Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Jeff and Mikki Martin on the Right (and Wrong) Ways to Help Kids Get Fit

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

News flash: us Westerners aren’t exactly paragons of health and wellness. While it’s easy to blame our bloated body fat percentages and sedentary living on many different external factors, the reality is that much of what’s ailing us collectively has stemmed from the compounding effects of bad habits that began in childhood. And these trends aren’t getting any better. Kids these days are less active, less interested in physical activity and sports, and spend more time in front of T.V.s, computers, tablets, and phones than ever before. Their dietary habits aren’t any better, either, with less than 10% of teenagers meeting the minimum number of daily servings of fruits or vegetables. Many parents think this calls for extreme measures like micromanaging their broodlings’ every calorie and extracurricular minute in an attempt to save their kids from the pitfalls of modern living. This too often backfires and can lead to alarmingly unhealthy behaviors as the children get older and eventually leave the nest. And so parents wonder what's the right way of addressing this issue? How can we teach and encourage our kids to eat and live healthily in a way that will stick and become their own? I invited Jeff and Mikki Martin on the podcast to help answer these questions and more. They’re co-owners of The Brand X Method, a coaching program devoted to youth training since 2004. Through their training centers across the US, live seminars, and coaching programs, they’ve helped tens of thousands of kids learn proper movement patterns, improve their athleticism, avoid injury, and develop a healthy relationship with food. And in this episode, Jeff and Mikki share some of the key lessons they’ve learned over the years, including where to start when they're young, how to help them enjoy sports as they get older, how to introduce them about proper nutrition, and more. Let’s get to it! 9:40 - Why did they remove PE from public schools? 21:53 - How do we educate parents with new information about raising kids? 30:22 - What are some movement solutions that work best for kids? 40:40 - How do you approach nutrition with kids? 50:38 - Are there any supplements that you recommend for kids? 53:22 - What are your thoughts on omega-3, vitamin D and multivitamin supplements for kids? 58:59 - Are energy drinks and caffeine intake becoming an issue with teenagers? 1:00:47 - Should teenagers stay away from caffeine altogether? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Head over to www.LegionAthletics.com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will

save 10% on your entire order and it'll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States. And if you're not, it'll ship free if your order is over $100. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Hello, Mike Matthews here and welcome to Muscle for Life. And I have a newsflash. Us Westerners, old and young, are not exactly paragons of health and wellness. are not exactly paragons of health and wellness. And while it is easy to blame our bloated body fat percentages and our sedentary living on just getting older or entering the workforce,

the reality is that much of what is ailing us collectively boils down to the compounding effects of bad habits that started in childhood. Kids these days are less active, less interested in sports. They spend more and more time in front of TVs, computers, phones, and the like than ever before. And their dietary habits have gotten worse and worse with research showing that less than 10% of teenagers meet the minimum number of daily servings of fruit and vegetables. And some parents that are concerned about these things think that this calls for extreme measures like micromanaging their broodlings every calorie and every extracurricular minute in an attempt to mold their kids into surefire winners. That also often backfires and can lead to alarmingly unhealthy behaviors as

the kids get older and eventually leave the nest. And so many people out there, many parents out there wonder what's the right way of tackling this issue? How can us parents teach and encourage our kids to eat and live healthily in a way that will actually stick and become their own? Well, that's why I invited Jeff and Mickey Martin onto the podcast. They answer those questions and more, and they know what it takes firsthand because they are the co-owners of the Brand X Method, which is a coaching program devoted to youth training. And they've been doing this since 2004. And through their training

centers across the US, their live seminars and their coaching programs. They have helped tens of thousands of kids learn how to move right, how to be better athletes, how to avoid injury, how to eat better, and basically how to enjoy being a kid without ruining their body. And even better, while improving their body and setting themselves up for a long, healthy, and productive adulthood. And in this episode, Jeff and Mickey share some of the key lessons they've learned over the years helping kids get and stay fit, including where to start when they're young. So I'm talking, you know, when they're three, four, five, six years old, how to help kids get into sports and enjoy sports, especially as they get older, as they mature into teenagers, how to introduce kids to nutrition and how to get them more interested in eating well

and more. I hope you liked the interview. Hey, Jeff and Mickey, thanks for taking the time to come talk to me. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, this is something that I wanted to do because I guess first and foremost, I have kids. So what we're going to be talking about is something that now has an even more personal element for me as opposed to a problem that's just out there. Now, fortunately, I haven't run into any problems yet in terms of their health or their fitness, but they're young, and I want to try to keep it that way. And then there's also, though, there is the fact that the problems that a lot of kids are currently faced with will eventually become a problem that

affects me, if nothing else, just in the way of rising healthcare costs. And just the fact that if we live in a society where more and more people are unhealthy and sick and not doing well, that just unfortunately drags everything down. It would be great if we could live in a society with a lot of healthier, fitter people. And of course, that starts with childhood. And then these are all things we're going to get into. But even the habits that kids develop or are encouraged to develop by their parents can really set the stage for their future health and body composition and eating and exercise habits and so forth. So I thought it'd be great to get you two on the show and talk a bit about where things are currently at and just share some of your key lessons that you've learned in helping kids get and stay fit and do it in a way that is healthy physically, mentally as well, without pushing kids too far or pushing them to do things that they shouldn't be doing. And I've touched on a little bit of this specifically with weightlifting in teenagers, but I haven't really gone beyond that. So if we're talking about

younger kids, I haven't gone into it because I haven't, just don't have experience with it. I haven't looked into the research. So I just haven't chosen to just leave it as like, well, I'm going to find somebody who knows this stuff better than I do. Cool. I love that you see it, Mike. Not everybody even sees it. They just sort of take the state of things as the way it is, and they're not really observing and seeing patterns of what has been changing and how that's affecting the future. And then the need there for intervention and serious intervention, at least in this country, we see it worldwide, but we definitely see it here at a scale that's unacceptable. And you mentioned healthcare costs. Obviously the most, I think what people have a big

awareness of is type two and obesity and that moving downward in age and what that's doing to our children's health. We are involved with a organization called Teen Lift, where we're making great change in that area. And that's something that is important to the future, that we can address this with kids. We owe them more than just letting them slide into ill health because no one's paying attention. But for the majority, that's a huge and important thing to think about. But the thing that I think is less, people have less awareness of is that, kids are on their devices, and so that's the problem. Well, really, it's not the device. It's what they're not doing that they would otherwise have been filling time with. kids climbing trees, hurling themselves over walls, kicking the ball around, finding something to play with, learning to cooperate with other kids just through organic play, having no rules,

learning to adapt. Those things are essential to not only physical capacity through life, but they're essential. They're finding that play, that socialization is essential for mental health we have a huge problem developing with anxiety in the youth and they're looking at what are all those reasons well a great portion of that is lack of play so you're going to hear my voice change because that's so sad to see that we're allowing we're allowing mental health problems now to come out of lack of movement exposure and playfulness and those things that really are essential to a full development of a human, mental health, physical health. The Brand X Method focuses on progressive physical literacy.

We start at the very base. We want kids to learn to be able to interact with whatever environment they're presented with and be excited about doing it to come up with a movement solution to the problem presented in the physical world so that's a big picture what we're doing looking at addressing some of the issues let's look what society looks like or what a typical day of a child looks like now. They get up, they have maybe a cereal for breakfast, then they're driven to school. So they drive to school rather than maybe walk like we did maybe 20 or 30 years ago. Drive to school, sit in class. PE has been largely taken out of many schools, elementary schools. I didn't know that. Why is that? Well, at least what's the purported reason for removing PE? Yeah, that really started back in the no child left behind. We want to spend the

time in the classroom, not out here. And then, I mean, we can get into this because I think it's horribly sad, but finish the day for the kid. PE has been taken out in our little town where we lived for 30 years, Ramona, that one of the schools had actually said that on recess, not PE, but on recess, the kids weren't allowed to run because it was dangerous. So what did he say? Yeah. Nuts. Nuts.

So now you take the kid and you say, go out, but you're not allowed to run around the track or you're not allowed to run because so let's- Whatever you do, don't be a kid. That's the key. Right. Exactly. So now you have these kids who are they sat all day at school they come home and now they're on their electronics while they're going outside and playing or they

have a tremendous amount of homework now where they have to you know do two or three hours of homework and you know sixth grade and guess what they're sitting and they're sitting so and then you take that kid and you put him in you know at 13 years old and he says i want to play high school football well he's ill prepared for high school football. From our perspective, we see what we've seen over the course of the last 20 years, in the last five years, kids coming into the gym who've lost common human movement. We look at a library of human movement that a child should be able to come into our gym with or into play with. And it's like kids have lost their library card. A kid who's 12 years old can't skip or cannot jump, take off with two feet and land with two feet.

Can't do it. And you have to go back. And our program then had to start, as Mickey was saying, our program starts to have to adapt to what we see in the culture. And we're seeing that we have to address, well, how do you teach skipping to a 12-year-old? How do you teach side shuffling to a 12-year-old? It's even as far as how do you keep both feet flat on the ground?

We're having to move the bar back constantly because of lack of exposure and the depth and breadth of lack of movement exposure. So, and back to the PE topic, you know, PE is not, a lot of elementary schools don't have PE teachers anymore. Then you move into the middle school and high school and PE is ball sports. So, a child doesn't have the requisite strength and physical literacy to, to excel at the ball sports. Yeah. And that's the end of sports for them they go just this sucks i can't even skip loss of motivation loss of motivation it's a huge problem so what we try

to do with kids that come into our gym is teach them that movement is part of life that everybody can learn movement and they can see movement problems and movement solutions so like climbing a rock is a climbing a tree would be a movement problem that you have to provide your own movement solution to things like that, that we want kids to see and begin coming out of our gyms or out of the Brand X Method training centers as kids who see movement as important as breakfast. So, you know, if you don't have breakfast by, you know, by two o'clock in the afternoon, you're hungry. If you haven't, you know, if a kid who's come through our program hasn't moved in the day by two o'clock, they're going like, I got to do something. The importance of movement and play applies to adults, too, really.

I mean, it applies even more so to kids. But most people listening would probably agree with that, just instinctively go, yeah, we all know it's important to just move around. And then as far as play goes, although maybe our version of play changes as we get older, anybody who has taken it out of their lives for some period of time, and I've done that myself, where for an extended period of time, I've really just worked and there weren't really any activities that I did just for the sake of enjoying them, even though maybe some aspects of my work I enjoy more than others, but it's different. It's different when you're on deadlines and you have to get things done. It's nice if you can kind of enjoy the process of doing it,

but that's not the same as some activity that you really just enjoy and it's kind of unstructured and there aren't deadlines and there aren't even necessarily goals. It's just something that you do because you enjoy it. And yeah, I don't know if there's research on this per se, but I know there are quite a few anecdotal stories out there from people. The ones that I'm thinking of were people who were entrepreneurial types and kind of type A work, work, work people who over time just developed more and more symptoms related to anxiety. And we're just having more and more trouble in their day-to-day life. And one of the things that worked the best for them, again, I think of a number of cases of

people who had written up stuff on Medium and other websites. In fact, one person even wrote a book about it, was play, was just taking up a hobby that they do just for fun and making sure that they make that just as much of a priority, even if it's just one time slot a week, that they don't sacrifice that to do a little bit more work or something else that is not fun. And in the cases of adults, it's made major changes. And again, in a few cases, like completely eliminated feelings of anxiety. So, you know, you can imagine, and we can all think back to when we were kids, you have a lot more energy and everything is developing. And especially as you start going through puberty, your body is like supercharged with hormones.

You know, there are even interesting observations that have been made about what you do in that period of puberty, especially in boys, in terms of your body composition can kind of set the stage for the rest of your life. You know, there's epigenetic things in play, things that we probably don't even understand yet. And so it'd be fair to assume that there also are going to be other developmental factors that can just completely go awry if you don't do what comes most natural during that period. And that is not sitting and playing Xbox six hours a day. Exactly. You start hitting on things that are important for adults with play,

but Mickey, you can talk really good to this or really well to this about what kids get. You talked a little bit about mental health, but what kids get out of play that is critical to their development, that if they don't get it as youth, it shows up. You mentioned research. It's a field that's blossoming and it does go way back. Stuart Brown is considered the father of play. Anybody who has any interest in this subject, go look at the TED Talks. Someone else, a very current, Charlie Hone, and he's talking about what you just discussed in the adult world and what's been missing and the connection to anxiety and happiness,

really. What we need to know about play with children and the developing human is that the reason for play, sociologically, way back, there was a researcher named Carl Gruss, and he did some studies on animals and socialization of animals, and he was watching them. Why do they play? Well, they play as practice for life. So it's easy to imagine

this. You see a lioness and her cubs, what are they doing? They're chasing each other, they're biting each other, they're tackling each other, they're practicing for their lives. That's how we track down our prey, right? So it is not any different for other animals. And they found that the more a species plays, the more evolutionarily successful it is. That's mind-blowing, especially if you take that information and apply it to what we're doing right now. What does that mean for our kids into the future if they're playing less? Are they, will they be less well-adapted? We're starting to see the answer to that question. I think it's clearly forming to be a yes. It's a tragic answer. So there's so much that comes out of play that's positive, mental health-wise, but socialization-wise. We also have kids who just

are stunned by a new experience. Oh, I've never had this happen before. I've always been in sets of rules. I've always been in sport, for instance. People use the term, my kid plays sports. Well, they do play sports, but it's very different when you have tons of rules versus when you have no rules. When you have no rules, you get to experiment, which means you learn to adapt, learn to improvise. And that improvisation, that ability to take a new situation and not be mind blown by it and know, hey, I can figure this out. I have this weird stick to hit a foil ball with, and I'm going to learn how I'm going to do that and make it work and still sail it over the fence like I can with a wiffle ball. So I'm adjusting to a new situation.

It's muddy. It's not all everything is a manicured field that I know exactly what's going to happen on. It's a bunch of new situations to which I have to adapt. And usually I have to adapt to those situations with a group of other people who will all walk away if they feel like it if we're not interacting in a cooperative way. people who will all walk away if they feel like it if we're not interacting in a cooperative way. So you can see how many things kids are learning through free play and what they are missing if they don't have that in their lives. A task for us, because we're looking always our filter is what is best for kids, a task for us is how do we inject that into a physical fitness program? And we have found several ways

to make play and experimentation highlighted within our programming so that our kids are exposed to it, at least through our program and training centers. But we're also very motivated to speak to people about, please, please let your kids do those natural things. Let them get play and playing outside also has specific benefits. I understand the difference between free play and directed play. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's an important point. What it makes me think of is for whatever reason, maybe it's because it's a more affluent area. And then that comes with kind of keeping up with the Joneses inherently. That's a game a lot of people get sucked into. But the area that I live in, I live in Virginia outside of Washington, DC,

and it's very much a thing around here, at least for parents to have their kids involved in a number of different sports and extracurricular activities to where you have seven, eight, nine, 10 year old kids who have basically no free time to do anything other than the sports they're supposed to be playing and the extra academic classes and things they're supposed to be doing at their school. A buddy of mine who I work out with, I mean, I don't know him. I know him well. I know him from the gym. So, and I've had dinner with him. He's a nice guy.

So, but I don't know if this is the case, but one of his daughters is like golf and soccer and I think basketball. And every weekend he's taking them, taking her to one thing or the other. And I think it's the same thing with his other daughter, which can be cool if they want to do that. But he remarked to me like a week ago that one of his daughters was just telling him how tired she is. She's just tired all the time. So it just makes me think of that, that I wonder if that's not normal when you're like nine years old. I don't remember feeling that like you shouldn't be getting run down yet, burned out yet. Save that for when you're 40 or 50 or something or never if you can, but certainly not at 10 years old. Come on. And so it just makes me think of that. Some parents might think of like, what do you mean? They play all the time. They have 15 soccer practices a week and 10 swim meets a week, but that's not the same unless it truly is. I mean, I can speak personally. I played a fair amount of sports growing up and it probably started my general interest

started, well, I guess it started young, but I started to play in structured sports at maybe 10, found my way into ice hockey. And I truly enjoyed it though. Like I played roller hockey all the time with my friends. And I guess I didn't have necessarily helicopter parents like keeping score on my games and telling me I need to get better. But for me, even though I put a lot of time into sports, that was a play activity for me, but that's not necessarily the case with what I see with some of the kids around here, where if it were left up to them, if they were left to their own devices, I don't know if

they want to just sit on the couch, but if that was not, they had to go do something. They wouldn't go spend another three hours practicing their like goal kicks or something, you know, from our perspective, while this is a problem, we need to be educating parents like, look, this is not the right way for a child to grow up. The child needs to have the free play. And then kind of unpacking what you how your comment was, is that you, you know, at 10, you started doing organized sports. You know, you played. There's free play there from birth to 10 and then organized sports, as start into your preteen years. And really then what the research shows is that other than specific sports like gymnastics and maybe swimming, if you want to be good at the sport, that's the path you take. Free play, some exposure to the sports early on and variety of sports at 10, 11, 12 years old, you start to go, I want to do these sports at 13, 14, 15 year olds are specializing in sport. And that leads to longevity and actually leads to longevity, less burnout, but it also leads to more mastery of the sport.

Which is a bit counterintuitive because you hear stories like Tiger Woods and you think like, oh, well, of course. But then what you don't hear is the story like Roger Federer, which is very much what you're saying. Exactly. And there's some interesting research out there that said that if a child specializes early, they reach their max potential in a sport at like 16, 17 years old. If they specialize, if they follow the pathway we just talked about, they continue to learn and get better at their sport into their 20s. Holy cow, that's amazing and then you look at like nc2a coaches and scouts who say you know they they want to pick kids who are

multi-sport athletes yeah we're starting to hear a little difference in the drumbeat there and i think it's going to take some time for the youth sport culture to catch up and recognize that the research is pointing now in the direction of don't do it that way do a multitude of things learn a multitude of movement patterns and applying it at the right age rather than forcing it down a level we see signs in our community we've recently moved but still see it in this community where signs pop up saying sign up your three-year-old for flag football. People aren't even thinking clearly. Come on. What concepts can a three-year-old grasp? What are they going to physically get out of this? Maybe pick up the ball and run around with it.

With soccer, and everybody that has had a child from four to eight years old who plays soccer understands the beehive, where the ball is out there and the kids all run together on the ball and the coaches are all yelling, no, play your positions, play your positions. And it doesn't work because developmentally, the five-year-old, six-year-old kid is going, I've got the ball. It's my ball. I want the ball. They don't understand positional play yet. They're not developed enough psychologically to be able to understand the rules of the game. So shouldn't we be addressing that, teaching the game in a different way than playing a game that kids can't even understand the rules or why they should be taking part in it yet?

One of the biggest problems in youth training in general is the idea of applying an adult model on developing humans. So thinking that through, they're not finished yet. It takes a long time for all the systems to finish, yet we so easily will go, well, this adult model works. Let's just shove it on children. Instead of thinking through, let's not reverse engineer something. Let's engineer something from the ground up, specifically designed for children. Instead of thinking through, let's not reverse engineer something, let's engineer something from the ground up, specifically designed for children. If we were specifically designing the best thing for a three-year-old, it certainly wouldn't be team soccer, right? It would be movement exploration. It would be movement pattern development, development, playfulness.

Those things should be our priorities. And so what we're looking for really is a sea change in thought. But we find that we're motivated to educate people. If we can, getting an opportunity like this to talk about it, get people to just wait, stop and think. Should we be doing it this way or should we be doing it with the best interests of children in mind? With an understanding of what children need and the best way to develop. Right. How do we make them thrive into the future? Not how can we just slap this thing on and keep moving it downward? Yeah. And like you said, parents are trying to just do the best by their kids. And so it's not a matter of, oh, what you're doing? Oh,

you're wrong. It's just, here's new information to think with. And we can only make decisions as good as the information we have. So, you know, and I can totally understand getting a kid into sports and let's say not taking the time to inform yourself because we're busy and there are a million different things that, you know, we need to do. And so we just think that how, you know, the sports people have figured it out. I just throw my kid into the combine and they turn out an athlete or something. Right. And I understand that line of thinking. That's kind of the point of having experts and specialists. It's kind of

the point of like even sending a kid to school and the, and okay, PE has been removed. That is a failure. I'd say more of the school system than the parents per se, because the parents are trusting the school system to not devolve over time, hopefully evolve and try to align itself with best practices that should be evolving and so forth. And so, you know, just for anyone who is doing any of these, making these mistakes with their kids, I'd say the easy way over the cognitive dissonance is just that point of like, well, I didn't know that. But now that I do know that, I can be more right. I was right before in that I didn't have much information. I tried to make the best decision I could.

But now I have better information so I can be even more right and encourage a more healthy way of going about physical activity and sport and play. Part of our job is to present the information without making somebody feel defensive. Yeah. And that is, it's tough because when you're talking about somebody's child, you know, I like what you just said. That's a good, people can step back for a second, get away from the emotion and go, okay, now this is the information I have. Now I can do a better job. These kids don't come with a manual. And people who know our history know that our program has changed greatly over time with learning. We became more educated about the subject matter. We went out and looked at the research. We learned and realized, whoa, whoa,

whoa, we weren't doing that exactly right. Let's change that. And we had the opportunity to be around a lot of really well-versed folks in fitness and youth training and really learn and adapt as we went. So obviously that grace is given to everyone that you learn over time, that you take the information you have, you do the best you can, and then hopefully you're listening when there's new information or things that maybe you might want to explore take the information you have, you do the best you can. And then hopefully you're listening when there's new information or things that maybe you might want to explore that might be best for your child. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports

nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout, and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase

with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Let's talk about some of the solutions that you have discovered and developed over time. Let's talk about a bit of your approach and maybe some practical tips that you can share with parents. And we can do it by maybe by age. So like, you know, from this age to this age, here are the types of things that tend to work best and seem to be most productive. And I'm interested in myself.

We have a template we call Explore Express Excel. And that is something that applies to many different levels of what we do. But you can think of it this way. A young child is in a stage of development. Explorer stage would be a three to eight-year-old. The numbers are rough. Some children will develop more quickly or more slowly. So when I say eight, it could be in the next group.

It depends on the child. They don't change just dramatically when you bring them in. Right. So we have an explorer group. That group should be exploring movement. an explore group. That group should be exploring movement. Biologically, they can only express certain types of workouts or contractions. And because of that, we shouldn't be programming things that they can't even biologically adapt to. So for instance, we don't want to put a three to eight year old under pure intensity and power output as some kind of indicator of where they are. We didn't know that a long time ago. We know it now.

So what we want to be doing with kids of that age is let them explore movement. So that means let's move in this way. Let's move in this pattern. Let's practice that. Let's practice in ways that are going to build a foundation so we can move to the next step. The explore group. The explore group are eight to 12 year olds. They now can actually change gears biologically when they're moving. They can kick it up a little bit. Their bodies are changing. So again, we have a group where things start to be differentiated and as they start to move into the teen years that's what we call our excel group and jeff's gonna no now he's okay so the excel group are the teens and the teens now can express things more like adults meaning all of the energy pathways they or contraction So they are able to now do intervals and intensity

in the way that people are thinking of when they look at the adult models. So now we can start to explore that with them. But we are always still practicing basic movement patterns prior to complex movement patterns. And we're never loading children until they have the ability to safely show that they can handle basic movement patterns. Which is just a logical way to teach anything really. Like you have to learn on a gradient. You have to learn the simple stuff first and make sure you've got the simple stuff before you move on to the more complex. It's one of those things that it sounds commonsensical when you say it, but it is rare to find. I mean, I'm sure it is in your world, but it certainly is even in the world of education. And just you try to go about learning anything and it can be

hard to find resources that are laid out in that logical manner where they're really doing a good job making sure that you fully grasp the most basic fundamentals before moving on, even starting with stuff like terminology. Yeah, you get some mistake to just hit somebody with a bunch of terminology they don't understand, or at least it's kind of rude. What you're saying is, have fun spending half of your time in the dictionary because I need to use a lot of words that you don't understand. So, so similarly with physical literacy, it's like not hitting somebody with multi-syllabic words before they even know how to pronounce, you know, the basic phonemes. Yeah. I switched gears a little bit, talk about like a strength program for teens. You know,

you get a 14 year old and what's typically done 14, 15 year old comes into the gym. He looks like an adult, you know, he's developed. Soyear-old, and what's typically done? 14, 15-year-old comes into the gym. He looks like an adult. You know, he's developed. So they teach the movement. Here's how you squat. Boom, slap a bar on the back, and we're going to find out what your one rep max is, and then we'll do your percentages from there. And when you start to think about where kids have come from and the loss of physical literacy, the loss of this, is that really a intelligent way to go about safely programming a strength program

for a teen? Given that a teen hasn't fully developed their frontal lobes and being able to even make good decisions about Among other things? Yeah, that's why they still aren't adults. They still have to have parents.

So we take an approach, we call it a base build and boost. Child comes into your gym. You should be working on the base. They should work on body awareness and positional consistency. So if you're showing a child how to squat is different than teaching a child to squat. And so when you're teaching a child to squat, you want them to standardize their movement. I want to know that when they start to move, their feet are pointed forward.

They're in a certain position. I can stop them in a position and it will look like it the same way every single time. We want to have that positional consistency and that body awareness before we add an external object, which is where we go with build. Now if somebody has positional consistency, they have body awareness.

We've spent some time teaching them that, and that doesn't happen in one class. It happens depending on the ability of the child. It may take several classes to teach them simply how to squat in the air right. Once they have that down, you can add the ability

to move external objects. We're not talking about deadlifting. We're talking about can you keep your spine in a neutral position and pick your backpack up off the ground safely? Finally, when they can move these good patterns correctly and safely, and you've seen them start to introduce external objects, now you can start to load them. And that's the only way that it seems to make sense to us. And then you build a program around enhancing those

things so you know you have you don't just start to find somebody's one rep max and then put work on their percentages you go i've got kids who are you know 12 13 years old we're going to do a lot of reps correctly with lightweight but we're going to do it with the coach watching right and also small incremental jumps so that they have a motivation to continue every week if we max somebody out within their first six weeks when can they jump again we ruin motivational trajectory it makes it less fun yeah but absolutely we have to build you know we ran our strength program for about 10 years out of our gym last time we looked at it was 2016.

We had over 90,000 contact hours, and we didn't have an injury that was required intervention. So a kid might pull a hamstring or something like that, but there was nothing where they had to go to an emergency room or go to a doctor. Zero injuries in the 90,000 hours. That's an outstanding safety issue. But on the other side of that was our teams produced over 100 state state and national powerlifting records. So we were never looking at numbers. The funny thing about that is we've never looked up what the records were. We just moved our kids well and progressively moved the weight up as they could handle it. So it wasn't, that was just because they were consistent and because they never were injured, they didn't have to lose time on their consistency. Focus is always on the movement and how to make the movement better.

And what does that do? That helps them with something that transfers to everything else too. And we're kind of, we missed that in this whole discussion, is that we also want transferability to life, to high-level sport, to whatever kids want to do. We want to give them, I look at it and call it like the menu to life, to high level sport, to whatever kids want to do. We want to give them, I look at it and call it like the menu of life, like compare it to if you go to college or you don't go to college, you get a different menu. I have these choices or I have this world of choices. It's kind of the same thing. If you have movement exposure at a certain level, you only have a few choices. If you have the whole movement library, physical literacy, and a background of free play, you get the giant menu.

You get to pick. You can at any point say, hey, I feel like trying that. We have multiple kids who, through our program, starting at four, walking out at 18, walked onto college campuses and tried out for sports they'd never played before and got on college teams. And we realized that that was just because they were exposed to everything and had the motivation and confidence to say, I want to try it. And they just walked on. And that's the gift we want to give kids. We want to make sure they have that opportunity and we feel like they deserve that from us. That's great. And of course it extends to non-physical things too. I mean,

just that confidence in themselves that they can learn things and through really repetition and through resistance and through progression, they can get better even if they don't explicitly realize it. I mean, I've seen it many, many times working with so many people over the years, just helping them get into better shape. It inevitably ripples out into other areas of your life. Even if you don't explicitly think it, it's like, well, I did that and that was kind of hard. So who knows, maybe I can do this thing too that has nothing to do with squatting weight. But it has everything to do with squatting. Yeah, exactly. A young kid come in the gym and kind of following the story.

I had a young kid come in the gym. He was, I think, 13, 14 years old at the time. He came in. He was getting Ds in math. A year later, working out of the gym, we're on the platforms. I'm hearing him talk to the other kids, and he's telling the kids he's getting an A-minus in his math class. I took him aside. I said, hey, so what's going on he said well before i looked at math and i would go i see the problem i go like i just can't

do that and he said now you know i think of the math like i think of a workout like you know like i can't do all of those pull-ups at once so i'm gonna have to break them up so math is just like that he said i i look at math problem now and i go like i do this part i can put that and i can do that put it over here and then I can do another little part, I put it over here and pretty soon I've worked my way through the problem just like I do through a workout. That's cool. Yeah. Coming from the, you know, standing there as a coach going like, well, that's exactly what I wanted to have happen. I don't know. And you just expressed it a whole lot better than I can. Yeah, that's great. Let's talk about nutrition. How do you approach that?

Carefully. Yeah. Carefully. We were just talking about some new content about different types of parents and this came up. Nutrition is, like everything, is optimally very personal. In a perfect world, we'd like to take each person and know their genetic makeup and their DNA and everything and be able to say,

let's fine tune it to that. But what we have are parents who sometimes have a family history of a certain way of eating. And they show love in certain ways, usually through food, or it's a hard thing to jump into, to talk to parents about how kids should be eating. So what we do, what we start with is just education on what food is made of. So the base build boost model. So what is food? What are carbs? What is protein? What is fat? We don't talk about allocation. We don't talk about timing. We don't talk about portion. Good or bad. Good or bad. We're just defining it because we find that kids aren't even necessarily given definitions of food. We might think they are somehow in school, but when we start to query that, we find them. I mean, most people couldn't answer if you were to say, most people, I mean, I've done this and I talk about this in my books

and also like just take the average person and ask them to define the word calorie. Eight out of 10 will get it wrong. If we're saying right needs to be the entire concept, maybe they'll get like one fifth of the concept, right? But yeah, you just, if you don't learn it, you don't learn it. And if you think about it, you go, uh, it's like a thing that makes you fat. Exactly. So with our base, which would be our explore group, we're just going to teach them that food is made up of these categories. And you know, chicken is a protein, and broccoli is

a good carb, and nuts and seeds are delicious fats. And we just give them some positive input and some definitions. And then we start to move into from there, educating them in the build period on what should portions maybe look like, that food volume has an impact. Always with an awareness that they come from a family who is buying their food and have little or no control until the teen years when they can drive a car and go buy their own food. Once we get to the teen years and we get to the boost period, we can start to fine-tune the information. Again, with the awareness that most of what they're eating,

mom and dad are serving. And sometimes mom and dad are angry if they don't eat all the food or if they complain about the food. Mom and dad are stressed. They have a lot of things going on. We have some great stories of the things kids have said about the meals that I cook for them. It's a tough thing. You're trying to get them to eat healthy amidst what is for most people a very busy schedule and trying to do your best by them. So there is always that concern that we know that parents

are doing their best, but yet we want to give the children information that they can take and carry with them and explore more as they get older. look at people on Instagram and they want to look like that too, and either have started or starting to go down the path of just calorie restriction and getting too obsessed with looking a certain way when their body's still developing. And so what I've always done with the kids that I've spoken with is getting them away from caring too much about calories in versus calories out and not getting too much into the nitty gritty details of dieting, which is more relevant when you're older and really want to optimize your body composition physically and I think emotionally and mentally. It's more relevant. Whereas with teenagers, I've just encouraged them to develop good habits, get in the habit of eating a few good meals a day, of eating a few servings

of protein, of eating plenty of nutritious foods, relatively unprocessed. If they want to have some sugar and that's okay with their parents or whatever, don't worry about it. They don't have to be afraid of any food, but so long as they stay active and develop just good eating habits and allow their body to just develop however it's going to develop for the next couple of years. Like just wait until you're 19, 18, 19, 20, before you even think about, you know, getting really lean, for example, which is often what a lot of these young boys and girls want to do.

And I mean, I'm sure you could comment on this, but it's just a bad idea to spend an extended period of your teenage years in a calorie deficit. It's a bad idea physically, and it can turn into eating disorders and body dysmorphia type situations. And so that's something I've always encouraged, just good habits, develop a good relationship with food and just get used to eating fairly well. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it doesn't ever have to be perfect. Really. If you do the most important things, mostly right, most of the time, you're going to be golden. That's really a good summary of what we're trying to accomplish with it, especially like in the team years, just, we don't want them coming out of that timeframe with a bad relationship with food. We want them to see it as fuel i eat the fuel and that's kind of where our pathway down that on that road you know as a team trainer i used to do things once a year i would have the kids do a food log so i could see what what they were eating because almost everybody comes in the gym almost every parent comes in the gyms and thus almost every team comes in the gym saying, oh, yeah, I eat really well. And I remember I had a young girl who was a phenom with a long-distance runner and asked her how much protein she was eating.

She said, I'm eating a lot of protein. And then by the time I got her food log, I found that she didn't eat protein but once or twice a week. Her view of what food was was fueling her, and she looked at high-level runners, and they were talking about carving, carving, carving. So it was a dial back, a lot of discussions with the parents on how to include protein every meal and that kind of thing. And the food issue is kind of fraught with traps. Ideally, you have buy-in from the parents.

Right. They're fine with also, really what it comes down to first and foremost is the parents have to eat the same way, at least in front of their kids. It's not going to work if they're bringing home McDonald's for themselves and then telling the kids to like, you know, eat some steamed broccoli or something. Yeah. Early on, we got, and you kind of hit on this, like, don't condemn or don't say no sugar. We got into the, you know, we're not going to have any sugar in the house. Worst mistake of our life. That was really just, we tried it.

We had our middle boy. Got into sugar trafficking. Yeah. Got into sugar trafficking. Anyway, one day they all went to school and being the good dad that i am i went and tossed my kids rooms he was in you know late junior high and we just bought these new mattresses and i turned over the box spring i saw a hole in the box spring and i reached inside i feel a baggie and i'm like oh no worst day of my life my child is

all the worst things go through your head, right? Yeah. And I pull out this baggie and it's full of gummy worms and gummy bears. I mean, it's just a quart-sized thing of baggie with all this candy. Hiding it under his new mattress from his mom and dad, which was cool because, you know, when he came home and he got into his room, he found that I'd replaced it with fish oil and almonds. He didn't appreciate that at all but put it back but what it does when you say no you can't do this especially for a teenager

they're built to be oppositional so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to live on sugar so we learned our lesson and had a much more sane approach to here's a small amount we'll have in the house and that's it. You just don't buy more than that. Yeah. And that's exactly what we do is we have, I mean, I have a little bit of dark chocolate every day. I'm not really a big sugar person, but there are, let's see, like these little Annie's

little cookies that the kids like. We'll let them eat some of those every once in a while. But we've always had a little something for them that if they wanted to have something sweet. So far, my son's seven and my daughter's two, there's never been any problem. Like sometimes my son will eat, like when he had his Halloween candy, we let him decide, like we didn't really police it all that closely. And then we were like, all right, dude, you're eating too much Halloween candy. That's not how Halloween candy goes.

But generally speaking, or sometimes my daughter will, she'll sneak in and grab some chocolate or something, but by being pretty relaxed about it, they have never gotten into like a weird relationship with sugar or abused it. It just seems to make sense. I mean, I had a similar thing growing up for some time. My mom didn't want to buy any sugar or anything. And so I'd just go to my friend's house and eat a bunch of, yeah, like gummy worms and stuff at his house. Like, oh, what do you think I'm going to do? We found it's best to give them the tools, give them the information. And then when it's time for them to make those decisions, they at least have the information from which to make decisions. They may have a family pattern and a family sort of what they grew up with,

which supports healthy eating, or they may not, but at least they'll have the information on what they can explore to stay healthy and be healthier and then make their decisions from there. And that takes more time and work than just being authoritarian and being like, well, I'm the parent and this is what you're going to do, but ultimately it's going to produce better results. It's time well-invested because you're saving yourself bigger problems later down the line. It's healthier that way too. They see the choice for eating well as their choice rather than something you require them to do. They were forced into. Totally. What about supplementation? Are there any supplements that you generally

recommend or like to see kids taking? First, we look at big picture things. So really, if the big picture things are solved, then we can start to think about that. It's the least important. I mean, same thing with fitness. It's like, you have your pyramid of importances and at the base, you have stuff like energy balance and macronutrient balance and nutrition. And then all the way at the top, you have supplementation. It's something that is supplementary by definition, right? People try to supplement a bad diet. Yeah, it never works. You know, and you know that, we know that, and we don't want to get the children

in to that frame of mind. That being said, so if we have a, you know, you have a strength class and you have a five foot five, 125 pound 15 year old who's, you know, eating a lot at home and he comes in and says, you know, would it be okay for me or healthy for me to have a shake in between because I really, after working out, because I really, you know, I want to put on some weight and you understand that and go like, well, let's, you know, certainly that's going to be okay. Sure. That might not be exactly what I want him to do, but you know, he's showing there's a reason why he wants to gain weight.

You know, I want to play, you know, I want to play up next year in high school. I need to put on 10 pounds. The coach told me I need to put on 10 pounds. The coaches told me I need to put on 10 pounds. Well, I'd rather have him doing, you know, having a shake after he lifts than... Having some like Pop-Tarts or something. One of the coaches

at the high school told a football player that we had training at our gym that we wanted him to gain 15 pounds in the off season. So he'd like him

to replace all protein at his breakfast and replace it with pancakes and French toast and donuts this coach did not walk around campus but rather drove some kind of vehicle so if you were to make this mistake it would make me feel better about myself so here do this exactly but the you know i'd rather supplement with the protein shake in between lifting and his next meal than replacing the protein in his breakfast with pancakes.

I think the key there, though, is that he came to you for advice. So you've given him information, and then when he had a question, he came to you and asked advice. So that's the key is if we're building trust with these kids, we know them, they know us, they know their coaches care about them. And when I say us, I mean Brand X professional youth coaches. If we have that relationship, they're going to ask us when they have questions and we can offer advice without judgment. Just yes, that sounds like a better choice. Absolutely. What are your thoughts on an omega-3 supplement, a vitamin D or a multivitamin? Well, we take all of those, but we're adults who look at what we need and what we think we may or may not be getting if we're getting enough organic foods or not, or enough of a certain nutrient or not. So I feel like that becomes very specific what you might need. a certain nutrient or not. So I feel like that becomes very specific what you might need.

And I also think that it depends. I've never read anything about, still in 20 years of doing this, I haven't read anything about omega-3 or fish oil being problematic for supplementation. But it's still, again, it's supplementation. So if they're eating well at home and their family is going like, we should supplement with fish oil. That's going to be good. I think we've never said no to that. When a parent asked us, do you think that's a good choice? We've said, yes, we've all, we've read looks like that's positive. And in fact, there, there are some companies that make little squeeze packs that are flavored or little gummies.

Like that's what I give my kids, this little omega-3 gummies. Cause there are, they're decent eaters, but I'm not going to be getting them to eat any mackerel or anchovies. It's just not going to happen. We tend to try to get, as a youth coach, I tend to try to get away from the specifics of that. I don't have a nutritional background. So if I'm giving that, like, yeah, supplement that fish oil with your four-year-old, that's a decision that the parents should make. I just, the information I would have is I've never heard that that's going to do anything but have positive effects for a child. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I've spoken to a number of pediatricians and nutritionists where

like, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, they're not going to get any of it really in their diet, even though their diet's okay, but they're still kids. I mean, they only are willing to eat so many nutritious things and it's just is what it is. And so that's why I'm happy to give them, you know, that's what I give my kids. They get like these little omega-3 gummies and then a vitamin D gummy. I mean, there's even good research on that. They're inside a lot. And when they're outside is whether their sun exposure is just like anybody, really, we all need to supplement vitamin D period. And then a multivitamin, again, it's just a kid's gummy multivitamin, just because there are certain nutrients that are going to be lacking in their diets that,

of course, when your body's young, it's so resilient, it just figures it out. But if you can at least plug a couple of those nutritional holes, it's going to help them. And so long as you're not super dosing vitamin E, for example, that'd be a bad idea. And yeah, there are some things that you want to stay away from, but I see it very similar to even adults. It's just the doses that are needed are a lot smaller, obviously. It kind of comes back to the same idea. A 14 or 15-year-old kid is coming to me asking me if he can supplement his protein intake with a shake between his meals. You know, the first thing I'm going to ask him,

are you having protein at every meal? Yeah. And then he goes, yeah. Well, okay, then you're supplementing. That's fine. You know, you have a good, healthy diet, and you want to supplement it with fish oil. Cool. You know, that's the difference between having a bandaid. I don't have a good diet, so a few fish oils can take care of this. No, no, it's not.

Yeah. Or a multivitamin or any other, any other supplement. Now supplements I recommend, this is more for teenagers that they just stay away from is really anything else, actually anything related to gaining muscle or strength or losing fat, even though you could say that creatine may be okay, but it's just the research isn't there. And so I just don't recommend it. I just tell kids, don't worry about anything related to body composition. If we're talking about some basics related to health, that makes sense. But fat burners or muscle builders, just stay away from it. Anything related to hormone boosters, because in some cases, and this has been confirmed by

labs, there have been big news stories that have made the rounds that you don't necessarily know what you're getting in some of these products. You start getting into the sports nutrition, performance, body composition stuff. You might have a 15-year-old kid who gets a quote-unquote natural testosterone booster that has steroids in it, legitimately has steroids in it. It could be low dose, but it doesn't matter. Even a low dose can mess a kid's body up. And so it's better to just, for anybody who has teenage kids who are into lifting or playing sports, just stay away from any of the, and that includes, I'd say I've had parents ask even wanting to buy my stuff and my stuff is clean and not spiked with anything,

but I still tell them the same thing. Just like, just, you know, if some protein powder, if it's necessary, it shouldn't be necessary. I think, I think they should just learn to eat enough food, but I can understand certain situations that might be nice to have. And if you want to, I don't sell vitamin D. I mean, I have fish oil, but there are some basics that you can look at the research. Here you go. I think this makes sense. But outside of that, just don't give them a bunch of pills and powders to take. That's a sound way to go about it. You said it earlier, these kids, when they're teens, their bodies are dumping hormones on them. It's like a natural steroid cycle,

actually, is what it is. You're already in a place where you're anabolic. You're dumping all of this natural testosterone into your system, and you don't need to mess with it. You just don't. Just support it with good nutrition and exercise and, sure, hydration, good sleep hygiene. Make sure you have sleep. Just do all the basics, and your body's going to take care of you. That's exactly right.

We call that in our professional youth coach certification, we call it the nourish section where we talk about the whole sort of recovery and nourishing the body piece for kids and how to think about that and present it. Are energy drinks like caffeine intake, is that becoming an issue with teenage kids? Yes.

Yeah. And they often see it with their parents, right? Parents get up and get the energy drink and they think it's okay. We actually sold them in our gym for a while and then stopped because we realized that the biggest demographic that wanted them were under 18s. And we didn't feel like that was a good choice for us to make, to put that in front of them necessarily. Yeah.

Because it's so easy when you don't understand, it's so easy to abuse and you not realize that, oh wait, this kid's been having like 800 milligrams of caffeine every day for months now. Yeah. Right. So we just didn't bring water to class. Yeah, yeah.

Once in a while, I'd have somebody, you know, go get a Slurpee and bring it in and they thought they were being really revolutionary

or whatever. Bucking the system with a Slurpee. But it wasn't too much of a problem. Most everybody understood that they felt better if they had water.

Then there's a Fideid revolution for a while, that kind of thing. Fideid is an energy, it's an energy drink, right? Yeah, we had to. Oh, it's like aAid revolution for a while, that kind of thing. FitAid is an energy, it's an energy drink, right? Yeah, we had to- Oh, it's like a caffeinated, yeah.

Yeah, it's like a naturally sweetened one or something. I haven't had it. I just, I randomly heard about it recently. One of our original kids that we trained actually developed that. Yeah. Oh, funny. Sold the company.

And we had to go, we're not putting it in our gym. Sorry. Sorry. That's funny. Sorry, David. Sorry. I feel like, I'm looking gym. Sorry. That's funny. Sorry. I feel like I'm looking at their website.

What's the guy? I feel like I met this guy. I'm going to look at this after. I'm like having a deja vu moment where I was at some, like it was a podcasting event. And I think it was the guy who did this FitAid stuff. Anyway, I'm going to look at that after. The young man's name is David Shanahan. Okay. I have to find his face and see. But yeah, no, that makes sense. I haven't looked into the

literature at all on caffeine intake and teens in particular, but I'm assuming that it's just generally a good idea to stay away from it altogether. Is that true? Do you know? There is some recent research out that at certain levels is dangerous for the kids again it's coming back to if you're sleeping well you're eating well do you need this no i just want to fit in with doing this no let's not do it as youth coaches we should err on the side of keeping them safe it's our responsibility so if we're unsure if there's research is still ongoing look at the whole vaping controversy, right? It's supposed to be healthier.

Yeah, you know what's healthier, though, is not smoking or vaping. Exactly, because that's kind of the same idea with energy drinks. Let's just not. And, you know, and if someday somebody says, wow, it's the best thing ever and prolongs your healthy life by 20 years, then we'll go, okay. You made a mistake. Yeah. Sorry. But in the meantime. But I bet you, okay. You made a mistake. Yeah. Sorry. But in the meantime.

But I bet you we're not going to find that. Yeah, I'm not thinking that's kind of. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. We try to do that. Makes sense. Yeah, exactly. We all try to make sense, don't we?

And again, that comes to the parents, though, where then it will, I'm sure it's very helpful if they're not sucking down energy drinks every day in front of their kids. very helpful if they're not sucking down energy drinks every day in front of their kids. And if you can get them in, get the kids into the gym where, or into, you know, team sports,

things like that, where the team starts to support good, healthy habits, then you're, then you have, you know, his peer groups, his peer group.

Also, we don't do that or we don't find that necessary. That's helpful as well. Absolutely. Well, this has been a great discussion. I mean, those are all the main points I wanted to cover. So yeah, why don't we wrap up with just where

people can find you and if you have anything new and exciting coming, you want people to know about. Best place to look at what we're doing and our current language and ideas and things is Instagram because that's where we find the most, the easiest way to transmit little pieces of information. Sometimes we put stuff on IGTV and in stories. But we are redoing our YouTube, and we have a website with a lot of information. But what is most important for people to know is if they're interested in becoming more educated youth fitness trainers, we have something we call our professional youth coach certification, which is about 30 hours online. So you can take it at your own pace. And it is full of

information. Major contributor is James Fitzgerald from OPEX. We have some business advice from somebody well-versed in business also from OPEX. And then just our basically 20 years data dump on everything we've learned and how we've evolved and best practices and all of it. Our Instagram is at the Brand X method and our website is the brand X method.com. Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time to talk. This was great. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I'm doing

here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural

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