Ep. #486: Jeff and Mikki Martin on the Right (and Wrong) Ways to Help Kids Get Fit

Mike: 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 percent 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.

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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.

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 percent of teenagers meet their goals. 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 Extra curricular 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? 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 U S 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, 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, 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. 

Jeff: Thanks for 

Mikki: having us on. Yeah. Thank you. 

Mike: 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 health, 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 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 would 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. I’ve chosen to just leave it as I’m going to find somebody who knows this stuff better than I do. 

Mikki: Cool. I love that you see it, Mike, not everybody even sees it.

They just 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. The thing that I think is less, people have less awareness of, is that all kids are experiencing less movement.

And it’s not what they are doing with their time, it’s what they’re not doing. So people like to blame, for instance, technology and say kids are, on their devices and so that’s the problem. Really it’s not the device. It’s what they’re not doing that they would otherwise have been filling time with.

So if they would have otherwise been filling time with getting home from school, throwing their backpack down, running down the street with a pack of other 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 youth. And they’re looking at what are all those reasons. 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 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 the 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.

Jeff: 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 taken out of, largely taken out of many schools, elementary schools.

Mike: I didn’t know that. Why is that? At least what’s the purported reason for removing PE? 

Jeff: Yeah yeah, that really started back in the No Child Left Behind. We want to spend the time in the classroom, not out here. We can get into this cause 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. They at Ramona, that one of the schools had actually said that on recess, not PE, but on recess, they weren’t, the kids weren’t allowed to run because it was dangerous. So what did he say? Yeah, so now you take the kid and you say, go out, but you’re not allowed to run around the track.

You’re not allowed to run. Cause so let’s, 

Mike: for whatever you don’t be a kid. That’s the key. 

Jeff: 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 that where they have to do two or three hours of homework and, sixth grade and guess what they’re sitting and they’re sitting.

So And then you take that kid and you put him in, at 13 years old. And he says, I want to play high school football. 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 has to start, as Mickey was saying, our program has starts to have to adapt to what we see in the culture.

And we’re seeing that we have to address how do you teach skipping to a 12 year old? How do you teach side shuffling to a 12 year old? And it’s 

Mikki: even as, 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.

Jeff: And back to the PE topic, 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 all sports. A child doesn’t have the requisite strength and physical literacy to, to excel at the ball sports. 

Mike: Yeah. And that’s the end of sports for them.

They go, this sucks. I can’t even skip. 

Jeff: Loss of motivation. Loss of motivation. It’s a huge problem. What we try to do with kids that come into our gym is teach them that movement, It’s 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 brain X method training centers as kids who see.

Movement as important as breakfast. If you don’t have breakfast by, by two o’clock in the afternoon, you’re hungry. If you haven’t, 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. 

Mike: The importance of movement and play applies to adults too, really.

It applies even more so to kids, but, and 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 enjoy the process of doing it, but that’s not the same as some activity that you really just enjoy and it’s 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 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 type a work, people who over time just developed more and more symptoms related 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, I get, 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. 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, they’re even interesting observations that have been made about the, what you do in that period of puberty, especially in boys in terms of your body composition can set the stage for the rest of your life.

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 in playing X Box six hours a day.

Jeff: Exactly. I, 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 about a little bit about mental health, but what kids get out of play is critical to their development. And if they don’t get it as youth, it’s, it shows up.

Mikki: So you, 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 Gru and he did some studies on animals and socialization of animals and was watching ’em. Why do they play? They play as practice for life, so it is 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. 

Mike: We’re starting to see the answer to that question. I think it’s clearly forming to be a yes.

Mikki: 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.

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. 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. Okay. You can see how many things Kids are learning through free play and how, what they are missing.

If they don’t have that in their lives, the task for us, because we’re looking always, our filter is what is best for kids. The 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 let your kids do those natural things. Let them get play and playing outside. It also has specific benefits. And understand 

Jeff: the difference between free play and directed play. Yes. 

Mike: 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 keeping up With the Joneses inherently, that’s a game. A lot of people get sucked into, but the area that 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 are supposed to be doing at their school. And, a buddy of mine who I work out with, he. I don’t know him. I know him. I know him from the gym. And I’ve had dinner with him.

He’s a nice guy. 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. Yeah. 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 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 can speak personally.

I got, I played a fair amount of sports growing up and it probably started. My general interest started 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, 

Jeff: there’s lots of impact there, but let’s talk, first with most parents. Are doing what they think is best for their kids. From our perspective this is a problem. We need to be educating parents.

This is not the right way for a child to grow up. Child needs to have the free to play. And then unpacking what you, how your comment was is that you, at 10, you started doing organized sports. You played there’s free play there from, birth to 10 and then organize 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 in 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’s leads to longevity and actually leads to less burnout longevity, less burnout, but it also leads to more mastery of the sport. 

Mike: Which is a bit counterintuitive because you hear stories like Tiger Woods and you think oh of course, but then what you don’t hear is the story like Roger Federer, which is very much what you’re saying.

Exactly. 

Jeff: 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 16, 17 years old. If they specialize, if they have followed the pathway we just talked about, they continue to learn and get better at their sport into their twenties.

Holy cow. That’s amazing. And then you look at NC2A coaches and scouts who say, they, they want to pick kids who are multi sport athletes. 

Mikki: Yeah. We’re starting to hear a little difference in the drum beat 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 

Jeff: for flag 

Mikki: 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? 

Mike: Maybe pick up the ball and run around with it. 

Jeff: With soccer and everybody that has had a child from four to eight years old who plays soccer understands beehive where the ball’s out there and the kids all run together.

Coaches are all yelling, no, 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 

Mikki: 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, 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. A 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, playfulness, those things should be our priorities. And so it’s, what we’re looking for really is a sea change in thought, but we find that it’s, we’re motivated to educate people, if we can getting an opportunity like this to talk about it, get people 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 

Jeff: with an understanding of what children need and the best way to develop? 

Mikki: How do we make them thrive into the future? Not how can we just slap this thing on and keep moving it downward. 

Mike: 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. 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.

We need to do. And so we just think that how, the sports people have figured it out. I just throw my kid into the combine and they turn out an athlete or something, and I understand that line of thinking. That’s the point of having experts and specialists. It’s 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 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 I didn’t know that, but now that I do know that I can be more right.

I was right before and 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. 

Jeff: Part of our job is to present the information without.

Making somebody feel defensive. It’s tough. Cause when you’re talking about somebody’s child, 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.

Mikki: 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, Oh whoa, we weren’t doing that exactly. 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 we, 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 that might be best for your child. 

Mike: 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 percent 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.

More. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100 percent transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check 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 percent on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us.

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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 from this age to this age, here are the types of things that tend to work best and seem to be most productive.

And yeah, I’m interested myself, , 

Mikki: 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 child, a young child is in a stage of development. Explore 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. 

Jeff: Just dramatically when you bring it down. 

Mikki: So we have That group should be exploring movement. Biologically, they can only express certain types of movement. of workouts or contractions.

And because of that, we shouldn’t be programming things that they can’t even biologically adapt to. For instance, we don’t want to put a 3 to 8 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 explorer 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 going to. No, now he’s one. 

Mike: Okay. So 

Mikki: 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 interval 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, 

Mike: 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’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 of it.

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 rude. What you’re saying, 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 similarly with physical literacy, it’s like not hitting somebody with multi syllabic. Words before they even know how to pronounce, the basic phonemes. 

Jeff: Yeah. Like switch gears a little bit. Talk about a strength program for teens. You get a 14 year old and what’s typically done 14, 15 year old comes into the gym.

He looks like an adult, he’s developed. So they teach the movement. Here’s how you squat. Boom. Stop a bar in the back and we’re going to, we’re going to find out what your one rep max is and then we’ll do your And when you start to think about where kids have come from and 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 

Mike: among other things.

Jeff: Yeah. That’s why they still aren’t adults or 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, it’s 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, 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’d want to have that positional consistency and that body awareness before we add an external object, which is where we go with built.

We’ve 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 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 dead lifting. 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 do, move these good patterns, correctly and safely and you’ve seen it and then 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. You have, you don’t just. Start to find somebody’s one rep max and then work on their percentages. You go, I’ve got kids who are 12, 13 years old. We’re going to do a lot of reps correctly with lightweight, 

Mikki: 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. 

Mike: It makes it less fun. 

Mikki: We 

Jeff: have to build, 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 an 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 produce over a hundred state and national powerlifting records. So we were 

Mikki: never looking at numbers. The funny thing about that is we’ve never looked up what the records were. We just moved our kids 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. 

Jeff: Focus is always on the movement and how to make the movement better. 

Mikki: And what does that do? That helps them with something that transfers to everything else, too.

And we’re we miss 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 of life. 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 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 it at four, walking out at 18, walked onto college campuses. And try it out for sports that never played before and got on college team. And we realized that was just because they were exposed to everything and had the motivation and confidence to say, Hey, 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. 

Mike: And of course it extends to non physical things too. 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’ve seen it 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 eh I did that and that was hard.

So who knows, maybe I can do this thing too. That has nothing to do with squatting weight. It has everything to do with squatting. Yeah, exactly. 

Jeff: A young kid coming to the gym. And the following following a story, when a young kid come in the gym, he was, I think, 13, 14 years old. At the time he came in, he was getting D’s in math.

A year later, working out of the gym, we’re standing, we’re on the platforms. I’m hearing him talk to the other kids and he’s telling the kids he’s gotten an A, getting an A minus in his math class. I took him aside and said, Hey, so what’s going on? He said before I looked at math and I would go, I see the problem.

I go I just can’t do that. And he said, now, I think of the math, like I think of a workout like I can’t do all of those pull ups at once, so I’m going to have to break them up. So math is just like that. He said I look at math problem now and I go 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.

Mike: That’s cool. 

Jeff: Yeah. Coming from the. Standing there as a coach going 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. 

Mike: Yeah, that’s great. Let’s talk about nutrition. How do you approach that? Carefully. Yeah. 

Mikki: Carefully. We were just talking about some new content about different types of parents.

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. 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. 

Jeff: Good or bad. 

Mikki: 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. 

Mike: Most people couldn’t answer if you were to say most people, I’ve done this and I talk about this in my books and elsewhere.

Like just take the average person and ask them to define the word calorie eight out of 10. We’ll get it wrong. If we’re saying right needs to be. The entire concept, maybe they’ll get like one fifth of the concept, but yeah, you just, if you don’t learn it, you don’t learn it. And if you think about it, you go it’s like a thing that makes you fat.

Mikki: 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, 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 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. 

Mike: And to do it in a way without just speaking from my experience, I’ve heard from a number of teenagers over the years.

Who they 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.

relevant when you’re older and really want to optimize your body composition, like physically, and I think emotionally and mentally you’re in a, 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. 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, getting really lean, for example, which is often what.

A lot of these young boys and girls want to do, and 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 things. 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’s never have to be perfect. Really, if you do the most important things, mostly right, most of the time you’re going to be golden. 

Jeff: 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 where our pathway down that, on that road. 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 they were eating because almost everybody comes in the gym, almost every parent comes in the gym and thus almost every team comes in the gym saying, Oh yeah, I eat really well.

And, I have remember 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. Wow. 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 it’s fraught with traps.

And 

Mike: ideally you have buy-in from the parents, right? Yeah. They’re fine with also because 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. Like they can’t, it’s not gonna work if they’re bringing home McDonald’s for themselves and then telling the kids to eat some steamed broccoli or something.

Jeff: Yeah. Early on we got. And you hit on this don’t condemn or don’t say no sugar. We got into the, 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. 

Mikki: Got into sugar trafficking. Yeah. 

Jeff: I got into sugar trafficking.

Anyway, one day they all went to school and being a good dad that I am, I went in and tossed my kids rooms. He was in late junior high and we just bought these new mattresses and I turned over the box spring and I saw a hole in the box spring and I reached inside and I feel a baggie and I’m like, Oh no, worst day of my life.

My child is all of all the worst things go through your head, right? 

Mike: Yeah, 

Jeff: pull out this baggie and it’s full of gummy worms and gummy bears. It’s just a quart size thing, a baggie with all this candy. 

Mike: And 

Jeff: hiding it under his new mattress from his mom and dad, which was cool. Cause 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. We learned our lesson and had a much more sane approach to that. Here’s a 

Mikki: small amount we’ll have in the house and that’s it.

You just don’t buy more than that. 

Mike: Yeah. And that’s exactly what we do is we have, 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 if they wanted to have something sweet. Yeah. 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 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 given up. Gotten into a weird relationship with sugar or abused it.

It just seems to make sense. I had a similar thing growing up for some time. My mom didn’t want to buy any sugar or anything. And so I just go to my friend’s house and eat a bunch of yeah, like gummy worms and stuff at his house. Oh, what do you think I’m going to do? 

Mikki: 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, 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.

Mike: And that takes more time and work than just being authoritarian and being like 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 

Jeff: It’s healthier that way too.

They see the choice. For eating well as their choice, rather than something you required 

Mike: totally. What about supplementation? Are there any supplements that you generally recommend or like to see kids taking 

Mikki: first? We look at Big picture things. So really, if the big picture things are solved, then we can start to think about that, but 

Mike: it’s the least important.

It’s the same thing with fitness. It’s 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?

Jeff: People try to supplement. A bad diet. 

Mike: Yeah. It never works. 

Jeff: 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 have a strength class and you have a five foot 525 pound 15 year old, who’s, eating. A lot at home and he comes in and says, 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, I want to put on some weight and you understand that and go let’s, certainly that’s going to be okay. 

Mike: Sure. 

Jeff: That might not be exactly what I want him to do, but, he’s showing there’s a reason why he wants to gain weight.

I want to play, I’m going to play up next year and the high school, I need to put on 10 pounds. The coach told me I need to put on 10 pounds. I’d rather have him doing, having a a shake after he lifts then 

Mike: having some like pop tarts or something. 

Jeff: 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 doughnuts. 

Mikki: This coach did not walk around campus, but rather drove some kind of vehicle. So 

Mike: if you were to make this mistake, it would make me feel better about myself. So here, do this. 

Jeff: Exactly. But the, I’d rather have supplement with the protein shake in between lifting and his next meal than replacing the protein in his breakfast with.

I 

Mikki: 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 I don’t, when I say us, 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. 

Mike: Absolutely. What are your thoughts on an omega 3 supplement, a vitamin D or a multivitamin? 

Mikki: 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. 

Jeff: 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 three 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 we should supplement with fish oil. I don’t know, is that’s going to be good? I think we’ve 

Mikki: 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. 

Mike: Or little gummies. That’s what I give my kids, this little Omega 3 gummies. Cause 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.

Jeff: We tend to try to get, as a youth coach, I tend to try to get away from the, like the specifics of that. That’s what, I don’t have a nutritional background. So if I’m giving that 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’s going to do anything but have positive effects for a child.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. No, I’ve spoken to a number of pediatricians and just nutritionists where yeah, it makes sense. They’re not going to get any of it really in their diet, even though their diet’s okay, but they’re still kids. 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, that’s what I give my kids. They get like these little mega three gummies and then a vitamin D gummy. There’s even good research on that and 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 with 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 doing so long as you’re not like 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 what’s the doses that are needed are a lot smaller, obviously. 

Jeff: It comes back to the same idea, 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.

The first thing I’m going to ask him, are you having protein? And then he goes, yeah okay. Then you’re supplementing. That’s fine. You have a good, healthy diet and you want to supplement it with fish oil. Cool. That’s the difference between having a bandaid. I don’t have a good diet, so I’m a few fish oils going to take care of this.

No, it’s not. 

Mike: Yeah. Or a multivitamin or any other supplement. Yeah, 

Jeff: exactly. 

Mike: Now supplements I recommend this is more for teenagers that they just stay away from is really. Thank you. 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.

I just tell kids like 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’s 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 just, if some protein powder if it’s necessary, it shouldn’t be necessary. I think they should just learn to eat enough food, but I can understand certain situations. It might be nice to have. And if you want to, I don’t sell vitamin D, 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. 

Jeff: That’s a sound way to go about it. You said it earlier, these kids, when they’re.

Mike: It’s like a natural steroid cycle actually is what it is, 

Jeff: 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 

Mike: 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. 

Mikki: That’s 

Jeff: exactly right. 

Mikki: 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.

Peace for kids and how to think about that and present it 

Mike: or energy drinks like caffeine intake. Is that becoming an issue with teenage kids? 

Jeff: Yes. Yeah, they often see it with their parents, right? Get up and get the energy drink and they think it’s okay. 

Mikki: 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 18. So we didn’t feel like that was a good choice for us to make, to put that in front of them necessarily. 

Mike: Yeah. Cause 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.

Mikki: Yeah. So we just didn’t set, bring water to class. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mikki: Once in a while and have somebody You know, go get a Slurpee and bring it in. And they thought they were being really revolutionary bucking the system with a Slurpee. It wasn’t too much of a problem. Most everybody understood that they felt better if they had water.

Jeff: Then there’s a Fidaid revolution for a while. That kind of thing. 

Mike: Fidaid is an energy. It’s an energy drink, right? It’s like a caffeinated. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a naturally sweetened wonder. So I haven’t had it. I just, I randomly heard about it recently. 

Jeff: One of our original kids that we trained actually developed that.

Yeah. We sold the company and we had to go, we’re not putting it in our gym sorry. 

Mike: I feel like I’m looking at their website. What’s the guy? I feel like I met this guy who is where 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 Fidaid stuff. Anyway, I’ll look at that after. But the 

Mikki: young man’s name was Dave is David Shanahan. 

Mike: Okay. I have to find his face and say, but yeah, 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, or 

Jeff: there is some recent research out that was 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. 

Mikki: 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 that’s still ongoing, look at the whole vaping controversy, right? 

Jeff: It’s supposed 

Mikki: to be healthier. Yeah, 

Mike: It’s healthier though, is not smoking or vaping. 

Jeff: Exactly, because that’s the same idea with energy drinks. Let’s just 

Mikki: Matt!

And, 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, yeah, sorry, but in the meantime, I bet 

Jeff: you, we’re not going to find 

Mikki: that. Yeah, 

Mike: yeah, no, that makes sense. 

Jeff: We try to do that. Makes sense. 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. We all try to make sense that way.

And again, it 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. 

Jeff: And if you can get them in, get the kids into the gym where, or into, team sports, things like that, where the team starts to support good, healthy habits, then you have, his peer, the peer groups, his or her peer group also, Oh, we don’t do that or we don’t find that necessary.

That’s helpful as well. 

Mike: Absolutely. This has been a great discussion. 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 

Mikki: best place to look at what we’re doing and our current language and 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 and, but we do, 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 contributors, 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.

Jeff: Our Instagram is at thebrandxmethod and our website is thebrandxmethod. com. 

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again for taking the time to talk. This was great. I really enjoyed it. 

Jeff: Thank you. Thank you. 

Mike: 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 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars.

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