literally splitting apart from their body. However, if someone can express the ability to squat with a wide stance, going in much closer won't bother them at all. We had a young man come in, good friend of Keegan's. He was a high jumper in high school. Came in the gym his junior year.

He had jumped, I think he jumped six foot six at the state meet. He was five, or no, six foot two, weighed about 135 pounds. His deadlift was 185 and terrible. His back squat was 135 and struggling. He was, he was, uh, uh, gangly gangly year later. Um, he was closing on a 400 pound, um, sumo stance deadlift. We trained entirely sumo, um, almost a 300 pound back squat, wide stance, wide stance, low bar back squat. Um, went to the state meet, uh, his, his, his coach called me and read me the riot act cause

he'd gained 10 pounds. And, uh, I was like, no, we tested him all. I know he's going to jump more, jump higher. He ended up winning the state, uh, seven foot jump. Um, wow. And there's a state record, California state record. So he, he, uh, but we'd, we'd only done wide stance training. You know, he did some front squats, but, but mostly the training was low bar back squat, wide stance, sumo stance deadlift, high box jumps. I mean, we're talking how high were we jumping? You guys were jumping.

We were jumping on over 50 inches routinely for repetition reps, yeah. And we put those in a workout so the kids would be doing like- Five reps, five to 10 reps of that and then – Do five low bar back squats, go over there, do five high jumps. And this kid was able to move his feet in. People are like, well, you know, that's – we want you to train in athletic stance.

That's why we want you to do narrow stance squats and narrow stance deadlifts. And I go, well, but athletic stance is wide, right? well but a athletic stance is wide right yeah athletic stance is actually very wide yeah like really a beginning a beginning stance like a linebacker stance is obviously not very wide you know uh or maybe the foot position of like a defensive end or something might not be that wide right in comparison to how wide you might have them squat but look at when somebody you, go to a baseball game and watch someone throw the ball from third to first. I mean, they step their foot out way out in front.

Their feet are really wide. What about when someone's in the batter's box? Their feet are usually spread pretty far apart. You look at a lot of different positions in sports. MMA, what about trying to block someone from taking you down? What about transition from basketball? Yeah, right. Running, I mean, when you run,

your feet end up far apart from each other. Right. So I wouldn't know. Doctor says I'm not allowed to run. That's why you have your son here though. You have him demonstrate, right? Exactly. He should, he shows all the, all the movement patterns and everything. I think, you know, what you guys have done is, uh, is unbelievable because this, this is a tough job in so many different ways. There's so many things going on from so many different angles. And you mentioned the development of, of a kid, you know, um, his training age, their actual age, and just kind of how they act. I mean, man, you're really dealing with a mess of, a mess of things going on all at one time.

And so you guys no longer have your gym, right? You shut that down, right? Yes. And you guys are coaching coaches. So I'd imagine the task now is to, it's not even really coaching coaches. It's like coaching leadership and coaching mentors in some way, right? I mean, they got to know the X's and O's of, of what goes on in the gym, but they also have to know how to command respect from these kids. They also know how to, they have to know how to treat their emotions of the, I mean, this is a wide range of things that

you're dealing with this. You're not just, you know, not just online coaching some people and spitting out a program. This is difficult. Why'd you guys choose something so damn hard? Right. Would have been a lot easier to choose something else. I think. Taking the hard road. Yeah. That, that, that, the, the program itself, the, the Brand X method has grown really over the past few years. And the fact that we, we started with, you know, just getting kids moving and then we realized that that's not enough. So we need, yeah, that's a really low bar just getting kids moving. I mean, it's great, right? Kids are moving. Sure. That's awesome. But you know, it's, it's not necessarily helping anything, right? It's not helping any of the issues that we're seeing come up. So we need to have a base. Okay. Well, what does that base look like? Well, it looks like getting them moving

well. Okay. Well now that's a start. Now, how does that grow? Well, it's getting them moving well and, and, and getting them really, really strong. Right. And so now that, and okay, now we have this, this awesome base and then how do, well, how do we get there? You know, well, developmentally, what do they need at age three, right? Developmentally, what do they need at age nine? You know, how does that change and how do we morph the program to, to, to get us to that point? And, um, you know, recently this, just this past month we released our, our, our, it's the most comprehensive course to date that this industry has seen for, for training kids. Um, and it's the professional youth coaches course. And we built that with, uh, James Fitzgerald of OPEX. I think you guys are going to have on in,

uh, in a couple of weeks here on the podcast, so that's pretty cool. But it's morphed into – Yeah, James is kind of another one on a special list in terms of his welcome with the CF, I'll say. Yeah. The CF people. Don't say the C word here.

He won like the first CrossFit games, right? Yeah. That'll be a good story. That'll be pretty cool. We developed a pretty good relationship with them. He's actually part owner of the Brand X Method and helped us co-brand this course. We're super excited about it because it's got everything. course. And, um, you know, we're super excited about it because it's got everything, you know, it's, it's developmental, uh, biopsychosocial, um, anatomy and physiology. It's got everything

you need to know as a coach going into this, you know, like I'm working with age four and then it's just plug and play, right? Like, Oh, I'm working with explore group. We're going to, we're going to prepare, we're going to practice, we're going to play. As I start to think about this even more, this job gets to be even more and more worserist, as I like to say, because, you know, if you're dealing with, you know, if he comes in with his six-year-old son and Andrew, you know, comes in with his seven-year-old son and the seven-year-old's doing some more advanced stuff, now he's watching and he's like, hey, I want my kid doing that.

So now there's kind of that side to deal with. And then also just even parents aside, there's just the kid just like feels left out. Like I want to kind of do what they're doing. Right. So you got to probably try to figure out a way it's, you know, you end up with individualized program, but also some group stuff that's just fun because they're kids, right? Have to. There's three. I don't want the kid crying every time.

Every time he's out the door. Yeah. Maybe every other time. Maybe every other time. There's three egos. There's your ego. As a coach, I mean, like, you know, I want the kid to lift more, right? There's –

Kid's got to squat and deadlift and bench. Right. That's it. That's all we're doing. There's the kid's ego. You just mentioned it. There's the parent's ego. I mean, it's a minefield.

You know, usually if you're dealing with an adult, you're just're just dealing with you know your ego and his ego yeah that's it but you gotta deal with the kid too and it's really important that kids work out together like just coming in and going you know okay i've got a specialized program for little johnny that might work with one percent of the kids who are really focused they're eight years old and they you know i'm going to be a football player and that's all he's going to do until he finds out his genetics won't let him be a football player. Then he'll be really good in high school and he's out. But if you want kids to keep coming back,

so, you know, making someone move well, how long does that take? Like an adult, how long does that take? It takes years to take. Well, if I've got a five-year-old coming in and I want them to move well, how long does that take? Like an adult, how long does that take? Years. Well, if I've got a five-year-old coming in and I want him to squat well, and then I want him to learn how to apply that strength to other things, where he sees that he's good at something, you know, then in the, in the class, then I'll never have the time to do my job. I just, I simply won't, which is why I think a lot of times people just start loading weight on kids, you know, and they go, well, I get lucky. We're squatting one 35. Now you're squatting one 85. Well, they'll never squat two 25 because squat like crap. I need to make them, I need to make them come back over and over and over again.

So if I've got, you know, one of our favorite kids, Nick. You're not supposed to have favorites. Nick was in our program forever. He was, you know, a kid who came in, he was overweight. Everything was stacked against this kid. He's, dad wasn't in the picture. Mom was overweight. Everything was stacked against this kid. Dad wasn't in the picture. Mom was in prison, raised by his aunt.

ADHD, impulse control things, anger issues. Because of all that other stuff, overweight. And kid never – he couldn't latch on to anything. So we had an in-house weightlifting meet. It was the one you were at. No, it was Jesse. Maybe my brother went to it or something. It was Jesse. Um, so we had an in-house, uh, weightlifting meet. So when you were at, no, it was Jesse. It was Jesse.

Maybe my brother went to it or something. It was Jesse. Oh, Jesse went. Jesse was there. And, um, uh, we tried to get Nick to come in and he wouldn't,

um, Keegan, I think Keegan and his buddies finally talked him into, into coming in. So Nick's 13 years old, um, had a, couldn't concentrate. So we could never let him lift more

than one one rep he could do one rep beautifully but if you said three left three reps you know like the second rep it's like shiny thing you can't you can't lift more than one rep but in the meet he uh i feel like that he started he started off with a 200 pound you know deadlift um walked up beautiful deadlift. So we built him up, and I think it was we got up to like – in the back, we got up to like 255, and he pulled that. It was wonderful. And we said, let's just let him go up to 285 the next time. And we put on 300 pounds and give it a try.

So we have a video of Nick, 5'6", 245 pounds, 13 years old, walks up and just, you know, gets himself wide, reaches down and grabs it. Double overhand stands up with 300 pounds. Boom. Everybody in the room is like, Oh,

you know, it's probably the first time Nick had ever had success at anything. Um, uh, uh, athletically and everybody's clap. So we went away for, um,

do some training for about a month, came back to the gym and Nick is, uh, Nick's aunt meets me at the door and says, you got to see this. And I walked back and I see a guy standing by the, by the pull up bars in the back of the gym. And,

uh, it looks like Nick, but it's looks smaller and, um, walk back there and this kid grabs the bar and it's Nick and he starts pulling and he pulls and he does his chin up, does pull up. And, um, he'd lost 15 pounds. Here's a kid who, who never could really even hang on the bar. He did his first pull up that one success drove him. And the kids now, uh, you

know, six foot two weighs, uh, two 15 or something like that. He's got a close to 600 pound deadlift. Yeah. He's closing in on six. And, but it was, it created a monster. It changed his life. You know, that, that one lift, one successful thing changed his life. And you have to find those things for every kid that walks through the gym in the gym. And that's what drives the kids. And that's what changes their lives. And then, and really leads them onto a path of what we want. Isn't that they're great in the gym. It's that they can do whatever they want outside the gym and they have movement for life. And that's really where we're, where we're at with this. Yeah.

It's a, you know, I've kind of have pointed out many times just through my own observations of being in here. Um, I can easily tell like who hasn't gotten a pat on the back. It shows. I can see it. I can see you wearing it. I can see it when someone goes up to the squat rack. Like, man, this son of a bitch never got a pat on the back. No one ever told him good job for anything.

And you can't just get a pat on the back. You have to earn it, too, because you know. People talk about these positive affirmations where you get up and talk about how much you love yourself. And it's like, it's all bullshit because you can't love something that, that you're, that you didn't work towards to be able to actually really, truly appreciate it. It has to come from like inside, you have to have actually earned it. You guys mentioned earlier, kind of producing that hormone. If you're like forced to do something, it doesn't even happen, right? With exercise.

You mentioned that earlier, right? Yeah. So it's like that, what you're, what you're doing is, is so awesome in so many different ways because you're getting the kid to try something, you're getting them to experience something. And then there's some positive reinforcement behind it, which, you know, a lot of people just never get a chance to experience. There's, you were talking about how do we work with coaches? I think that every coach has to

have its own style. You know, for me, um, it was really important that you didn't like give artificial praise, right. You know? And I think that, um, what kids came out of our program with, with this idea that if they worked hard, you know, they learned about long-term goals. You can talk about that kind of thing probably better than I can, but they, you know, I was never the kind of coach who stood and yelled faster, faster,

you know, at the top, you know, go faster. I'd rather walk up behind the, you know, next to a child and say, you know,

that was an awesome lift. That's great. You know, real quietly. He's the only one person who heard it, but what he heard was coach concentrated on him that, you know, real quietly. He's the only one person who heard it, but what he heard was coach, um, concentrated on him that,

you know, you were for, for a second for the coach, that kid was his world, or, you know, the kid was his world. Like I am focused entirely on what you just did.

And that was wonderful. And that was awesome. And, um, you know, when they make a correction and there's a thousand corrections, so you have thousand opportunities to, but, you know, walk up, you know, Hey, I really want to keep your chin down when you know, when they make a correction and there's a thousand corrections, so you have thousand opportunities to, but you know,

walk up, you know, Hey, I really want to keep your chin down when you're, when you're pulling. When I see you pulling, I see you pushing your head up first. I want you to keep the chin down.

You did it. Fantastic. That's really great. Cool. You see those small improvements, right? But, but the,

but take those opportunities as a coach to acknowledge them. And then the kid says, okay, I, you know, I, I got that pat on my back. I, you know, the coach, this is a place where the coach is listening to me and looking at me and really wants me to succeed. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. I think that's, I think that's huge. How do you kind of work out in terms of, uh, of, of trying to create leaders inside? Like, I know you don't have the gym model anymore, but with building up these coaches, how do you guys work on that side of it? Because some people might be like, like if I'm coming in and I'm, I'm gaining all this knowledge and taking your course,

like that's great. But if I'm not, if I'm not going to speak up or I'm not going to kind of take charge, it might be hard for me to get the attention, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think one way that we've started to really push that idea of leadership inside of our own community is we have these things called Brand X Method Labs now. And we've got three of them worldwide. And those are the centers that are doing our best practices. They're the ones that are upholding what the Brand X Method is and really carrying out the vision now in terms of on the ground actually doing it.

Because we're in the background now, right? Now we've taken a step back from actually coaching kids. And before it was all our content. All those videos that you guys pulled up, it's funny. Most of those weren't our kids. we didn't coach those kids personally you know but a lot of those videos that you pulled up came from the labs and uh you only get the title lab if you know we see consistently good movement from kids and and a progression that you know we've suggested so really that's that's kind of one way that we've developed that leadership is is is going, these are the guys that you want to follow. Why? Because they followed

exactly what we've said in each, each and every step. Um, developmentally they're on the right track for all their kids and all their kids are moving beautifully because of it. Um, it's Brand X, what Brand X was in Ramona now in three different locations worldwide. So it's pretty cool. We, um, we have webinars. So we have, uh, usually two to three webinars a month. Um, we focus on either like a movement or a coaching topic and all the labs or all of the, uh, training centers can get on and we can ask us questions. We can, we can, uh, you know, talk them through. We have mentoring. I mean, everybody, almost, almost all of the training centers have my, my, uh, still number. So I'll get like, you know, two, uh, two or three emails or texts over the weekend. Like, Hey, look at this, or, you know, here's something. And we have discussions

back and forth so we can start to have some impact on the actual coach in there. Um, you know, the lab labs lead the way and the labs where are, where they're called labs because it's where we, we lab new ideas. So that idea with the, um, you know, how do we teach the hinge? You know, put this, put the band on the chin, put the band on the hip. There's tension there. Uh, they can find when they flex, they can find when they, when they, um, sorry, they can find when they extend, they can find when they flex and, uh, and the kids can get a kinesthetic awareness of, of what's going on with their body. Um, we did that. We said that to labs and try this out and they try it out.

Then I say, did it work? Yeah, it worked. Okay. Let's, let's, uh, let's videotape video. We'll put it up. That's kind of what we do. Yeah. Go ahead.

Um, my mom, when, when I was there, she put me in like music and she put me in like sports and I know she knows a lot of parents that have kids and they don't put their kids in physical stuff just because they're like, ah, it's taken away from school. I want them to concentrate on this. I want them to be able to get to college, et cetera. But you were talking about earlier about how much, like all of this stuff benefits, not just, you know, the kids that are going towards sports, but their academics. So what kind of benefits have you seen this have on kids outside of sport movement? Um, academically, I'll let Keegan talk to that, but at, in our gym, um, open 20 years, I think we had eight valedictorians come out of our gym. We had, uh, I think we had three salutarians. All of our, you know, most of our kids were on the, you know,

3.5 and above our, our youngest son switched schools cause he wanted to get a 5.0 as senior year, which is just silly. Like, you know, okay. I didn't, in my,

when I was growing up, they didn't have 5.0. They had rocks and tablets other than that. But Keegan can talk more to that. Sounds like a version of schooling, right? High school 5.0. No. Yeah, I think there's two big things there, right? One is if you look at how movement affects learning, it affects it greatly.

And, you know, we were talking out there earlier, you know, recess is being removed now for kids because of budget cuts. PE is kind of going away because of budget cuts. They want kids inside a classroom just studying. We got to get you learning more. So you can't be outside and can't get any sun. Dude, that's the same concept, the same concept as the parents sending the kids to a camp to play the sport that they already play 365 days of the year. Is that really going to work? No, you need a base, right? And that base is movement. And there's that chemical that you've mentioned a few minutes ago, BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, right? That's released, but only on voluntary exercise. So when

kids play, they release BDNF. When they exercise voluntarily, they release BDNF. We had these study groups at Brand X in Ramona where it was immediately post-exercise. We grabbed our worst subject and we went to the study room. And we had a tutor in there that we did a trade with her. She could train at the gym. Her kids could train at the gym. But she tutored the kids inside of the class. And so post-workout, we would go in there. We'd study our worst, our worst subjects, whatever our grades were most lacking

in. And all of a sudden we started to see as a group, the entire groups, grades got better. All of our GPAs got better. Um, and I think there's, there's something to be said about that, you know, like exercise positively impacts academics. But a lot of science that backs that up, you can just go for a walk and then go to study and it has a huge impact. Absolutely. I try and do that even when I'm programming for my clients, I start getting more creative ideas because I'm, you know, I'll walk on the treadmill 10 minutes or, or, or walk outside 10 minutes and then sit down and program. And it's like, Oh, all of a sudden these workouts are 10 times better. You know, my clients are like, oh, dude, he's got some good ideas this week. We were just mentioning that yesterday.

You know, so, but I think, I think beyond that, the gym now is a, is a platform for, for kids to learn things that they don't have the ability to learn elsewhere. Right. Cause like life nowadays is so easy, but the gym teaches you how to work hard. It teaches you how to goal set. So if you take that away or, or, or sports even are kind of similar. If you take that away from a child, you're, you're removing the ability to learn all of these valuable life lessons. Um, so it's, it's, it's, it is unfortunate. Sometimes, you know, parents are really focused on academics. Um, but just hammering

home the academic side and not allowing a kid to move is removing, uh, learning in itself. James, um, you're going to have him up in a couple of, uh, couple of weeks, but James asked this question. I think it's really pertinent to this is why do you have kids work out? You know, I mean, you know, there's a, think about it about it well why are you really going to bring your kids in and i'm going to have them do you know he's six years old i'm going to have him work out well it isn't that we're trying to get him to work out it's trying to get him to move trying to get him to learn how to move and to enjoy moving because everything works better if you move your body works better if you move your mind works better if you move and if we can get these kids early on to to to think of movement as breakfast it's vital

like it's it's part of what you do like if you don't do it you don't you know you're you're gonna have uh you're gonna have problems um every so why do we have kids move because we want them to have a full life why do we have them work out Because we want them to have a full life. Why do we have them work out? Because we want them to have a full life. Why do we take PE out of school? Well, it's not a good idea for us to do that. Yeah, what you guys are mentioning, I've always kind of referred to the gym

as being artificial exercise. It's just because we don't have to do, we just don't have the same human demand that we once had. We can shop on Amazon. You get our groceries and everything delivered right to our front door. So you just don't have to do as much. And so it makes sense. Like we got to offset, you know, some of the things that are going on, you know, people are on their phones a lot. People are playing a lot of video games and stuff like that.

And I think those things, I personally grew up playing some video games. I don't have any problem with it, but there's gotta be some sort of balance to it. All right. There's no problem with the, with the screen time. The problem is what the screen time replaces. Right.

That's, that's a great way of putting it. Well, that's not me. That'd be my, that'd be my, be my wife. She says,

there we go. Yeah. She's sitting over there going, son of a bitch. He just stole that from me. I'll do it. I'll do it all the time. Yeah. And then take, just take full credit. Absolutely. Why wouldn't I? What about, uh, you know, building leaders inside the gym? Is this something that

you guys teach too? Cause you guys probably got to be really good at that in terms of like maybe poking and prodding certain people to do certain things, uh, so that it would drive the rest of the group. You know, Louie Simmons did that a lot. Louie Simmons would be like, Oh, you know, so-and-so you know, benched five 15 for five reps this morning.

And then he'd just walk away and you're like, Oh man, I've got to hit five, five 17.5. That's right. Yeah. No, it's all about building culture.

Right. And creating a culture inside of the gym where everybody wants to be looked up to. And, and I think as the coach, really, if I think back to when I was inside of, you know, organized sports as a, as a kid, what I wanted from my coach was recognition. And I think every kid wants that, you know, every single kid wants to be recognized by the coach. They want, they want that pat on the back that you were talking about. Right. And so that's it. That's a huge thing, but you only give that pat on the back as a coach when you get what you want so that you build the culture that you want inside of your gym. That's how we get kids to move. Well, it's, it's they, they, they, they,

they start moving, whichever one of them is moving. Well, I pointed out, right? Like, and SEMA, dude, you got your knees right over the tops of your, your, your toes. That was perfect. Good job on driving your, your knees where they need to be when you squat. Everybody look at in SEMA. Oh, that makes me feel good. You know, it does. When you're eight years old, you're like, dude, I am the king of the class today. You know, you start shredding around, but it builds that culture. Right. And then all of a sudden you start getting these kids that are leaders in the class in terms of the culture that you want to develop. I know you've got some pretty good stories in

terms of, you know, transitioning from me inside of the class to Duncan and his friends, and then eventually the, the last group that we had. Yeah. I got a couple of stories. I got a bunch of them. No, you know, I think that was interesting that it isn't just the culture. It is what the coach does. And I think that's what Keegan was kind of referring to. What do kids need? So like one of the things I would recall that we would do that I thought helped kids was early on. I would start to do like,

so we'd go about, we'd do the squat. So every time, every day, you know, I know it got repetitive, but I wouldn't go over what the squat should look like. And I don't care if,

and I try to, and I try to figure out different ways of explaining where the hips should be and where the knees should be and what you're trying to accomplish. And I would every, so every time we're doing a squat in the workout, we're going to have that explanation. And then we go through and we teach the squat and everybody would gather around. We'd all go through the squat.

We'd make minor corrections, then trying to involve the kids. So, Hey Keegan, come on out here and teach the squat. And then Keegan would go through teaching the squat and, you know, Duncan come out and teach the squat. Sophie come out and teach the squat. So maybe two or three different kids coming out and teach the squat. Sophie come out and teach the squat. So maybe two or three different kids coming out and teach the squat. And they had the experience of public speaking, the experience of being leaders. They had experience after they'd done it a while of trying to make up their own.

Like, okay, well, I heard him do it this way. I want to try to do it this way. That's the process of developing them outside of just, look, you're squatting well. Let's try to develop them further beyond that. Give them leadership. We would do things like make them almost like he was talking about being leader of the class. Try to catch Keegan on the run. Hard to catch Keegan on the run.

See who can keep up with him. Not anymore. Not anymore. It's easy to catch Keegan on the run, hard to catch Keegan on the run, you know, see who can keep up with him. Not anymore. It's easy to catch Keegan on the run now. If it goes further than three yards. Yes. But the first three yards, that's really fast. You guys mentioned earlier the study room that you, that you used to have at the gym. And I thought when I went down there and you guys showed that to me, I was like, Oh my God, I'm like, this is great. And so how did that work?

What did you, what did you guys do with that? Well, it started off with really just a study circle. Like I would just tell the kids, bring in the, when we started seeing that research that you, you guys talked about that, you know, exercise impacted BDNF made it made learning easier. I said, well, why don't we try to see what we can come up with here? And so I had the kids bring in homework that was in the class that they were doing the worst in. And I'd just get them in chairs and sit them down and say, okay, bring that in. And they'd sit there and they'd do their homework. And what was cool was, you know, one kid's bad at math and their kid was good at math.

They'd start to help each other. It was awesome. And then we took over our second suite and we had this extra room. I said, well, why don't we actually, I think it was Mickey who said, again, I'm going to give her credit. Um,

don't want to get in trouble. Don't want to get in trouble again. Um, uh, and you know, she just designed a workout or a homework area. And then we did that in that, in that specific room.

So we had, uh, you know, whiteboards in there and, uh, desks in that in that specific room so we had whiteboards in there and desks in the in the room and then eventually we said well we had a teacher who who um and we said hey you want to come in here and be a tutor and we tried that holy cow that was amazing that's kind of the progression of how that started to you know kind, kind of went through. Yeah, that's awesome. And then in terms of like nutrition with these guys, I mean, that must be a tough area to try to cover with kids. They're eating French fries and they're not eating breakfast and it's a real hard thing to unpack.

And then you got to talk to the parents a lot, I'm sure, right? Yeah. So kind of the concept of ego that we discussed, uh, earlier, it's the, the same thing applies to nutrition. There's three, three pieces, right? You as the coach have to lead. Um, like if they see you walking in and you're chugging, you know, chugging an energy drink and, and, and eating a bagel, you know, like they're, they're going to copy you. Um, you know, if you were walking around and you're snacking on, on goldfish all day, they're going to, they're going to copy you. Um, you know, if you were walking around and you're snacking on, on goldfish all day, they're going to, they're going to try and copy you. So you got to lead by example. You got to do exactly what you want them to do. Um, and then you got to start with

education with the parents and kids are going to be kids, right? So every once in a while, you know, um, they're going to want to eat birthday cake. They're going to want to have candy on, on Halloween and you got to allow for that stuff. Um, so really what we try and do is we try and we try and, and, and have kids leave our program with a better concept of what food is and how to utilize it as fuel for their bodies. So it's, it's rather than, you know, like trying to get them to prescribe to anyone diet. It's, you know, this is a protein. This is what it does for you. This is a carb. This is what it does for you. This is a fat. This is what it does for you, you know, and teaching them about food and how to

utilize it and what, uh, what amounts to eat it in, um, really goes further for us rather than saying you can't have these foods. Cause what we found is that like, you say that to a child, the first food they're going to have when they can get their hands on it is the food that you said, hey, you can never have soda, right? At such a young age, if they're already making better decisions, I mean, they're going to be so much better off than the general public. Tons. So when we were raising our kids, we went through a really strict period,

like, okay, that's kids, we went through a really strict period, like, okay, that's it. No more sugar. And, uh, kids revolted. Oh, they did. So only I revolted. So I'm, I'm, you know, being a good parent, uh, kids go off to school and I go into my, my, uh, older kids rooms, Connor and Keegan, and I toss the room. So I'm going to, you know, I'm looking for everything that, what could they possibly

be into? I want to make sure that having a military dad must've been great. Yeah. It was awesome. It was awesome for. So I'm looking for everything. What could they possibly be into? I want to make sure that – Having a military dad must have been great. Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome for him, I'm sure. So I'm tossing the room. And we've just bought the new beds. And I toss Connor's bed over.

And I look at it. Okay, cool. And I toss Keegan's bed over. And there's a hole in the bottom of this box spring. My God. And I go, shit. Because I wasn't in class. I wasn't in kids' class. So I could, shit. Because I wasn't in class, wasn't in kids' class, so I could say shit.

And I reach into this, in there, and I find a bag. Oh, no. God, what am I going to do? And I pull it out, and it's a huge quart-sized bag full of gummy bears and jelly beans and things. Jolly Ranchers. You sat on the bed and cried for three hours, right? I was so upset. He's on gummy bears. No. It was a creative that. So I went downstairs and I got a bag of

almonds and fish oil and I dumped them into the thing, put it back and put it back in the bed, turned it over. That's great. I was pissed. I came back. I was like, put it back. Welcome to the Martin's house. house that's a that sounds like a nightmare almost yeah so did you talk about base build and boost yeah so base build boost that kind of matches up with we we we kind of talked about our uh explore express and excel groups right and and how those stages of development are really what we try and follow in terms of the kids progressing through our class. We have three terms, base, build, and boost in terms of talking about their nutrition. And base is just food identification. It's just teaching them what food is.

That's really it, you know, because kids nowadays, like you hold up a picture of a pizza, they'll be able to identify that, right? You hold up a picture of candy, they'll be able to identify that. But you show them a picture of broccoli and it's like crickets. They have no idea what it is. So it's just food identification, teaching them what food is, you know, and then you start digging into macronutrients inside of your build group where you're discussing, you know, what proteins do for your body. You know, what fats actually do for your body. And you can actually even, uh, we we've done this a few times where we've, uh, cooked for the kids inside of the class and had them try some foods after class. Um, talk to them a little bit about

what, when they should be eating those foods, all that good stuff. And then, uh, boost is where you start to individualize it. Just like they're, they're, uh, programming with weightlifting, you know, for your goals, this is what you're going to need in terms of your macronutrients, um, and what you should target hit. So it's a really slow process, you know, just identifying foods. This is what food is. This is the foods that you should have all the time. These are foods that you should have sometimes. And these are the foods that you should try to, uh, use as treats, you know, and then slowly morphing that into how can you utilize food as fuel? You mentioned, you know, the, the parents and the parents, especially with the younger kids,

they control the diet. Right. And the problem is often that, um, cooking and is how parents and, and show love. And so coming to somebody and going like, you know, dude, you know, pasta every night? Not so good. Well, now you're telling your kid, don't love your kid because I can't, you know. And so it's really a minefield, talking to the parent. And so we would involve in the older age groups

when we start talking about the boost group, when we would do little half-hour talks when we, when we do a do, uh, you know, little half hour talks on nutrition, we'd invite the parents to come in too and have them sit there. And we're not trying to say you're doing it wrong. We said, look, this is the best way to do it. You know, and we divide carbs up into vegetables and then that other crap and, you know, have that discussion. Like, you know, you can have some of this other stuff. Just don't make it the main part of the plate, right? And then it wasn't so focused on what that parent is doing.

Right. And then you guys doing it at your house probably helps a lot because then you can go in and talk about strategies. You know, hey, we cook up, you know, when we cook, we always cook a little extra. We have leftovers for the next day day like all that kind of stuff all the little it's those little things that people i think people always just think everything's gonna be so hard and so to give your kid like two nutritious meals every day is not hard no it's again that's a low bar yeah and they can have you know one they got a snack and they have you know they're gonna have whatever they

have with their buddies and there's gonna be some things that are outside the box, but breakfast and dinner should be fairly healthy. It shouldn't be too hard. Yep. We made, um, you know, just as a family, you know, I used to get up, go down the hill at four 30, go to work. And I work my, I work for biotech and then come up, open up the gym, work out, you know, work in the gym, bring the kids to the gym, have them come in with me. They were there until we went home. And then we always had family dinner. And even so, even if we got home at eight 30, our kids still sat down, we had family dinner. And I think there's so many

times now with kids being overscheduled and parents being driven, they, they forget that, that that's such a key component. Look, if we're all going to, we're all going to sit down, we're all going to sit together. We're not going to drive through Jack in the Box, grab you a hamburger on the way home from soccer practice. We're going to sit down and we're going to have something. So scheduling out how you're going to do that may take a little time, but it's really important to the quality of the home as well as the child growing up. I think that's huge.

And I think that that's kind of a forgotten piece when people talk about nutrition. I mean, that is a very healthy practice, you know, because when you're talking about, you know, how to put these things into play, if you actually kind of enjoy it or if you start to like it and everyone starts to get a rhythm down and now it's abnormal for you to not have that. And something disrupts that. You're like, man, we haven't we haven't had a chance to sit down and have dinner together. This sucks.

We need to figure this out again. We need to get back back in the swing of things. I think, too, like, you know, there's certain markers with with kids like, you know, most parents will tell you they kind of felt a separation when the kids start to get into high school. Like I kids start to close down. They don't open up as much. They're they're, they're trying to develop themselves to their own person, you know, and, and kind of break free from being one of one, you know, under your, under your wing, I guess. You'll never allow Keegan to do that. Nope. Not allowed to. No, he was, he was the first one to do it. But, um, you know, that, that family dinner time was a time where, you know where you're forced to sit there and I can ask you how your day is.

Good isn't a good answer or isn't a good enough answer. Let's have a little discussion. And you can stay connected. The gym was awesome because we could stay connected. I was still programming for Keegan at that time. And so there was that hour where dad is focused on, um, what he's doing. Did that ever get hard?

Yeah. I think there's a, there's a fine balance between coach and dad, right? Like, and that's super hard to find. I mean, you just might say something the wrong time at the wrong, wrong way or it might annoy you or upset you or, you know, totally. Right. He did that all the time. Yeah. No, but, uh, yeah, absolutely. I think there's that, that

there's a fine line of, you know, when to be coach and when to be dad and, and, and reading that as a parent is really, really crucial if you're going to be coaching your kid. Um, he did a really good job of it, but yeah, there's still times, you know, that you can think back to and go, oh man, that was hard, you know? Um, but I think as, uh, from a, a parent's perspective and now being a parent myself going, okay, you know, separating dad from coach is that's,'s the critical piece you know you have there's got to be a difference and you got to know when as dad to step in and go like hey i'm really proud of you it's kind of hard because as a dad you are coached too you know so it's like hard to separate the two like in some ways you kind of are you're like a life coach you know

you're trying to coach them along and you're trying to uh give them the facts and then also allow them to make their own decisions. And also not be so soft on them, but show them that you love them and you care about them, but also be tough enough on them so they don't grow up to just get run over by everything. It got to a point where it was really separate between home and the gym. And that's where I think it was, it was perfect. The, the,

the balance between the two where it was like in the gym, he's coach and he treated me the same way that he taught, you know, all of his other athletes, which I appreciated, you know, it was like just another kid inside of the class. And then when you go home, it was dad, you know, you know, I really liked the way that you did this today. I'm really proud of you, you know? And having that separation, I think that's where, um, parents who are coaches are going to thrive. Very cool. Yeah. You guys ever trained together? Workout partners? Yeah. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. At this point, um, you know, it'd be more him coaching me.

Like, dude, your arthritic hip doesn't work that way. You need to do this this way now. It's kind of reversed. All three of the boys at this point have at one point or some way that Keegan is taken toward powerlifting. Connor, our oldest, is working as a competition director for a gym and programs for functional fitness competitions. for fitness, functional fitness competitions. Our youngest is studying kinesiology at San Diego State, wants to be a physical therapist.

He walked onto their cheer team, and now is the captain of the cheer team. They came in fifth in the nation this year. He's kind of the story of the kind of like this is what we wanted to produce. He – Got better as the kids got younger. Yeah. He didn't play sports. He like sampled sports when he was in elementary school, entered high school, decided he wanted to play rugby because if you're the smallest kid in the school, it's a good idea to play rugby.

you're the smallest kid in the school. It's a good idea to play rugby. And so, you know, we're just going like, that's when you step in as a dad and go like, you know, I'm going to talk to you about this decision. And he was like, I don't want to really play. I'm like, you know, you need to be really fast because they're big guys and they're going to fall on you. And so he played rugby for two years

and he, you know, six months in was, you know, starter on the team. Senior year said, I want to go out for track. I'm going, well, okay. So you were fast because you were the smallest kid in there. That's good. And he goes, no, I want to pole vault. So, okay, well that takes, right.

Okay, pole vault. So he made the county finals and the coaches are like, well, why didn't he pole vault all the time? He didn't, you know, why, why'd you hold him back? Well, I didn't. He just decided he wanted to pole vault. And then he went to San Diego state and decided, I, you know, I want to go out for a, he was going to go out. He was actually on his way.

He said to go try out for the rowing team. And then somebody said, try out for the cheer team. And now he's, you know, the captain of the team. That's crazy. Yeah. They, they, uh, they just finished fifth at nationals. Yeah. And he's captain of their captain of their team,

which was pretty cool. Cause it was something that he never done until college, you know. Do you guys have, so I know you guys focus on movement with kids. Are there different pathways for different sports? Because I know it gets more specific as the kids get older. But like if you have a kid that's like, okay, I'm concentrating on football. Another kid who's like, I'm basketball. I'm wrestling. Do you guys have like specific pathways and things that you do for kids that

choose to go to these sports? We don't like we, we, we don't cause we rely on the movement. But what we do is develop coaches who can individualize. And so like, you know, I would individualize Keegan with soccer player. know, I would individualize Keegan was a soccer player.

I'd individualize workouts for Keegan for soccer. We'd have basketball players come in. I'd want them, what do they need to do? They need to be quick and they need to jump high. So we're going to work on that within the workout for that child. We had, or all of a sudden played, or was a wrestler. So a lot of doing, you know, doing suplex with bags and things like that as part of the workouts and learning how to clean well and getting strong hips, those kind of things.

So yeah, you individualize for the individual child and what that child wants to be able to do. But the basic program is general. And then we're just going to – everybody's got a squat, right? Yeah. And then we're just going to like, you know, every, everybody's got a squat, right? Now, after the squat, you know, somebody that's going to wrestle might want to do, you know, lunges with a bag, you know, something like that. So that's might be the other accessory work for that, for that day. you know, if we have cleans in the workout, the wrestler might get like, you know, bagged ground, bagged ground to overhead and over the shoulder as the clean in his workout.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. And Keegan, I'm curious because this is interesting. How old were you when you got your first phone? Sixth grade. So, but it wasn't, it was so different than a phone now. Yeah. Right? Like mine had, it was one of the uh razor like nokia no it was a nokia deal um like the battery would last like seven days like regardless of what you did you could throw it it had one game on it do

you remember that snake game dude it had that and that was it yeah right that was the only game on it and uh so i used it to call people, which I didn't like to do. Cause I was an awkward sixth grader. So it was like, you know, you used it twice a week. Yeah. Mom and dad are like calling you to, Hey, I'm here at the school to pick you up. That's it. Right. And then that transformed into, okay, now I've got the, the razor or like that one that flips. I had that one. Um, so you can kind of be grumpy like us and you can be like, I remember back in my day. Yeah, exactly. Um, but it, it transformed. Right. And so like all of a sudden I'm in high school and I didn't even have a iPhone. I didn't have a smartphone until junior year of high school. Me neither. Right. And so it's like, I didn't

even have that until I was almost 18 anyway. Yeah. So yeah, I had one when I was in sixth grade, but it was completely different. Yeah. And the same here. I got my first phone, I think when I was like 15 years old. Yeah. But the thing is, is like, I have young cousins, like they're six and seven. They have smartphones and tablets.

I see these kids walking around all day long like this. Right. I was playing soccer and all this stuff. So you guys definitely probably have to deal with some challenges with kids that come in and they don't know like how to move. How do you and what do you guys see with that? Are there like challenges now that you haven't like seen in the past? Everyone's posture is all messed up. How long do we have?

Let's go so ready so 30 seconds look that's not long enough look uh five uh you know five years ago six years ago um things changed because what kids got was the internet in their pocket you know and like what you guys were talking about you know you had you, who was on the, on the speed dial on the phone, mom and dad, and, you know, and your brother, that was it. Now they've got the internet and what we've got is, um, you know, movement wise, we're seeing kids come in who are quote unquote athletes, kids who played sports. They're unable to do just common things. Like they can't lunge. They can't get up off the ground with one leg. You know, the knee folds in the backgrounds and they have to push off with their arm, with their arm.

And you try to get them, you can't do that. You can't, they can't skip. And now it doesn't sound like, why do I want a 12 year old to skip? Well, that's a common movement. And if you can't do that, how can you, how can you shuffle sideways or shuffle forward if you need to, you know, you missing common human movement. And, and like, I like to think of it as a, um, as a library, like you've got this vast library of human movement and what we've done with the kids because of what's going on in the, in our culture is we've torn up their, their library card. Like they just simply can't access this common, common movement. And on top of that, you have things like, uh, Kelly talks about Kelly Starrett talks about, and you know, they just, their, their posture is all wrong and you can't start a movement. If your head is, you know,

if you're, if you're going to deadlift and your head is stuck in here and you can't get your body in a good position, you're, you're doomed. And now you're going to take that kid and put him into sport. So, so we've got huge problems. Our, our program has had to start to address things like the bear crawl. Like it used to be like bear crawl across the room. Now what we've got is kids who can't hold their bodies, you know, with the weight of their body in a bear crawl position, you have them, have them ankles collapsed down so that they're going on the inside of their instep when they're going forward. It's like the most bizarre thing.

And so we have to teach them how to do it. So you've got a 60 year old guy on the ground going like, take your left hand, put it forward, take your right foot, follow it. So we're going to tie yarn on your hands and we're going to teach you yellow yarn for right. And it's really, really tough. And on top of of that though you have kids who don't have pe sitting all day in school kelly addresses that killing juliet addressed that too um you have this head forward posture you have uh shoulders rolling in and so now we're having to take where we where we didn't have to do mobility work with six-year-olds before we're having to go like, look, your head needs to be back this way.

This is how you're supposed to stand. And we need to open up this, this area. And, and it's, it is, it is a cultural thing. And it's, and unless our culture starts to address that kids need to be outside playing. And we're not saying don't, don't, don't have the games at home. And I was saying, don't have the phone. Just if the kid is going to school and not, not doing PE coming home and being on his phone, you're going to need to do something. And that, that is pretty dramatic, pretty drastic because you're replacing

playtime with screen time. But that's common, right? Like that's the common issues that we see nowadays. We see the, the, the pronated ankle, we see collapsed arch, we see, um, tight spinal erectors, tight hip flexors. We see, uh, the, the head forward that like T-spine rounding, right. And tight, and tight tight uh pecs and anterior delta internal rotation that's normal now because of all this right like if you think of the average day of a child inside of the u.s it's atrocious it's nasty dude like they they get up out of bed they they go sit downstairs and they have um sugar right then they get a ride to school they sit at school all day and they get sugar from right? Then they get a ride to school. They sit at school all day and they get sugar from their teachers. And then they go to the lunchroom where they have

processed carbs. And then maybe they go to recess. Maybe, right? We don't know. It's all that stuff's being cut and they're spending more time in the classroom. They go home, they get a ride home. They sit on their phones, they do their homework and they eat dinner with their family and then they go to bed. That's normal, dude. And if they have access to the internet, I doubt they're even going to bed. Right. And then they have access to their phone. Or at least not well.

In their room, like they're going to be up. At least not well, right? Right. Crazy. crazy pe back when i was going through pe you know i the 60s 1960s um the uh we had a pe teacher and the pe teacher exposed us to things like gymnastics track you know so we learned to shot put you know in fifth grade i wasn't good at it but i you know i learned how to do it i learned how to do the hurdles we learned how to vault in gymnastics we learned how to had a trampoline that they brought but I learned how to do it. I learned how to do the hurdles. We learned how to vault in gymnastics.

We learned how to trampoline that they brought in. We learned how to do flips on the trampoline. We learned to climb ropes. We learned the rings. And that was PE. It wasn't about us getting fit. And that's the problem. It wasn't about us getting fit. And that's, that's the problem. It wasn't about us getting fit. It was about us being

exposed to how to move so that we could take advantage of everything of, of, you know, um, all of that movement and apply it out when we played sport or when we, you know, the hope was that we'd grow up and be active adults. Um, that's taken out. Now what you have is you have the, you know, fourth grade teacher who may or may not have any interest in athletics or sport. And she's told you need to run PE for the, for the fourth graders, um, two hours a week. Well, what's that person do? Go outside, um, run around the track for 10 minutes, run around track for 15 minutes. That's it. for 10 minutes, run around track for 15 minutes. That's it. We have lost this ability or this teaching process. Physical education was a teaching process,

and it was something that people chose to go into. With physical education now, the teacher is, let's do some ball sports because that's what's been mandated. Let's go do ball sports and nothing wrong with that. But if you're in the basketball block and you hate basketball,

there's nothing, I'm just not engaged. So. You're not really going to learn anything at that point. Right. Because you don't care about it. Right. Now, if you learn how to learn anything at that point, right? Cause you don't care about it. Right now, if you learn how to move well and you can play basketball and we play basketball

as part of a block, that's awesome. But, but the, you know, my, my, my perspective, PE needs to be reintegrated into, into schools. People need to understand that the PE teacher is a critical piece of children learning that, that they need to be honored as, you know, like you wouldn't say to a, to a algebra class in high school. Okay, guys, if you come here and you are, you know, have your, have your shirt on and your pants on and you're sitting in class, you're going to get a C, but you do that with PE. Like, dude, you show up and you kind of walk around the gym. You have the right clothes. Yeah. I have the right clothes on. You're going to get a C, but you do that with PE, like, dude, you show up and you kind of walk around the

gym. You have the right clothes. Yeah. Have the right clothes on. You're going to get a C that's, that's, um, denigrating the importance of the profession, physical education teachers. Have you guys ever presented this to any schools? Sure. Is that something, is that something that you guys are trying to work on to get, uh, it to get a lot of these concepts into schools? Very much so. We've worked with the San Francisco School District, worked with a couple school districts in Illinois. And we have a lot of teachers who have gone through what we're doing with our program. with our program. The, um, we can affect a lot of children's by, you know, children by having training centers, having come through the gyms, but we can affect a lot more if PE teachers see

the value of what we're doing and pick it up. Uh, we're having this month, we're starting a webinar with, uh, with one of our labs, um, lab in Tennessee is run by, Tennessee is run by Dan Quisenberry, who was voted the PE teacher of the year last year for Tennessee. So we're having a webinar for teachers, and we're just going to have that a monthly webinar where he gets on and addresses how to implement the program within, you know, how to implement functional fitness, how to teach it within a PE environment versus, you know,

from elementary school to middle school to high school. Yeah. I think people lose out on the part of PE. Yeah. It's supposed to educate you, right? Right. Physical education. You're supposed to like learn and you're supposed to progress.

Right. But it's just really gone backwards. It hasn't, hasn't made any progress. It's gotten worse. And you think like, um, I realize that people get a little frustrated when, when people are kind of, uh, forced to do these requirements because the, you know, there's, these are particip participation trophies nowadays, but what if just everyone was required to, uh, you know, complete a certain distance on the track and things like that. And it progressed more as you went along,

or, you know, just things like that, where it's like some sort of progression that we can kind of see, uh, you can clearly see it in math and you can clear, you start out with addition and subtraction and you progress onward from there. Uh, and you can clearly see it kind of everywhere else, but there's, there's not like phases to physical education. And, and for some reason, we feel like, or our culture feels like, if someone can't achieve this, then what we need to do is move that bar down and we lower the bar.

And what we found in our gym is the more we raise the bar, the more the kids strove and more kids achieved. And you'd go, kids would do amazing things. And they'd find uh self-confidence because like wow i couldn't climb a rope now i can climb a rope and i worked at that and i got that and that was awesome um but it's also culture and when that's where they start to thrive really when keegan was reaching those goals when keegan was in high school um when we first started the functional fitness thing our kids started just breaking

the records in the high school. So there was like, in fact, my oldest son, our oldest son, Connor, him and his best friend broke, I forget what it was, the sit-up record, something. And the athletic director said, it's impossible. Made them repeat it and they broke it again. But Keegan went in and his goal was to beat their pull-up record in the presidential physical fitness or the physical fitness testing. So he went in, he broke their record and then kept going. And next year comes up in the physical fitness test, Mickey went to help.

And so where's the pull-up test? We're going to do a hang this year. Well, why are we doing a hang? Well, because last year Keegan was on the bar so long that other kids got embarrassed and didn't want to try it. Well, shouldn't you have used that as a teaching opportunity to say, look what he can do. Can't you strive for that?

That should have been the teaching point. And what we've done, I think, as a society is go like, well, that's stellar. Somebody else was felt bad. So let's just lower that down. And, and that's not, uh, that doesn't raise good quality adults who are able to deal with, I mean, life's, you know, there are people who are better at than you at things in life. Yeah.

Almost no matter what you do. Right. Right. Well, for me, yes. Like, I think a big part of society today, we're trying to find ways so that kids don't fail. Right. Like failure is a part of life. But that's like that's not why we want kids to fail, but we want them to fail because there's so much learning that can come from failure.

Right. There was there was a quote by Sumner Redstone. It says that, you know, success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. And sometimes it's built on catastrophe. And I think that's totally true. I try to apply that when I'm coaching kids. And now when I'm teaching trainers to coach kids, you know,, there has to be some sort of failure at some point and they, they are going to fail, but, uh, staying away from that really what you're doing is you're setting them up for failure in their adult life, right? Because you're going to fail in life. It's going to beat you down at some point, right? You're not going to be successful

at everything you try. Um, so giving them a taste of failure in a safe environment to, to, to fail in inside of the gym is, is a, is a way to learn in itself too. You can't imagine like not, especially like just like not having that experience when you're younger, like avoiding it at all costs, because if you're an adult and you never take risks at anything, that would be just a scary life to live. But that's the life we're setting them up for. Right. Yeah. That's the life we're setting them up for. Think of your worst failures.

Some of those times can be the biggest catapult to success. Right? Because you look back and you're like, wow, that really beat me down. But you know what? It made me better because now I wanted to go out and achieve, you know. It's a pivot point. It's something to move off. It's a catapult, right? It really is. Um, when, you know, you mentioned like a rope climb and I'm thinking about like running and different things. And sometimes

we put people in a category and say that they can't do it. So I'm sure you guys have had people in the past that, that really struggled with something. What would it look like if somebody wasn't able to do a rope climb or wasn't able to run a mile? Would you just say, Hey, look, just run whatever way you can run. If you got to walk, walk it, you know, whatever, whatever way you got to do it. How would you guys approach some of that stuff? So, uh, like scaling options for, for kids, let's take the rope climb. For example, it's, it's always about what they can do and putting them in the position where they can move perfectly and still have it be difficult. That's always what we try to do is make it so that they're still training hard, but they're still performing perfect movement. And you want them to progress.

Yeah. So you have different scaling options, which are really progression. So you have a kid who's, you know, five foot six, 245 pounds, and he can't climb the rope. So you have him lay down on the ground, bring his legs up close to his body, and he can just pull himself to standing. And we're going to use that. Then maybe we're going to have him sit on a box, anchor his legs and stand up and hold on to the thing so he can figure out how to anchor his feet and how he can then use his feet and legs to stand. It doesn't have to be just his grip. And then maybe we teach him how to hang for just a second, pull his feet up and then anchor

again and then climb a little bit. So you have these little bitty successes and little bitty progressions. And we do that with everything. And that's how, you know, cause it's, it's not important or it's important that you don't just go walk away and go like, well, we're climbing and you're going to have to go do something else,

you know, go bench press. Cause, cause, cause figure it out, figure it out. But it's important to give them to acknowledge the failure. Look,

that was tough. You didn't make it, but then give them a way to success and give them a pathway to success. And that's really where you start to build a character of like, I can work hard at this. It may take me two years, but if I work hard at it, I'll finally be able to do it. And rope climb is one of those things that we just kind of use because it's always that thing that you see in the movies, you know, like, ah, you know, a kid up with it halfway up and pees his pants because he can't, he's afraid, whatever. And, um, but it's, it's, uh, you know,

it's important that they, that they have hard things that they see, that they see hard, uh, difficult tasks that, that they see that they fail. And it's also important that we give, we provide them a pathway to success. One thing I've always loved about lifting is that, um, for the most part, you know, just if you're an able,

able body human being, then you can, we can all lift together because of this. The scaling is just the weight, you know, you just, you're just going to use less weight, you know,

a thousand pound squatter can squat with someone that squats the bar. And it's got to take weight on and off. I mean, that's all it really requires. It might take a little bit more time and it might not be super convenient, but at least you're doing the same thing. And I think that there's something really awesome about that. So when we're talking about training kids, that probably plays into it to some extent when they're doing some of these, you guys mentioned doing some of the basics doing the bench the squat deadlift things like

that when they're doing these movements they can obviously you want them to work out in groups so they can push each other but one kid can look at it and say man i really stink at this exercise i can only handle having two and a half on each side and look at some of these other monsters they got four plates on each side but i'm doing the thing. Like they can recognize that they can see that very clearly. Yeah. And I think one of the least talked about benefits of the program that we run is mental resilience for, for, for kids. You know we build resilient human beings, people that are able to understand failure and see that they can work hard at something and then achieve it or be successful.

Um, and, and listening to the kids cues, you know, they say things like that all the time, you know, I suck at basketball, but it's because I can't, I can't jump super high. And now you, as a coach can approach them and go, Hey, let's work on your jump. If you jump super high, you'll be better at basketball. And they know they have a path forward. Right. Um, and, and sometimes it's all about listening to what the kid is saying, taking those cues and breaking it down into something that's manageable for them so that they have a pathway to success, you know? Um, yeah. So that's, that's super powerful. You can really change the internal dialogue, you know, by showing them that they can make progress. They might say rather than them automatically saying, I suck at that. They might say, I'm not that good at that yet. Yeah. That's way different.

It's temporary, right? It's not, it's not permanent for them. It's something that they, they know that if they work hard at it, it's, it's temporary. It's not, it's not a permanent, you know, I'm always going to be bad at basketball or I'm never going to bench press this. It's just. Talk about for a second, Keegs, talk about like going to bench press this. It's just what it is right now. Talk about it for a second, Keegs. Talk about locus of control because that's really what that is about. Yeah, locus of control is a term that experts in their field use. It defines how you see experiences, right, whether they're internal or external. And I think a lot of us nowadays, specifically kids, place blame on everything outside. They don't see that there's internal

inputs to experiences as well, you know? And I use the example, you know, if you think back to the hardest time in your life, maybe, you know, a loved one died or something like that, or, you know, you think back to that experience and give yourself a rating from one to 10. How well did you move through that experience? 10 meaning it didn't bug you at all. The next day you woke up and you were fine or one being it still crushes you to this day. But you think back to that hard time

and there's external inputs as to what happened and there's also internal inputs as to what happened. Maybe you're beating yourself up because you didn't give them a call the day before. Maybe you didn't make the drive, the two hour drive to go and see them, you know, that, that week prior to them passing, like that there's, there's internal things, but there's also external inputs. And, um, locus of control speaks to how internal or external somebody places blame on experiences. So you got kids inside of your class. Our goal is to develop a healthy locus of control, meaning that they understand that there's both inside and outside, you know, feeding into how they're doing.

You know, you'll get kids inside a class that maybe they're playing dodgeball that day. They think that they're like the best dodgeball player in the world. They're pegging everybody or they're catching all the balls in their mind, but you know, they've got a teammate that's, um, the best player on the baseball team, you know, and they're just like, they walk away thinking that they're the best, but you know, you have those discussions as coaches, you know, to actually bring them back to reality in either direction, whether they think the world's out to get them or they think they're the worst or, you know, you gotta, you gotta be in tune with that as their coach too. And we talk about that inside of our PYCC as well. Pretty in depth. Have you guys noticed anything, uh, like maybe kids that

may have, I don't know, depressive type disorders. I just remember when I was younger and I started lifting. The reason I started lifting was because of my injury. But after that injury, after I had Osher could slaughter and it messed me up, I went to very very dark place and when i was able to start going to the gym and working out it literally changed my life from that point do you guys see a lot of that in terms of improvement with kids that may have mood disorders people may call it that mental health issues yeah more of them lately than in the past. But movement helps. Moving helps.

And what happens to a lot of people when they're depressed and upset and they see that the world is a cave is they stop moving. So you get someone to the gym, just the act of moving, just the act of being around other people and being engaged begins to help. And there's literature on that. There's tons of white paper on that. What comes to mind right away is somebody in a hospital. Somebody's in a hospital bed, and even if they just don't move for a day,

they're already getting a lot of anxiety. A lot of depression starts. That's the saddest scene in every movie too, right? The person in the hospital, that's the sad scene. And the thing they get excited about is walking down the hallway. Right. Like I got to walk down the hallway today. They're pumped. And, and then you take a, um, immature brain, you know, you're 13 years old, you're 14 years, your, your, your, your nervous system doesn't finish. It doesn't finish growing until you're 25, 28 years old. And the, the, the, the part that makes good decisions is the part that is the part of

your problem is the part that is the part that develops last. So you've got a 13 year old, you've got a 13 year old kid who's had the thing that, that defined him. I'm an athlete taken away from him. Where, where's the kid going to go? Yeah, that's really tough.

So a kid who's hurt his knee can come in. He can start to do pull-ups. He can start to do bench press. He can start to, you know, pushups. We can, we can get you on,

we can get the kids moving and get them getting stronger. And they start to go on like, you know, pushups, we can, we can get you on, we can get the kids moving and, um, get them getting stronger. And they start to go on like, you know, 13 years old, they start going like, look, I got guns, you know, I'm because a big deal, right? Yeah. Like I'm starting to, I'm starting to be bigger than everybody else. I can do more pull-ups than anybody else in the class. Why? Well, because you couldn't walk because you had your, your own crutches, but that was

all you could do. But, you know, we can provide ways forward and we can provide things that kids for kids to find success in. And then, you know, they can kind of work their way out of that. What about, you know, so many kids are injured. You know, there's the injury rate is increasing all the time and you you see it a lot with with females. What's your take on like, why, like why a lot of young females athletes are getting hurt and injured? Yeah. So, um, that's a huge issue, right? Like, and, and that's one that like, everybody wants to talk about,

you know, um, athletes and, and, and, and how, how good it is to have an athletic kid nowadays. And that might be true, right? Like they're doing more than the average kid, but there's, there's, there's opposite ends of the spectrum, right? You got the average kid. We talked about the average day in the life of a kid inside of the U S right. They're basically sitting all day. So you've got tons of mobility issues, right? And then you apply that to an athlete.

Okay. So now this kid's been sitting all day. And then at the end of their day, they've got two and a half hours where they're doing repetitive motions, maybe poorly. So you've got huge motor pattern issues combined with mobility issues. They're worse off than the kid that's been sitting all day and maybe not even moving. Because they're trying to ask their body to do something that it's not really truly capable of. It's not capable of it. And maybe under high stress because it's like a sport or something like that it's not capable of it in many ways right like it's not capable of it in terms of their movement it's not capable of it in terms of their strength you can't express what you don't possess yeah right it's a quote from one of our friends and

i'm not gonna kevin dawn you know it's it's it's very it's very true and and so now you're asking someone to express something, and Keegan talks about this, I think, beautifully in our courses, is that you have a kid who doesn't possess the requisite movement patterns, the safe movement patterns. He's also been sitting all day. He's got mobility issues. And you say, okay, go out there and play soccer.

What's going to happen? Oshkod slaughters is the best you know it's a it's a great scenario because what's what's coming down the pike it's a lot worse yeah yeah and and uh you know what comes to mind for me is just over the years just hearing the different dialogue people have developed you know to try to explain some of this stuff is uh you know these athletes, they may grow pretty tall at a young age. And then also with females, they have the Q angle, the knees are kind of slanted inward from where the hip is. But kind of in both cases, you end up with longer limbs, basically longer arms,

longer legs. And that leads to a lot of shoulder injuries and leads to a lot of knee injuries. But the truth of it is, is neither one of those things are actually causing the problem. What's causing the problem is exactly what you guys mentioned, was the fact that they don't move very well and that they're not strong enough to handle the body that they have. So the height is making everything a little bit worse because it's harder for that person to move because they have mobility issues, perhaps. But the real problem is they just don't know how to move well.

As a teen trainer, somebody training young teens, 12 to 15 years old, you have to watch out for that growth spurt, the peak height and weight velocity when that occurs. And you need to understand that when that occurs, kids will become what you call uncoordinated. And so then they become unsafe under load. So we need to back off the weights. We need to lower, work on the movement patterns. But that's a short period of time. You know, back in the day, kids would go through the growth spurt.

They'd be awkward for two, three, four weeks, five weeks. And then all of a sudden, bam, they're back on the field and they're just fine. You know, now you combine all of the things you talked about earlier, plus the, the, the growth spurt and you've got real problems because you've got basically, you've got, uh, you know, a kid who's going like, well, now I've got a new body. I didn't know how to work the old one, you know, I got it now. And, and, and it potentially changes on a weekly basis, right? Which makes you as a, as a teen trainer, it's, you know, it's really important. You got to look look at each client and go like, that's not just one kid. That's 100 kids because every time that kid comes in the gym, they're going to be different. So you can't just go, well, last week Keegan squatted 225 by 5 and it was awesome. So Keegan, go grab the bar, load 135 up and warm up. You've got to go, let's get you under a PVC. Let me see if you can get depth.

Let me see what happens when you're doing, you know, when you're a few reps with PVC. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, you can, you know, you're moving well. So now I know that he's got the ability to move through the range of motion that I want him to do and keep himself, you know, unloaded that way. Now the only thing that's going to be affecting him is the load because. you know, unloaded that way. Now the only thing that's going to be affecting him is the load because, but, um, you know, this is, uh, problematic because these kids have been, uh, all, all the problems you're, you've talked about, then they get specialized in the sports. So they're only doing that one sport. And now you've got, uh, them launching into their, uh,

their growth spurts and they're playing sports in a way that even professionals aren't. So they're playing 365 days a year. Professional sports, they have to take it off season. And you've got these kids playing 365. They're playing five nights a week. They're playing two hours a night as a practice and they play tournaments all weekend long.

Just standing back from the problem, what do you think is going to happen? What's a way that you guys get some people to progress with range of motion? With these young kids coming in, let's just say it's day one for a 12-year-old kid that comes through the door and uh you guys are talking to him about these different movements you want to have him try i'm sure there's like a little bit of an assessment that you kind of view and you get a an idea of what what they how they move and everything how do you get them to move better is there a lot of stretching involved or how do you get better mobility depends on the age group butegan mentioned earlier, I'll let him talk about progressions and things,

but that we start really with learning how to brace, learning how to neutralize your spine. You know, internal stability provides the structure for external mobility. Yeah, and we've seen that demonstrated in some of Kelly Sturette's seminars where, you know, Kelly would show someone's hamstring length. He'd have them lay on their back and he would, he would move their leg around and their, their hamstring length wouldn't be that great. Their, their mobility would be

very limited. He would teach them how to breathe. He'd teach them how to brace and he'd move their leg and it would increase right there on the spot. You ever seen those copper bands? Like somebody will put a copper band on you, all of a sudden you're- The crowd would literally go, wow. You know what? The hamstring didn't get longer. But the body said,

you know what? I can let it go further because I'm now protected. And then, you know, we have progressions for, you know, every movement that we go through. We break them down

into what we call movement skills and movement skills are their static portions of movement that can't be broken down any further. Um, they can be done in a held, uh, position. So bracing, um, hinging at the hip, uh, external rotation of the femur at the hip, um, you know, these types of things, they can't, they can't be broken down any further, but they're foundational to every other movement that you're going to try either inside a sport or inside of the gym. And so we, that's where, that's where we start. And we start that at a really young age, but we also start it whenever they show up. So if we have a 14 year old that shows up, guess what we're learning today? We're learning how to control

your breathing, control your spine, and we're learning how to hinge because that's going to apply to nearly everything else that you do. And, and, and we might do that in the form of the squat that day, but we're going to limit range of motion so that he can perfect those movement skills inside of that movement itself. Does that make sense? So it's like, it's a progression in terms of, can you perform these movement skills throughout a full range of motion? If the answer is yes, then we start to load it. And then all of a sudden, when you have kids that have been practicing these movement skills, doing it perfectly, applying it to movement patterns, all of a sudden you can combine

movement patterns into really complex movements, load those movements, and they're going to just excel in terms of their athleticism. And on top of all that, is there some stretching that still goes on after training or before training? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The stretching itself. Yeah. Because we have all those issues, you know, just based on their their lifestyle now, you

know, kids are they're sitting all day. So you've got common issues that need to be addressed. And so, yeah, inside of what we do with the Brand X method, all of our classes are we prepare the kids, we practice movement, and then we play. And that looks different for those different stages of development, you know, our Explore, Express, Excel. But inside of Prepare, you know, yeah, there's some stretching. And there might be stretching after class or before their practice as well, based on their sport. But inside of Prepare portion of every single class,

we stretch. We, in the teen years, the Excel years, we divide the classes up into, um, conditioning and strength classes. So we have a strength class, which might have a little conditioning afterwards. And we have a conditioning class and might have a little strength in it, but, um, you know, typical strength classes, you know, we, we have the 30 kids, we have the 40 kids, we know what they, what their problems are. So we've assigned, you know, typical strength class is, you know, we have the 30 kids, we have the 40 kids, we know what their problems are. So we've assigned, you know, this kid's got some dorsiflexion problems. Come in, I want you to do some work on your ankle before you start. So that kid's got some individual five minutes of individualized mobility. Then we go through a warm-up.

And then it's just a standardized warm-up that goes through all of the movement patterns and warms them up for lifting. And then we do five more minutes of generalized mobility work. Then we do our lifts. Then we do our accessory work. Might do a little bit of conditioning piece that involves like a prowler push and farmer carry or something like that. And then generalized mobility as well. For what did we do that day? We did deadlift.

Let's do some lat stretch and some thoracic spine mobility, something like that. I think an important piece that we, we try to include inside of our training often is just putting kids into positions and having them stay in that position. So for instance, the bottom of the squat, right? Even just a relaxed position. Why? Because new range of motion is weak range of motion. And so if we're, our goal is really to get kids strong so that they're safe and they can apply it to whatever sport or, or, or move throughout their life that they choose. Um, then we have to put them in them in those positions eventually. So it's not that we're avoiding a full range of motion. What we're avoiding is doing it dynamically or under load until they're ready for it. We'll

put them in that position with just their body weight and we'll have them sit there and struggle. You know why? Because they need to, um, they need to open up that way. Yeah. The only strong position they're strong in is, uh, looking at their phone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Their body's ready for it at all times. They're there because of the movement problems, because the lack of movement, we're seeing people who are kids who just have dysfunctional movement patterns. And I mean, and then, you know, with the, you know, increasing obesity, you have kids now with coming in who are, you know, it was, you know, 10 years ago, we'd see the kid come in and it was,

you know, very overweight. That was unusual. Now we're seeing, you know, quite a bit, you know, 10 years ago we'd see the kid come in who was, you know, very overweight. That was unusual. Now we're seeing, you know, quite a bit. You know, most kids are a little bit overweight. I'm not saying that they're obese, but most of the kids coming in are, you know, could be moving more, could be eating better, and it's problematic. So we have to address mobility. In the past, we used to say that in the younger groups, in the express group, 8 to 10 or 8 to 12, and then the younger groups, that we would do mobility to build the habit of doing mobility. But now we're finding that they need the mobility. Well, saying to a six year old, wow, we need to do the couch stretch and it's painful and you're going to have to

sit there. You know, that's, it's a miserable thing to be doing with the kids, but we, but we are now having to do it because they can no longer, some of the kids can no longer, most of the kids can no longer open their hip. Yeah. One of the things I couldn't believe when I was working in high school, and this is, you know, six or eight years ago, somewhere in there was how tight their hamstrings were and how much that limited everything that they could do. I was going to go in and like train these kids and I was going to have them do the West side method. And I was, and then I, you know, started having them like move. And I was like,

Oh my God, I got to teach him how to move first. I can't have him like trying to lift heavy weights. They're going to kill himself. Right. Cause they couldn't squat down even, you know, a few inches above parallel without their back rounding over because the hamstrings were,

were pulling on their lower back so much. First thing he did was hamstring stretch with chains, right? That's right. And bands. Chain that puppy up and bands. Yeah. That was kind of a huge shock. I was like, Whoa, okay.

Like, are we going to take a step back here? I think the problem is, so you talked about the hamstring length. That usually happens after that period of long bone growth, right? Where they go through that giant growth spurt and then the muscles can't keep up. Yeah. And then, you know, they'll address it a little bit with some light stretching. But that's usually the only type of stretching that they do is that like hamstring, like posterior chain type stretching. Why?

Because that feels good and it's easy. And then it's like it's passive, right? You know, you can kind of fall into it. Whereas like that anterior chain stretching hurts, dude. Like it sucks, right? Like sitting in the couch stretch sucks. Why? Because it's a completely act.

Like you can't just sit there passively and let it happen. Oh, and trying to like open up and bring your arm up over your head and everything. Yeah, it's terrible, right? It's terrible. So like convincing a six-year-old now that he's got to do that is really, really hard, right? So man, your dad wants you to get a scholarship. You got to do a stretch. That's a lot of money on the line. Where do I put the band? And then you put the band on them and they, like angry birds, kids. No, let's not do that. But that's hard, right? Like that's a hard conversation to have,

but it's absolutely necessary to what we're doing. And I think that that is crucial in order to put them into the proper positions that we're asking of them. You can't actually get a kid into the proper position unless they can actually achieve that position. And so, yeah, absolutely, we start stretching. And we started out as young as three years old now because three years old, they might be super bendy. But what we've seen in terms of their lifestyle now is that it changes really quickly. So it you know, 14 years old, 14 year old, 15 year old boy who weighs 500 pounds.

And we were shocked to find out that kids, you know, that there was obese, then there's morbidly obese. And now they talk about these kids who are super morbidly obese. And now they talk about these kids who are super morbidly obese and there's no, they have no opportunity to, you know, to move because it's tough and their body starts to morph to change, to support the weight. And so how do you work with these kids? So we have these automatically talking about some mental disorders probably right off the bat because the kid can't be social. And I mean, it just puts them in such a bad position. Right.

It's, it's horrible. And, and, and they puts them in such a bad position. Right. It's horrible. And they feel badly about themselves. They're embarrassed and all of these things. It's a horrible situation. We had these doctors come to us from St. Louis and they said there's nothing out there to help these kids move. And so all of the weightlifting or all of the weight management programs out there

are designed around things like, okay, so get on the treadmill and run for 30 minutes. And we're like, you know, really, that's the best you can do. And the doctor said, you know, we want to design something. Can you help us design something? So we said, well, the first thing I would do is I would have them power lift. I'd have them deadlift squat bench press and maybe press overhead a little bit. You're like, I've seen Mark Bell do that and he's pretty fat.

Well, that was my, I did try to call you several times, but, uh, we're using your transformation photos. Yeah. So, so, you know, we, we built this program around them, uh them deadlifting, back squatting, pressing. And that was kind of the start of the program. Then we had to start to work on this dysmorphic movement. Like, you know, how do you get somebody who weighs 500 pounds to put his knee in a safe position squat well you let's start squatting to a 24 inch box with pvc oh you can't do it with pvc because

they can't get their hands here so now we've got you know a bar with bands on it so they can hold the bar here and they're sitting up and down with the with you know 24 inch box and you just slowly lower that over time um we ran a four month trial on the program it really went well we ended going to st louis um yeah we ran a power lifting meet for them that was pretty cool right and it was really cool because all these kids there was 13 kids in the trial run they were starting another one in like two weeks with like they're hoping for twice that number. But we went to this powerlifting meet and all the kids lifted and it was, they had probably 30 people in the crowd. And so I thought,

speaking of the mental state, first time these kids have done anything athletic where people were standing and cheering and you know, they're walking off, they'd squat and then everybody's standing and cheering. That's awesome. That's really cool. And give me chills still today to think about it. Young lady walked out and I remember she walked out and she said, I feel like I can lift the world today. And so that was awesome. It's an awesome change in their way. They think the program is called teen lift. And how can people find out more information about that? It's a Facebook page, Facebook page, teen lift. a fitness toolkit.

Right. It's fantastic. But these two doctors just kind of spearheaded that. This idea that what we want to do is get kids to, you know, we like what you guys are saying about moving well,

but how can we do that with these older kids or these kids who are overweight? And we were just like, well, running on a treadmill certainly isn't going to get them. If you're overweight, that's the last thing you want to do. Right. But you got to get some sort of success in terms of your, your athletics. Right. And that,

that brings us back to that story of Nick, you know, inside of our teens class, having that, that successful 300 pound lift at 13 years old, that set him on a different trajectory for the rest of his life because he had success there, you know? And these surgeons, they're, they're bariatric surgeons, pediatric surgeons who are now being asked to do bariatric surgery on 12 year olds. And they're like, we don't want to do that. Right. You know, they, they, yeah. Put us out of work, please. Right. That's really what they were saying. You know, the bariatric surgery is the only thing that saves these kids' lives. Did they run any tests on these kids? I mean, first of all, they must have had some sort of testing on them to know that it was safe enough for them to exercise.

So here was the cool. And then did they do any tests on them kind of afterwards to see like, uh, you know, how it increased their blood work or anything like that? Sure. They have these, all these kids. One of the things that I was told was that these kids came out of the hospital program. Great. Isn't that crazy? That was awesome.

That's pretty sweet, huh? He moved well too. Shoot. Yeah. So these kids, kids came out of a hospital program. And what was interesting is they have to go through this hospital program to get the surgery. And all these kids had come through the program and then quit. And they were, they were getting kids, they were getting like, I think 90% attendance rate throughout the entire program.

And these were kids who had quit the program at the hospital. So they, they do have, I'm sure they do have blood work and stuff on it. What's the, uh, like how, how do you guys see this like scaling over time? Like do you guys see like a, a brand X being on every corner and every type of school or what do you guys want to see? Yes, please. Yes. And every school would be great, man. I'd love for kids to be doing this nationwide. I think that would be beautiful. But, uh, in terms of our training centers, um, one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that our training centers mean a lot to us and we can't give individual attention to a million training centers. And so, and also what we've seen inside of the fitness community is that, you know, you give the opportunity to use your name, somebody pays you to use your name. Um, you know, we've seen it happen over and over again,

that, that people, you know, will train up underneath you as a coach. And then all of a sudden take half your clientele and open up right next door. Right. Um, that's something that we definitely don't want to have happen. And. Um, that's something that we definitely don't want to have happen. And we don't want to encourage that inside of our community. So our training centers have territories. It's based on, um, population of where they're at, but they've got a certain territory where, Hey, you know, as long as you're a training center and you're following our best practices, you're following our guidance and you know, you want to be a part of this with us, you want to run with us, then you're not going to have somebody step on your toes.

This is your area. We have monthly webinars. We have mentoring. We watch their social media, so we see what they're posting. And are the kids safe? Are you following the protocols that we've asked you to follow? you are then we want you to be part of us yeah this is so cool to watch so so there that's what we were talking about just limit the range of motion

um and you know they started with higher boxes you know they're you know these kids they got some challenges right but there's a lot of people people that aren't built that way that just can't move like that anyway, that are just at a desk job that just they've let their body deteriorate over the years. And they've had a lot more choices, a lot more opportunities than these kids. So that's pretty amazing to watch. You know, the thing that I think find, a couple of things. One is that I find the social stigma for these kids offensive. You know, that this kid who's, you know, 5'10", weighs 500 pounds, has chosen to be 5'10", 500 pounds. You know, it's not a choice. It's not because he's, you know. Yeah, they say fat and lazy. Right. That's not because he's, you know, yeah, they say fat and lazy, right? That's not okay.

You know, this is, these are kids who just, you know, genetics play a part in us and it's just, we've got everything stacked against them. So I find that, you know, let's, let's try to remove that from them. Um, secondly, we have some really good trainers there. Uh, being judgmental is not going to help. You know what I mean? Being judgmental against them is not going to help them. You know what I mean? to St. Louis. We did a little, um, two day seminar on movement with the coaches that did this. Uh, we have, uh, one of the, one of the,

one of the, uh, doctors went through, uh, Jose Greenspawn and Justin Harris. And they lead, he's a school teacher at, um,

uh, a school in St. Louis. And they went through school, isn't it? They went through the, through the program and, and understood that you don't

hurry people through the beginning process. And so what he got those kids learning was, well, where do you put your knees? Where you, when you squat, what do you sit back when you squat and let's, let's lift the box up high enough that you can actually sit back and you get to the place where you're sitting back and your knees are going, traveling out. Now let's lower down an inch. Let's lower down an inch. And you guys ever have those, um, you guys ever have parents that come and they're like,

I only want my kid doing conditioning cause I don't want to stunt their growth lifting weights. Do you ever deal with that anymore? I love that. Yeah. You still have to love that. Like we're going to have a bunch of really strong, short people.

Yeah. Only doors come out of Brian X. right? Yeah. Tell them about Cole. Yeah. Cole. Oh, that's a good story, man. He's a six, three. He's one of my training partners, um, coming through our program. So he started lifting with us. Um, Cole was really overweight when he started and he was like five, four, um, sprouted up obviously. Weight 235. Yeah, to 6'3", and about the same weight, if not a little bit less when he was at the end of our work with him.

At 15 years old, he pulled the California state record. It was just under 500 pounds. 15 years old, just under 5. Yeah, really strong kid. And I mean like 6'3", you know, at that age, you're not supposed to pull that that far you know yeah it's a distance yeah he had legs that were like this this long and his body was like this it was great perfect perfect for sumo deadlift right yeah perfect it was really interesting it was really interesting how have you guys over the years uh dealt with parents and how do you teach some of these coaches to deal with parents?

Like have you ever gotten yourself into like a predicament where a really overzealous parent was like, Hey, you know, you hurt my son or you, you know, I don't like them doing this or they got too sore or something like that. Uh,

sport parents, you know, kid, kid, you know, uh, playing, uh, you know, a game on, on, or a tournament on Sunday, Saturday, Sunday, and comes in and now he's sore and it's your fault. Well, um, to be fair, I may not appreciate the way that the coach is or the parents coming at me, but I do have to have to go that as a coach,

my responsibility is understand what my kids are doing. So if they have tournaments playing on the weekend, I should have been more aware. And that happens, you know, that happens rarely. But the, the idea, one of the things we talk about in our, in our course, and one of the things that we implemented so much in our practice was talking to the kids. So kids come in, you know, I want, you know, part of the requirement was that you come over, shake hands with the coach. And then there was a minute of us talking like, Hey, how you doing? What's going on? How's school today? What'd you have for breakfast? That kind of thing. And in that time I should find out.

I got a competition on Saturday. Yeah. Hey, got a competition on Saturday and- Don't kill me coach. Right. So you know what you're going to do today? You're going to do a little running. You're going to do a little bit of, you know, something else, light stuff. And we're going to do some mobilization. I don't want to take you away from your peer group and having fun with your, with your buddies, but we're going to do that on the other side of that. Um, we heard a story recently of a, I think it was sixth grade kids going to a water park. They're going to go to a water park on a, on a, on a Friday.

And one mother said, my kid can't go cause he's playing baseball on the weekend. You know, that's, that's insane, right? You know, going to go with my friends. My friends are having a party at the water park and my kid can't go because he's going to play baseball over the weekend. Well, that's insane. because he's going to play baseball over the weekend. Well, that's insane. Why we all do all of the sporty stuff that we do is so that they can go have fun.

There's got to be some metric on the insanity. One is that I do, if a kid's in my gym, I've got to have responsibility for him. On the other, it's parents. Let's back off here. And that kind of sweeps into we had kids who power lifted. Parents, you see power lifting parents

say, my nine-year-old set the national record. Nobody cares. It's nine years old. We don't want to necessarily need to rank all of our kids as the top 10 baseball players at 11 years old. We don't want to necessarily need to rank all of our kids as the, you know, the's a max effort, you know, deadlift day and everyone's going nuts in there. And a new parent walks in with their kid and they're, you know, kind of like, you know, as this, is this going to be safe for my kid? Like maybe their kids kind

of undersized and stuff. So they're real, they got some real concern, you know, is this going to be okay for my kid? How do you kind of explain some of that to them? Yeah, so that kind of ties back in with what Nsema asked, right? Like, dude, growth plate injuries. And that's like, you make a post on Instagram even now of a kid lifting a weight, and you get 10 people that comment like, oh, you're going to stunt their growth. I wonder where that is. It's one of the most frustrating things as a coach ever. Maybe because bodybuilders are short. So it started, uh, it actually started,

uh, a couple hundred years ago that researchers went into, uh, London and they, they measured the height of people in central London. They asked them, you know, do you lift heavy weights? The common answer was no. And then they went to the coal mines outside of central London. They measure the coal miners height. And, uh, the common answer to do you lift heavy weights was yes. Cause they're mining coal. Um, the coal miners happen to be shorter. They were hired because they could fit into the coal mines. And the science that went into that was, oh, if you lift heavy weights, you're going to stunt your growth. There was a study done where medical records inside of the U.S. were looked at between 1974 and 1990. And there was a series of six injuries due to weightlifting in kids to the growth plate, the epiphyseal plate.

Fractures to the epiphyseal plate happen because of acute injury. They don't happen because of repetitive stress. So things like car crashes, right? Or like if I slip and fall down the stairs, like, and I hit a land a certain way, it's an acute injury. It's not repetitive stress. All six of those injuries happened during a, uh, bench press or a overhead press. And so you can imagine the situation, right? A kid trying to

get swollen his basement, you know, which I could totally appreciate, but, um, having weight come crashing down on, right. You know, um, all six of those injuries were done without a supervision and they were done with unknown load. So the kid didn't even know how much weight they were trying to lift, you know. So that that that that argument is like super frustrating as a coach, you know. But I can totally appreciate from a parent's perspective, them walking into a class and going like, man, is this safe for my child? It's intense. So the answer is we turn Keegan loose on him.

That's that's cold. So the answer is we turned Keegan loose on him. That's Cole. Yeah. Jeez. That's at the Arnold. That was 430. No, that's 485. That was 485, yeah. So the other, I think the other piece is, you know, walking into the class.

In our class, we have four basically platform groups. There may be more platforms going on, but four groups. First group is our barbell prep group, and they're 8 to 10, and all they're doing is learning how to move. We have our rookie group, and they're kind of mimicking. This can be anywhere from 12 to 18. Everybody starts in the rookie group. I don't care if you're a 16-year-old, 300-pound lineman from the football team.

You come in. I got to know how you squat. Yeah. So you're going to start on the rookie platform. Those two platforms are generally just learning to move. So they're not lifting heavy loads ever. They're learning how to squat. They're learning how to pick stuff up off the ground. They're learning how to squat. They're learning how to pick stuff up off the

ground. They're learning how to press. And so we're doing high reps, high number of reps, low weights. Next group up is JV. They're starting to explore, explore weight, but you've worked your way through this. Now, then you have the varsity group and they're lifting heavy weights. We, in our gym, we had over 100 state and national records in powerlifting before we closed it from the team group. And so our kids lift heavy, but we never felt we weren't developing powerlifters. We were developing athletes. So we didn't do one rep max days. You know, our most kids ever did was a by three.

And then we would walk onto the platform and they would start with whatever their by three was, you know, on a meet and move up. So there wasn't really generally ever a one rep max day going on. You know, once in a while we would do it just for fun. day going on. You know, once in a while we would do it just for fun, but then one rep max to us was qualified by when does the technique break down? Not when the lift is broken. So if I see a kid lifting perfectly, his knees are in line and he's squats 300 and we go to three 25 and his knees start to wobble. I go, we're done. Right. Yeah. Because, because that knee wobble isn't going to get better when we go to 350. And then when we go to 375 and he finally stands up with 395 and he goes like, yay, it's a one rep max.

Ignore the technique. Well, I don't want to ignore the techniques. I know it started back at 305. And you just decided you were going to keep going up. So our one rep max was within tolerance of techniques starting to break down. And one of the things we always said is, you know, what changes with weight, speed, speed, that's it. You know, it seems like Brand X is going to be like our, uh, our Olympic development program. You know, China and Russia, they take these young children and they breed them to be competitors.

I feel like that's what you guys are doing. You guys are doing that in a much more humane way. They get to go home with their parents. They get to go home with their parents. You don't get to just put them on lockdown. You got any questions over there, Andrew? Yeah, I mean, it seems like to motivate kids

to exercise, you kind of almost don't call it exercise, right? At least for my daughter, I know if I say, hey, let's go to the park and do push-ups or At least for my daughter, I know if I say, hey, let's go to the park and do push-ups or something, it's like, I'm not going to do that. But if I say, hey, let's go throw your skates on, you know, let's go have fun and whatnot,

and then she's all for it. Have you guys, like, since you guys have been around kids so much and your experience, are there any, like, trigger words or maybe actions that totally... Yeah, well, I mean, well, definitely I want to ask that, but, like, that will totally deflate the kid, you know? Cause like, I feel like if I do, like, I'll tell my nephew, like, Hey, if you want to play video games, you got

to do like 10 pushups right now. And he hears pushups and he's like, I don't even want to play video games anymore. Right. You know? So is there something that parents should like try avoid doing or saying? Number one, using a exercise as punishment. And I think that's a huge thing inside of our culture nowadays that, that people do is like, oh, you did this wrong at practice. Go run, go take a lap. You know, you showed up late, go take a lap. You didn't dress out for PE, take a lap, you know? And that's, that's common now. And the first thing that kids are going to do is start to revolt against that specific exercise. Um, inside of the fitness community, you know, you show up late for class, it's, you know, 10 burpees, 15 burpees, whatever, how many, over many minutes you were late in

burpees, um, you know, using punishment with exercise, it's, it's going to pair those two things together for kids inside of their mind. Now that movement means I'm in trouble, right? Or if I have to do that to earn this, then I'm going to start to avoid that movement means I'm in trouble. Right. Or if I have to do that to earn this, then I'm going to start to avoid that movement altogether. So, um, the way you word things becomes really important, you know, inside of, inside of class, instead of, you know, if you get hit with the dodge ball, it's, it's not, um, you know, you got to move out and you're out of the game and you got to do, uh, 10 squats and then you come back into the game. It's you got to move out and you're out of the game and you got to do 10 squats and then you come back into the game. It's you got hit with the dodgeball, move to the left, do you get to do five, five

burpees and then you get to go right back in. Right. It's like a little incentive then to keep playing rather than, oh, you're out of the game and now you have to stay out. You got to do this exercise that you hate. And then you, you know, it's all a negative experience. So the way that you word things is really, really important. I think coaches too. I think it's very different between coach and a parent. So if you're a parent and you say, okay, we're going to go out in the garage, do pushups. The kid's going, I don't want to do that.

You know, Hey, come out in the garage. We're going to throw the ball around. And you know, every time we drop, I'm going to, we're all going to do pushups. So I'm going to do pushups with you or you're going out in the garage and and working out kids especially younger kids want to do what what dad or mom is doing they'll do it with you so you know it's the commercial stand up from the commercial we're going to do you know 10 squats and five push-ups the kids kids young kids will think that's fun. And then that's a habit they start to start to get into. You know, we had a bag hanging in the backyard. I'd hit the bag. Mike,

I'd go out and I would watch my kids. My kids were out there hitting the bag. You know, it's just, so there's a difference between being in the gym and motivating them and how you speak in the gym. And then there's a difference between being a parent and just living that life and being active. We go to the park. We kick the ball around. Every once in a while we drop and do five push-ups. Limit the number of push-ups you're doing. So you don't know.

We're going to drop and do 50 push-ups. Yeah. Yeah. We do. Six-year-old is doing his 50 push-ups so he can get back on the ball. That's not. I think it's really important to note that exercise pairs with whatever you pair it with. You know, if it's not fun for the kid, then exercise is no longer fun for them for the rest of their life.

You know, I can think back to, uh, when we were, uh, training high intensity and, and doing functional fitness. And even now, dude, you know, those, um, those clocks that sit on the wall, those red LED clocks, and it's got the countdown from 10 down to one. And once it gets to three, it's got loud beeps. It's like beep, beep, beep. If I hear those beeps, dude, my heart, even now, I'm not even kidding you, dude. Like my heart, I start sweating. Like I'm not even doing the workout, right? And like I have this like reaction to when I was.

And that's going to be forever. I know it. It's like PTSD almost from trying to push myself to exercise to the point of when I was puking. That's not fun, and that's not fun for kids. So putting that much pressure on them in whatever way, whether it's you've got to do this exercise, um, you know, using exercise as punishment, just understand that you're pairing that with it. Right. And that experience is going to carry through to the rest of their life. So that's really, yeah. Yeah. With my own kids, they know every time we go, you know, it's just 10 minutes from my house. Every time we go to downtown Davis that we're going to go on a walk, they are,

they know, like, we're probably going to go eat. We might get some yogurt, might get some frozen yogurt afterwards. But they know that there's going to be a walk after dinner every single time. It's just what we do. And we do it as a family. And there's never been a time where they, there's never been a time where they like really resisted it.

There's been a few times where they're like, oh, do we really have to go this way? Because they know I'm going way out of the way to make the walk a little longer. There's been a little bit of that, but I'm like,'m like yeah well this is the route to get to the yogurt you know yeah so that's that's so it's at the end of the trail yeah what about transitioning into like a resistance or strength training you know going from kind of playing games to get them to do a couple push-ups here and there to like hey today we're actually gonna try to see you know what what how

what your form is with uh like under a pvc pipe or something like that we utilize that as uh actually an incentive because what we found is that the kids look up to the older kids in the class that are on the barbells and and you know to take what what he was mentioning earlier you know with the intimidation factor of one rep maxes and and all all of that stuff, the heavy days, if a kid comes in and he's scared or mom and dad are scared with their child's wellbeing, um, that class is invite only. mature enough that they can actually pay attention during, during a set of deadlifts or a set of squats that they can listen and apply to coaching cues and that they can work hard. Right. So they start inside of our S and C classes regardless. So I think that's something to, you know, say too, is that that's, that's, it's invite only. But we use it as an incentive. All of the kids that are, that are young inside of our programs, they look up to the kids that are on the barbells.

They want to be them. Whether it's a young lady watching a female that she looks up to deadlift 300 for the first time or a young guy watching a kid on the platform squat over 400 pounds. Both of those kids are inspired then to get there, and they know the path is really clear to get there. It's an invitation to get under the bar. Like we don't start there. We start with block squats. We start with box air squats. We start with goblet squats, and then we slowly move into that.

And once they've shown that they can do those things, well, now we can get under the bar, but what they want. And then we go through that whole process of starting the rookie platform, go to the JV platform, go to the varsity platform. And, and, you know, as Keegan said, they're, they want to be the kid over here. Everybody wants to be that kid. And what we do is we start to pair the idea of moving well with getting more load. So by the time the kids get to the JV platform or the varsity platform, they walk off the platform.

The first thing they say is how did it look? Not that I missed, not that I got, look, I got the, I got the weight up. I did it five times. Like you asked,

it's always, how did it look? And the first rep has to look like the last rep. And if it, you know, other than they could slow rep. And if it, you know, other than they could slow down and if it doesn't, then you don't get more weight next week. So every kid wants more weight,

right? Right. Every kid down here wants to be these kids. So they're learning that they need to move really well and focus on that, which is a whole thing, which is a whole thing unto itself. I mean, if you've got a 12 year old teaching him to focus to us through a set of

five, you can't put weight on his back if he can't focus through the set of five. So you got to teach him not just the good movement, but also the mental mental state of from the time I approached the bar to the time I put the bar back in the rack, I'm on, I'm concentrating and you've got to teach them that.

And that's gotta be something that they walk off the platform going like, what did it look like? It looked great. Great. I get to go up two and a half pounds next week. And then you end up over here and then over here, we're just, you know, five pounds a week. Just you, uh, you mentioned box squats. You guys utilize box squats that kind of like a place where you start. And if so, why, why, why the box squat? So we talked about that, that concept of movement skills, right? Static

positions that can't be broken down any further. One of those positions is knee travel. Um, and what we found because kids tend to be, uh, tighter inside of the hip flexors and they're, you know, they got the hip tilt from sitting all day. Um, they tend to be a little bit more quad dominant in their, inside of their squats. And so one of the first variations that we teach them before we progress to an, uh, an air squat is just unloaded box squat. And we use the box as a tactile cue to get them to sit further back into their hamstrings and utilize it for support. Um, why? Because it's almost like a little bit of a balance thing. Yeah. Well, it's teaching them to gain strength and actually sit into that, that sit into their hamstrings. Well, the box is there to catch them, you know?

So it's a, it's kind of a safety net to get them to move at least in the right direction with their hips. Right. And so it's, it's teaching one of those movement skills. So with the younger kids in Mickey's class, they'll take a box that's just below the knee and they'll say, put the corner there and they'll put the kid's calves right up against the box.

And they'll say, keep the calves on the box and sit back. Well, your knees can't travel forward and continue. And so they'll lift the box up until that's what the kid can do. We can draw chalk.

We put chalk marks on the box too. So if the calves come in contact, you know, the kids will come off and like the kids can visually see, oh, I was able to keep my calves on because I've got chalk on my, on my calves. With the older kids, it's, you know, take a, take a, you know, six inches away from the box. I want you to sit, try to sit your, all the way to the back end or backside of the box, that kind of thing. But what it teaches them is to, you know, most of the kids have no idea what the backside of their body is supposed to do. And so you've got to get them sitting way, way back and it's a safety net. So as you transition into a regular squat, they're still going to drive the knees forward. I would imagine, right. Especially to like get below parallel. Yeah. At some point,

right. But it, you can, you can visualize it almost as, as an over-correction, right? We're utilizing the box to get, um, strength inside of the posterior chain, which they've never had and get away from excessive knee travel forward and a complete disengagement of the posterior chain. And in the worst cases, it's sit on the box, put your feet where you need to need to be, get your body in the right position. Okay, now stand up. Good. Now sit back on the box. Right. And really, it seems like very basic.

But if you don't start there, you'll never get there. Yeah. So many things can be addressed just by watching that because you can see the knees collapse in. And you could see them sometimes sit on the box and they'll adjust their feet almost naturally. And then they'll, they'll move their feet to a position that makes more sense for them. And then you have to kind of continue to tell them not to drive their knees forward, but for the most part they get it. And just like that video, they're allowed to have some, uh, deviation from like perfect form, which is great too, because when I was teaching people how to

squat, um, through these seminars, the, that was the hardest part was, and that's what shocked me the most was, uh, most of the dysfunction actually came from the upper body and not, it wasn't the lower body. Wasn't usually that big of a problem. Every once in a while I'd have tight hamstrings or hips or something like that. But so much of the dysfunction came from the upper body and they had to really tilt the body way, way forward just to get anywhere on the side. Because they have no strength back here. Right.

They got nothing to push into really. Right, right. And so if we start there, then when we move to the air squat, what we see is a lot less forward knee travel because now they've kind of got a hint, okay, I'm supposed to sit way back here. And so they'll start, and we would bifurcate the movement. Like, okay, I'm supposed to sit way back here like this. And so they'll start,

and we would bifurcate the movement. Like, okay, what I want you to do is I want you to just sit your hips back, now start to bend your knees and sit down. And so you really, they'd get, okay. And that would start to help the forward knee travel quite a bit. When they're doing that,

are they actually sitting on the box too? Or are they kind of like doing like a touch and go? Or just kind of depends on how far along they are? Yeah, it depends how far along they are. We'll get kids that when they get down to the box, they've got no support, so they just kind of flop, and then you'll see them kind of scoot their knees forward a little bit and then stand up, which is cool.

That's their starting point. We might need to raise the box up a little bit, and we'll also have kids that are just touch and go. And that's kind of where they're at for now. Um, ultimately we like to say, you know, sit about three quarters of your body weight onto the box. So they're getting a nice kind of deep sit into that full range of motion and then they're driving up, but they're staying engaged as they sit to the box is really what the goal is. I've always, I've always loved the box squad as a teaching tool, you know. And especially like without the bar in your back, you get to kind of put your hands out in front of you.

You mentioned a goblet squat, which is also a great way to learn how to squat because now we've got a counterbalance out in front of us. Our progression is block squat where they have the feet together and just learning to push their hips back and their knees out. And you go down only as far as you can keep your feet

flat on the ground. Then we'd go to the box squat. Then we move the air squat. And then before we load them, before we load them with a bar, we go to the goblet squat. And that air squat and goblet squat can kind of be interchangeable there. Cause you know, it's, um, if we found the goblet squat starts to fix problems too, because of the counterbalance. Right.

Right. And they're able to kind of like sit down in position and stretch it and which is something you pointed out earlier if you get them familiar with positions now they're going to be stronger in them right absolutely yeah yeah you know you mentioned the culture with brand x and like we've always seen lifting especially me when i was younger is like such a masculine thing to do you know and you're obviously working with a lot of young girls that are lifting and they're finding it just something normal. Have you noticed any type of like culture shift with the girls who work with?

Yeah, actually it was, you know, that's kind of one of our favorite things to kind of talk about is that, um, the young ladies, first of all, the young ladies, I, they start, they kind of, um, grab onto the lifting and they love it. And one of the things we've loved about it is that it changes their perception of themselves. It changes their perception of what they want out of the standard culture. So our young ladies are a little bit more muscular, but they can move more weight. They can do more pull-ups. They can do more. And they, and they, and they prize that over looking a certain way, which is

just such a more healthy way of looking at it. They, they view themselves by what they can accomplish versus, you know, what somebody says they look like or what they see in the mirror. Secondly, I think it's really interesting, the young girls, like 11 to 13, 14, if we get them in that age group, they start to mature a little bit faster than the boys. So they're a couple of years ahead of them. And what we see is that oftentimes there's a point where they're lifting more than the boys, their same age, they're able to do more pull-ups than the boys. They're same. They're running faster than the boys, their same age. And that does something when the society is telling them, look, you're, you're not as strong as, as men. They're looking at it going like,

well, no, I'm a lot stronger than the guys that I'm working with. And I think it does something to them and does something to the perception of their selves and something very healthy to the perception of themselves as they grow into young women. One of our young ladies now is training to be on our staff, Sophie. She qualified for nationals, USAP nationals. She's a competitor. She thinks she came in fifth, valedictorian for high school, first year at MIT. And I would never say that the program accomplished that, but I would say that she thinks about herself differently than she might have if she hadn't been in this program. She always looks at things and goes, well, I can do that.

You know, you hear her talk and she goes, well, I can do that. I can do that. I can, you know, want to try that? Sure, I can do that. I think that's more important than how much they lift, but I think it's a offshoot or a byproduct of them being in the lifting program. I think it's such a great thing that lifting teaches you. It's like, it just teaches you that you can do that and it may just take some time. It might take a little bit more effort. It might take you having more discipline towards a bunch of other things in your life to be able to get to that goal. And you can kind of rationalize, okay, well, what fits into my lifestyle? Can I figure out a way to get more sleep to get to that next 400-pound deadlift?

Can I figure out a way to have better nutrition? Can I figure out a way to maybe not go so heavy all the time or think of some other things in your training? And usually the answer is yes. Sometimes there's not room. Sometimes it's like to reach for stuff, sometimes you're overreaching, and that's where you can get injured, and that's where you can take a bunch of steps back. But for the most part, usually everyone can kind of agree,

yeah, I could probably do that a little bit better, and yeah, I could probably get that eventually. It might take a little while, but I can get there. And that's, you know, then the coach can remove some of that from them as well. Cause you know, it's our job to keep them safe. It's our job to keep them from getting injured. It's our job to keep them move, you know, progressing forward. How do we do that?

And then that's where individualization for knowing your kids starts to come into. And, and it's a different thing working with a 16 year old boy than a 16 year old girl. It just is. And you don't just go, I'm going to pile on the weight here and pile on the weight there. I'm going to understand what they need that day, apply it to them. And our program was very safe. I mean, I think we never had a real injury, pulled hamstring here or there. But weightlifting is extremely safe, and it's beneficial in almost all aspects for kids, I think.

Yeah, I think all experts are actually pointing in that direction, too. American Academy of Pediatrics, actually, they released a statement five years ago now that said that weight training or resistance training for kids is not only safe, but it's beneficial in order to keep them safe through sport. That's great. It's huge, right? Like all of the experts are now showing like, Hey, you know, this is what you want to do. It's not just, it's not just safe to do it, but it's actually what you want to do in order to keep your kids safe on the field, you know? Right. So that's huge. So you guys built up a brand, uh, and, uh, I'm sure that's taken, that's taken some time, taken some years, right? Um, but from like a business perspective, you, you build up this system and then you were able to help develop, uh, a system, uh, that was intertwined with CrossFit kids. Is that correct?

I have that wording of that right? Yeah. Right? And then you had many progressions. I mean, CrossFit's a huge company, so to be able to accomplish something like that is massive. And you guys have this gym, and you're working day and night, and you're kicking butt all day long, and you're working with a lot of people.

You're impacting a lot of people's lives. But just like with everything else in life, everything has a progression. You know, you start in one spot and you build something up and then you have to think about, you know, what's in the best interest of this company and of this brand. And so more recently you guys have closed the gym, right? Yep. And now you guys are, are mainly working with coaches and you mentioned the webinars and different things that you're doing and seminars and, and working with these, these kids as well. The, the heavier kids that were doing the powerlifting meet there. What has that been like? Cause that's hard to do. You know, it's hard. It was probably hard to close the gym, right? It's very hard. I mean, in some ways it's like, okay, good.

I don't have to work 97 hours a week, but at the same time, that's a hard thing to put away. There's that. But for me, for the 40 years I worked in martial arts and had a gym, 20 years we had the gym, I defined myself by that job and I didn't really, you know, like I, I understood that I felt like what we were doing was important and people needed to understand it. So I would go out and do the seminars. I never really liked standing in front

of people and talking. I just don't. Um, I liked working with the kids. I liked watching them progress. So shutting it down was a very emotional thing for me personally. I think it was the same for Mickey. Probably like, where the hell do I go now? Like, what do I do with my time? Well, no. There was a lot of stuff to do. I think it was emotional on another level is our kids grew up there.

Yeah. So like we, you know, it was just moving out of a house. Right. Yeah. And so shutting down the gym, like, you know, like our youngest was still in college and in San Diego. And he's like, well, where am I going to go when I go to Ramona? Why? What am I going to do? You know, well, you're going to go to Starbucks cause like everybody

else, you know, so it was, it was a difficult thing cause you know, our, our family was intertwined with that. But there was a point where, you know, it just, you know, it breaks you. So I, you know, the, the, the split we had and rebuilding the Brandix method, you know, we had no money. We had to, you know, we're getting contacted because we put good movement up on the internet with our, on our Instagram. And it shocks me to this day that people would contact us and go like, well, you know, we're looking at your inner, you know, looking at your Instagram and it's different than every other Instagram out there. Well, okay. Okay. And that's how, that's how we started to get people coming to us.

And it was a lot of hours. And the idea of how can we impact the most kids? What can we do that's best for kids? Well, that's always kind of been a driving force behind what we do. It certainly wasn't continue to work at the gym. It had to be let's build something that trainers and coaches can learn from. How did you come to that conclusion? Well, it was simple, right? Like it was we can either continue working in this town with a population of 25,000 or we can – It wasn't easy getting to your gym.

No, it's not, right? I remember that. I remember that. I remember that time. That's it. Yeah. Where the hell are we going? The moon. Yeah. Um, no, it was, it was, it was, it was kind of a simple, you know, simple decision to go, okay, we can, we can keep helping kids here and we can spend our time doing that. Or we can take what we know and what we know to be right to thousands of coaches, hundreds of thousands of coaches and have them impact people. And then your, your, your actual reach in doing what's best for kids grows exponentially. Right. So that's, that's where the shift was. And I think for me, like growing up, like they said, you know, it was, I was inside of the, I grew up inside of that gym. Um, and then I had the shift and the ability to, um, kind of change gears from an athlete

there to a coach there to also helping coaches outside. It's kind of been, um, it's been an emotional thing for me too, you know, cause I went from being inside of the class and knowing what it did for me, knowing what it gave me, um, and being able to actually give that to other kids too, you know? Um, so that was, that was kind of tough, you know, closing it down. And then there's a shift from, do we schedule, uh, seminars or do we do something online that's standardized? And you're like, you know, every time you do a seminar, you go, well, that was a great seminar, but I forgot to do this or I forgot to do that.

And I forgot to tell him this. So then it was, okay, well now we need to standardize what we're teaching, make sure that it's all out there. So we have this PYCC, which where we're standardized the principles about what, what we're doing. And then, then when we're done with that, we, they launch into the PYCC pro, which is a online thing. When we're done with that, they launch into the PYCC Pro, which is an online thing that's only open to people who've been through the PYCC. But it's all about implementation, hundreds of videos on how to get kids to move well and things like that. Now we can start talking about live seminars. So we have the Art of Growing Up Strong, our first offering. Before you move on to that, by getting, uh, by getting rid of the gym,

does it cut down on a lot of overhead or did you just incur more overhead because now you got to do these videos and stuff? It, it, it, uh, or just similar. It just cut,

it cut down on, you know, they're two separate things. They weren't the same. Um, they weren't under the same umbrella. So we had, you know,

brand X, the gym and we had brand X, the, the, the, you know, the global company, um, and I'm not the money guy. I, I, do we have enough money to eat this week? Sure. Good. I'm, I'm good. That's, that's about it. Um, you know, the overhead wasn't the, wasn't the consideration on my part though. The time was, you know, and then there was the emotional drain of you're building this global thing and it's going along really well. And then you walking in

trying to put your 30 hours into the gym as well. I see. You don't have the time to work outside the gym when you had the gym to build what you wanted to do. It's also draining. How much time? You talk about working with a client. Then you've got 30 teenagers. For me, it was 30 teenagers. And, you know, you were investing yourself in these clients. It's very difficult. It was really

emotionally hard too. I mean, it was like, you know, I'm just tired at the end of the week, but there was no end of the week because we had to work Saturday and Sunday because we're doing the gym. So really it was more a time investment thing. Yeah, no days off. There was no days off. And then what's the progression now? I cut you off there a little bit.

So you moved into coaching coaches and more of this online stuff. So we have the online, but then I'll let you talk about the art of growing up strong. Yeah, the art of growing up strong, really the idea behind that is – so PYCC is a, it gives a, the, the principles of the Brand X method, the art of growing up strong live seminars are going to give coaches the autonomy to choose what they want to, um, be experts in, in terms of, uh, kids fitness. So right now we've got youth barbell. We're building a, uh, explore art of growing up strong, which would be three to eight year olds. So if coaches want to work specifically with three to eight year olds, here you go, you know, uh, eight to 12 would be next. So express art of growing up strong,

Excel 12 to 18. So you've got all of these different age groups, um, or different areas of fitness. Let's say gymnastics, for example, which we're working on art of growing up strong mental health, which we're working on. Um, all of these, these areas and aspects of fitness, um, would give the coach kind of the ability to choose, you know, Hey, I want to be an expert specifically with working with three to eight year olds. And I want to, I want to learn about how to, uh, how to, uh, make them mentally strong as well. So I'm going to attend the art of growing up strong explore and the art of growing Up Strong Mental Health, you know, just giving them the opportunity and the options to choose expertise in their field now beyond the general education that you find in the PYCC. Cool. What are some other goals you guys have now?

You got anything in particular coming up any seminars or traveling anywhere or anything like that yeah we got seminars all over man we got uh actually going to australia for like three weeks in august you still do physical seminars yeah the live seminars that's what the art of growing up strong is um so we're going to uh argentina for uh a couple days in april we'll be in Ireland that same weekend. So we'll have two groups kind of coaching those. We've got one coming up inside of in Houston. We've got one coming up in Miami.

We've got one coming up actually three weeks. We're going to Australia later this year in August, you know. So those are popping up and all those can be found on the brandxmethod.com. So if coaches are looking to either, you know, learn a little bit more in a certain area, So those are popping up and all those can be found on the brandxmethod.com. So if coaches are looking to either learn a little bit more in a certain area, they can find those. And that might lead into interest inside of the PYCC too. We're working with the International Functional Fitness Federation to help their coaches know how to train kids, to help them define what a kid's fitness competition should look like.

Doesn't, shouldn't look like an adult competition. We shouldn't have three day beat downs, you know, eight year olds doing Murph. That's not, that's not appropriate. But, but we can have fun, you know, competitions where kids get, you know, markers on where they are and where they can move to and things like that. And so we're working with them to, to expand that. We're working with, uh, Carrie Walsh on her P1440 project. Um, that's been really, uh, rewarding as well. Um, that's kind of where the company is heading.

You're still keeping all the good stuff for the kids in the U S though, right? Like the secrets. Yeah. All of it. We need some gold. All of it. All of that. Only for here okay specific specifically um i think we we touched on a little bit but i'm really curious like because certain coaches are super analytical right they look at studies and when

you when you have to work with somebody especially a kid um i know you said you have like different leadership portions of the program but is that stuff do you feel that you have to work with somebody, especially a kid, um, I know you said you have like different leadership portions of the program, but is that stuff, do you feel that you can really teach individuals how to do that? Cause I know certain people who it would be extremely difficult to teach them how to motivate an individual, especially a kid. How do you really get into the weeds with that? Do I handle that or me? Go ahead and start. Okay. Go ahead and start.

I'll, I'll clean it up, dad. Um, you know, being analytical, you know, the science informs what we do. Yeah. And then we prove the science. Um, but the, the thing is, is a coach is a coach. And I think one of the, there's a couple pieces there. I don't think that you can – I promise I'll circle back to it. I promise I'll circle back to what you're talking about. But I don't think that a course can teach you to be a good coach, like teach the principals to be a good coach. And then you have to go apply it. And

that's what part of the mentorship process with the training centers is about, is getting in the weeds and telling somebody what I see, because I've been doing it for 20 years, and trying to elevate their eye, and then also trying to talk to them about how we would transmit this. and then also trying to talk to them about how we would transmit this. Some people aren't cut out to be coaches. Some people aren't cut out to program. You can't fix that. But for most people, you can talk to them about having, where do you start? Well, we start with empathy for the kid.

I have an individual child standing here in front of me. I want to do what's best for that particular child. We start with that. Well, if I have an analytical coach standing in front of me, I can say to him, you're working with a six-year-old. Talking to him about bone density and jumping mechanics is probably not what you want to do, right? Let's just talk to him about jumping and how much fun it is to jump up and down on this thing.

That may seem like a, um, like very easy, but it's really what, what you're doing is taking somebody on you as now, as, as the, as the head coach, taking another coach under your wing and providing him what you see in your, in your, taking another coach under your wing and providing him what you see in your, in your, you know, from your eyes and from your point of view, and then allowing him to go out and implement that. And I think that it really starts the, the, you, I don't think you can be a good coach unless you've worked with good coaches. I used to follow people around, um, in my old, old life. And I would just like, you know, I can remember the coaches like going like, why are you standing next to me? Well,

because I just want to hear what you're, how you're doing this. And I think that that's what we're trying to provide for the coaches in the mentoring process within our, within our training centers is give you the eye I have now from, from doing this, give you the perspective I have, and then I'll give you how I would deal with this. But I want you then to go out and try to implement it on your own. And, but as long as you have, I think if we start,

we start with the idea of empathy for the child, empathy for that six year old that you're working with, that that starts to break down that, if you're talking about an analytical coach, it starts to break that down. Like you realize you're standing here talking to a seven-year-old. That's just kind of bringing it back to what you said right out of the gate, right? Like science informs practice, but practice validates science.

And I think it goes both ways, especially in this industry. Like you can have all the fancy pieces of paper that say your name on them, but unless you've actually, you know, been in the trenches and done the coaching, it doesn't really mean anything, right? Yeah. And so what we're saying is like, hey, we've got all of the experience here and we're showing people how to do it. Um, that's all, it's all there, you know? Um, but until you actually go and put it into play,

it, it's, you know, all of your, your, your fancy pieces of paper are null. Um, so it's, it's kind of, it goes both ways. How many guys have you had, you've traded? It's like, they can't stick with a program. yeah it's a programming agd right like like uh you know i tried this and i and and it didn't work well how long were you on it i have three weeks well it doesn't doesn't doesn't it doesn't work you know and i feel like oftentimes especially with people coming into like coaching with kids that they kind of get like like that like they don't understand that if you have a five year old, you have got, you know, probably six to seven years before that kid starts to get loaded. You've got a long time to get that kid to move well, to enjoy moving, to think of moving as,

you know, as breakfast. And I, I gotta get to the gym. I gotta come in and do the gym. And if you take that view, you know, I don't, it's not really critical today that I've got your knee in the right place. What's critical is I've told you about it and you're jumping and having a good time. And then tomorrow I'm going to tell you about it again, and we're going to keep going for another five years. And then suddenly I'm going to put you under a bar and you're going to be a monster. And I think if you have that perspective and you start to give people that perspective, they have a very different understanding of how to coach when you're doing, when you're dealing with an adult,

they want to be under the bar and lifting heavy tomorrow. Yeah. Six year old doesn't, they want them to have fun with their friends. Yeah. Just the fact that you get conscious of it at a young age and they start thinking about it and then it'll be just ingrained in them forever. Right.

Where can people find you guys? What's the Instagram handles and websites and all that good stuff? We're the brandxmethod.com and at the brandxmethod on Instagram. Sounds super complicated. Thank you guys so much. It's been a lot of fun having you on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.