Strength Training for Kids & Building Lifelong Movement Skills

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Andy Galpin: The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and Life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance center at Parker University. Today we're going to be talking about exercise and more specifically, strength training for kids. Now, I've wanted to talk about this for a long time and it only hit me recently how ironic it is that I've never actually been asked about my views or how I interpret the research in this area in any public format.

Never been asked to give any scientific talks or really ever. This has come up in any podcasts I've done as a guest. And that's ironic because almost nothing else has filled my inbox, my DMs, my emails, more than this. Oftentimes, when I'm stopped in public or asked from friends and family, it is questions like this is it okay for my kids to lift?

If so, how and when? And who should I pay attention to? How do I determine a quality coach? I'm all for health and exercise, but I just don't know where to get started. So whether you are in the camp of thinking, of course this is great, it's a no brainer or you're concerned or you don't know or you're unsure, there's a lot of stuff we can unpack today. A recent publication in 2022, not 1994 or 1972, 2022 in the journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics. I want to read this quote from you directly and you'll understand why this is so confusing to many people, whether this is consumers, parents or even medical professionals.

The paper was trying to advocate for more physical activity in kids. This is something we're all supporting. But despite that, they said, I quote, weightlifting is not appropriate for younger children because the strain may be too high for developing muscles, tendons and bones. That is as untrue as we could possibly imagine. The data are clear on this and specific, and so this is why we need to continue to cover topics like this. If you're already a supporter, great, awesome, keep sharing the word. But you can have a little bit of empathy.

Why it is confusing again, even to medical practitioners when things like this are put out in the scientific literature. We're going to cover five things today. First, we're going to go over some of these common myths and misconceptions, whether they are positive and negative, so that we're all on the same page with what the current state of the evidence actually shows us. After that I want to get into some of the documented benefits, whether these are the cognitive, mental, as in mental health and or physical benefits that have been associated with exercise and specifically again resistance exercise. If you are a consistent or previous listener to the Perform podcast, you will know what I mean when I say we'll cover the three I's. If you're new, the first I we call investigate. So how do we actually measure this?

And you can translate that into thinking, well, how do I know if my kid is moving well or moving bad? What does that even mean? What should I test? How do I know if those scores are good? How do I interpret those data? Which would be the second eye? So we'll cover common recommendations.

What should you test? What should you look for? And then how do you interpret that? We'll then get into the third eye which is the intervene. In other words, what do you do about it? What are the do's and don'ts? So that's the stuff we're going to cover today when we get into all things regarding exercise and specifically strength training for kids.

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I use Element constantly, particularly when I'm sweating a lot, and I routinely make it a part of my clients optimization programs. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinklmnt.com perform to claim a free Element Sample pack with the purchase of any Element Drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com perform to claim a free sample pack. Let's get started by going all the way back to the beginning, I can finally answer this question that I have been hounded with for many, many years now. And that is simply where did some of these misconceptions get started? Why do people think it's bad or dangerous for kids to lift weights? And probably the most common one, which we will talk about.

Why do we think it stunts growth? I'll give you a spoiler alert. It doesn't. But where does even all get started? Well, most of the time there's a direct and simple reason, and in this case it's no different. You have to go all the way back to the 1960s. Couple things to pay attention to.

Number one, exercise science was not a field until really the 1960s and didn't really take off until the 70s and 80s. So upwards at that time pediatric medicine also wasn't really much of a field. And so prior to the 1960s we didn't have any information. And I think it's fair for parents and other leaders to be cautious about things when you have no data to go off of. And so from a starting default place, I think it was reasonable to say, we don't know if it's safe, therefore we're just gonna assume it's not safe until shown otherwise. And that's an okay default position. More specifically here, the very first paper that shot this thing off was a really renowned study in this field that came out of Japan again in the 1960s.

And what it found was an association between kids who were involved in high amounts of hard labor being shorter in life. Now, the ability to look back at this, you know, some 80 years later, obviously you can in your head and on all of you astute scientists now are able to think, okay, wait a minute. What are probably some of the confounding factors that are associated with this? Kids doing a lot of hard labor, probably other things going on. Malnutrition, environmental toxins, lots of other issues that are going to contribute to them not being as tall as they should have been. But at that time it was an association, and again, no other information. They just assumed then that even though, again, the study was not in strength training, to be really clear, there was just an association with hard manual labor in kids was going to stunt your growth.

And that myth persisted for decades, mostly because we just didn't have any other information. 1970s, 1980s, there wasn't a lot of research again coming out on kids. Not a lot of research at all, if any, on kids and strength training. By the time the 1990s came around, the National Strength and Conditioning Association, NSCA. I've spoken about this organization many, many times. The research was there, this organization was all over it advocating for strength training. The science was coming out.

And so now the general culture was, you can't really argue it's bad for kids anymore. But they weren't really strongly arguing that you have to go out and do it either. It was kind of just like a, well, it's okay. It's not as dangerous as we thought, so it's fine. But no one was really banging on the door to say, get kids in the weight room, get them to start lifting. Outside of the NSCA group, things changed dramatically. In 2008, this point, there was enough data and research that it was really, really positive for kids.

And so people had to start changing these policy statements. 2020, actually, a big update came from this policy stand. And now it is just inarguably that the benefits are not only small, but they are large, they are robust, and they cover a lot of different areas. And it is overall a fantastic and amazing activity for kids. And so that is awesome. But at the same time, remember just a couple of years ago, we still had statements like we didn't be strength training kids in that journal I mentioned earlier. And so it's hard.

It's just a confusing thing for people to pay attention to what most of us are going to agree on. Yes, it should be supervised. Yes, it should be progressed appropriately. And I will cover all of these rules in one moment. But if done well, these are really, really beneficial activities for kids to do. If not done well, then of course, don't do them. The first thing I like to understand are these handful of what we call the zombie myths.

Now, I stole this term from a guy named Dr. Avery Feigenbaum. Point of fun here. I tried like crazy to get Avery to come in himself and be a guest on the show to cover this topic. He maybe takes a little bit more nudging. So if you'd like to see him come in next season, let him know. But I asked him because I've seen him speak many times.

He is probably the world's foremost authority on strength training in kids. He's got dozens, if not hundreds of publications. He's on every position statement and stand you'll ever find and so forth. And I'm bringing him up now because of not only his contribution, but because he's the one that I've heard for a couple of decades now call these the zombie myths. And he calls them that because they are just myths that will not die. And so, as homage to you, Dr. Fagenbaum, I wanted to bring up some of the more common myths that just won't die regarding kids and exercise.

And I'm going to rip them off real fast here. Six of them I want to cover. I'm not going to get into the science of the physiology. I just want to make sure that that for you short attention span people, we know what these myths are and what the truth is. So let's go. Myth number one, strength training stunts growth or and otherwise is harmful for your bones and growth plates. I covered this in a previous episode of Perform, one that we did on bone health specifically.

And we could just be easy and clear here. This is insanely untrue. In fact, the research is gonna show you it is quite opposite. Strength training is generally very beneficial for kids and short for short and long term bone health. Myth number two, I told you we're going to blast past these ones here is that strength training or exercise in general is only for athletes. So if my kid is not an athlete, we don't need to worry about that. Well, if you've been paying attention to anything I've said the last decade and specifically something that we end every show with, if you have a body, you're an athlete.

I'm going to advocate strongly for this the entire length of our discussion today and I'll give you more context later. Number three, that you should wait until you're 12 years old to start lifting. Another kind of a similar one that I batched in here was this idea that kids actually can't get strong until they get to puberty. Neither of these are true. In fact, kids are ready to strength train as soon as they are ready to follow safety instructions. They can pay attention and they want to. Generally means something like the neighborhood of five to seven years old.

Could be earlier, could be later, but if they can do those things, they are physically ready to start strength training. Number four, that it makes girls bulky. This is a common one that lasts I guess through any age. Another myth. It is very hard for girls or boys to gain a lot of muscle mass, especially prior to puberty. They'll get a lot of benefit from it. They're mostly neurological and skill development and motor control.

But putting on a tremendous amount of muscle mass is very unlikely for girls or boys at this age. Number five. That it. This is actually funny because it goes the opposite. I've heard a lot of things about how it will actually start puberty early. Same thing with menses. It'll get the onset of it happen earlier.

I've also heard the opposite, that it delays it. None of those are true. It doesn't alter puberty at all. It'll be just fine. It is completely irrelevant to it. The final one is that this is all good and great, but it requires expensive equipment or high priced trainers and special coaches. Neither of those are true.

In fact, we're going to spend a lot of time in the next few minutes covering tons of examples, drills, resources, activities that can be done at free or low cost with your body weight and at home in local parks and so forth. So now that we've gotten all of those really common myths out of the way, let's step back and make sure we're actually talking the same language. And I'm doing this because I want to play a game with you. My guess is if I asked you all right now to sit down and think Very carefully. And I said, do you think it's okay for kids to play? Everyone would throw their hand up. Yes, of course.

What if I said the same thing about is it okay for kids to play sports? Well, maybe there'd be some hands that go, I don't. But most of you would say, yes, of course. If I said, should kids work on their coordination and have better body control? Again, all of you would put your hands up. But if I said the exact same thing, but I just changed the words or the terms, and I changed them to things like strength training, not as many hands go up, boy. Not sure.

I think so, but actually they're not. Or resistance exercise, weightlifting, plyometrics. We would have way less consensus across the board. One of the things you have to realize is I've basically said the same thing in all those cases. See, when you hear this topic and you think about strength training and exercising kids, most adults take an adult centric view rather than a child centric view. What I'm referring to is when I tell you to go lift weights and exercise, you think, I'm gonna go run for five miles. You think I'm signing up for a gym membership, I'm gonna do body part splits, I'm gonna do a 90 minute tricep routine, I'm lifting weights, I'm deadlifting.

That's how adults exercise. That's not how kids exercise. Right. When you hear things like strength, I'm not necessarily referring to weights at all. If I even say weights, I'm not referring to bodybuilding, I'm not referring to muscle hypertrophy. I'm not even referring to maximum strength training. You see, nowhere in this conversation have I said maximal strength until just now.

But many people, this whole time we're hearing maximum strength as if the only way and the only method we can use strength training for was to try to develop maximum strength. When you think strength training and exercising kids, the kid centric approach would be movement literacy. The primary goal of strength training for kids should be to enhance movement literacy. Now, that is a very specific phrase and we use it that way intentionally. I just want you to be more literate with movement. What that means better locomotion, more coordination, more control, better stability. Move how you want and don't move how you don't want.

Movement options, movement variety, movement choice, unique and independent and creative ways to solve movement problems. That's movement literacy. That is strength training for kids. It's not an hour and a half calf workout. It's not maximizing strength or powerlifting or competing. So hopefully that alone cleared up one of the biggest misconceptions we've got in this entire field, that when we say strength, that we're meaning things like that when we're actually meaning almost always movement literacy in kids, movement, quality, motor control, coordination. They're not direct synonyms for strength, but they're pretty darn close.

In fact, we actually know this. This has been shown scientifically that kids that are more coordinated, even those that think they're more coordinated when they're not. So their perception of coordination, are going to be more physically active as both kids and adults. You see what I'm saying? Getting your kids more coordinated will mean they're more likely to be physically active when they're adults. And so right there, from our bottom foundation, we know we have to enhance coordination in kids. So then the next logical step is, how do we best do that?

Well, again, this has been shown scientifically that strength is the key detriment, the biggest determinant of motor control function in kids. So when you. I say strength, if you need to translate that in your brain of saying, oh, he just wants my kid to be more coordinated, fine. We're actually on the same page. I like the word strength. If you don't like the word strength, fine. All good there.

By the same token, when you go to that your strength coach or when you go to your facility and you say, hey, my kid's just really uncoordinated, a really solid coach is going to hear that and go, okay, we got to get that kid stronger. And they're not meaning they got to work on their deadlift. Probably they don't need to maximize their overhead press, but that is just how the words will be translated. I really hope that helps us understand what we're saying, because oftentimes we are saying the same things from both sides here. But people just don't make that connection. That strength and coordination are incredibly overlapped, particularly at this age. I want to do another game.

Think about the difference between movement vocabulary and language vocabulary. In other words, I will go through this example almost always talking about language. I want you to translate in your brain. Also to go, how would I think about this differently if I switch this from language vocabulary to movement vocabulary? Again, that's why we use vocabulary. Okay, number one, language vocabulary. When do you start teaching your kids language?

I get this question all the time. When do I start teaching my kids to strength train? When do we start them in sports? When, when, when, when do I start? Well, when do you start language Development, you start at moment one. You start at day one. I've got children, I know this.

You are talking to your kids the moment they arrive. And you never stop talking to your kids. Now, you don't expect a lot of payback out of that. Initially, there's not a lot of return on investment. You're not seeing anything. But if you didn't talk to your kids for six months, they were not going to wake up at three years old speaking. It's not going to happen. You start it very early and it takes forever for improvements to make.

But that's because that development is so hard. Going from no language to one language is one of the most costly things your brain will ever do.

Okay, so when do I start? Day one. Well, how do I do it? It's age appropriate. You use language to your one year old or your one month old. It's short, it's one word, it's simple phrases. You're using a lot of facial expressions to try to convey a point, try to make context. Right. It is age appropriate.

You don't overwhelm them with language. You try to make it fun. You see the analogies I'm drawing here, right? So when do I start it? Immediately. How do I do it? Age appropriate, make it fun, so on and so forth.

Why do I even worry about it? Well, this sounds silly if I say why worry about teaching your kids how to talk? But again, doesn't sound as silly if I say, well, why do I even want to strength train my kids? I get that question a lot. I never have gotten the question, why do I teach my kids language? But think about it. You teach your kids language so that they can express themselves. Oh, interesting.

We know of the short and long term benefits or effects, I should say negative effects, consequences of being illiterate. We know how hard this is to be socially involved. You can't be a part of a community if you can't read. It's harder, you can't speak. Right. These are challenges. You have better job prospects, make more money.

I could keep dragging this on. You will find scientific evidence that makes the same connections to those exact same variables. And exercising kits. Exact same ones. Not to the same extent. I'm not going to argue that. But the same ones will be shown to be associated.

Now, how much do you do, how often do you teach your kids language? Same thing with exercise. You want to stimulate, but you don't want to annihilate. In other words, we read to our kids every day. And my kids kids have to Read to us every day, and every day it's a fight. My son can handle about five minutes at max. My daughter will.

Sometimes it's a page, sometimes it's a whole chapter a little bit older. I never let them off the hook. We push them, we drive them. We don't just say, oh, you don't want to read today, no problem. But we don't try to annihilate them either. Right now, I'm not saying I'm a perfect parent, but you get the point. I don't want to burn them into a situation where they hate reading, but I'm also gonna drive them and push them a little bit.

The analogies are completely extended here. You get what I'm going at with that one. So I know that was really long and drawn out, but I wanted to do that because if you honestly think about exercise and movement like you do language, the concepts are almost identical. And so if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're wondering if you're doing the right thing or going about it, so on and so forth, if you think, would this be appropriate for teaching language, there's a very strong likelihood it would or wouldn't be appropriate for teaching movement as well. I appreciate you sticking with me through that one. Another thing I wanted to go back to was something I started the show with, and that was this idea that, you know, I didn't lift my kids.

Don't need to. Kids have never done this before as a species. They're fine. Kids know how to move automatically, so on and so forth. And I told you I was going to make an argument that this generation is the very first where I actually don't agree with that anymore. And I think we had to go farther. Bunch of reasons why, but I'll be brief here.

Number one, you all obviously are aware of the chronic health crisis the whole world is facing. We're going to make a very strong argument that this starts with childhood. I've already alluded to some points. You can pick a lot of different areas. But you'll see routinely what happens to you as a kid is going to dramatically impact what happens to you as an adult. So solving the adult health crisis is starting by solving the children or childhood crisis. I'm not going to go over all the details, but, you know, childhood obesity is skyrocketing.

It's something like 400 million kids globally are considered to be overweight, and 160 million are obese. And I think in the states, it's like 20%. It might even be higher than that of all 2 to 19 year olds. Just probably, you know, 15 to 20 million kids are categorically obese. We also know that physical performance is dramatically lower. This is physical strength and motor skill and movement pretty much across the board. We're going down now.

This is happening for a lot of reasons. And this is the part where I think most people have not understood why that's happening. People are aware general physical activity in the world is down. We know that. Right. All right, well, why is it happening? Number one, it starts at home.

No big surprise here. But kids will model parents. Parents are less active than they've ever been and communities are less active. The activities your parents did as a weekend, as a family activity are just far different than what they are now. And so entire not just about you and your life, it's about what you're exposed to when you go to your friend's house and so forth. So overall physical activity way down. Kids play outside way less than they used to.

Physical activity itself is way down. The standards that we'll use in science are things like kids should be physically active for 60 minutes a day, but this is going to floor you across the globe. In the US as well, 80% of kids fail to hit that number. We're not missing the mark here. We're not even in the stratosphere. There have been, and depending on where you live, this may or may not be true. Huge reductions in PE physical activity in schools.

So your kids, unlike your generation, they're not getting physical activity in schools. So where you didn't have to go out of your way to take your kids after school to one of these specialized strength conditioning programs. You were getting it in school. They aren't. Recess is also way down in general. So calorie thing, but a movement literacy thing is happening on top of all that. Sports are phenomenal.

I'm a huge advocate. But sports alone, because of these first two things I just said lack of general physical activity and lack of activity in schools. Because of that, sports are no longer just enough. Sports participation is way down. The COVID pandemic crushed it. Prior to that, we were at all time historical lows. It is coming up.

People are recovering from that. That's fantastic. Depending on where you look at, you'll see as high as like 50 to 54% of kids in America at least will participate in organized sports. But that's not enough. We need that number to be higher. But the sports alone won't cover all your bases. In addition to just simple caloric expenditure. The. Well, first of all, the caloric expenditure in sports is not nearly as high as you think.

If we move all the physical activity away that I just done talking about. So you're not gonna get there with sports alone. So where in previous generations, sports alone might have been enough to cover your bases, I don't think it is anymore. And I think that the scientific evidence would again, generally support that conclusion. Now, with all that in your mind, what actual issues does this cause downstream? First obvious one, call it energy deficit. In fact, Dr.

Feigenbaum called this the exercise deficit disorder, EDD. But this is not moving enough, not burning enough calories, metabolic health and so on and so forth. The obvious one, right. But past that, more importantly are the second two points here. So the second big problem is what's called dynapenia. Again, this is a Dr. Fagenbaum special.

Typically we use that word in context of older individuals, but this is also true in young kids. This is basically, think about it as underdeveloped muscle and underdeveloped strength. Why does that matter? You combine number one and number two and you get number three, which is what I call the death spiral. Perhaps I'm being a little dramatic there, but this is physical illiteracy. I've been talking about physical language and being literate. What is illiteracy?

Here's the spiral. If you move poorly and you start to fall behind your peers, you lose confidence really quickly. And the research is going to suggest this hits young girls harder than it does young boys. Come back to that. But you lose confidence, you lose confidence, you stop having fun, you stop having fun, you become less active. Kids that fall behind physically fall behind really far, really fast because of this spiral. They know they're not good, they're behind everybody.

Young kids tease each other more often. You know how this goes. It's not the kid's fault. This is just what 4 and 5 and 8 and 10 year olds do, right? So they become less active, they get less confident, and then what ultimately happens? And he'd be surprised to know this, but it's very true. Kids that are less physically active, we'll get hurt more as adults.

So oftentimes you get this experience, oh, I wasn't good, I sucked at sports, I was terrible. So then I didn't do them because you didn't want to get made fun of, so on and so forth. Maybe no one is even making fun of you, but just your self confidence. You knew you were the worst player on the whole team, so you stop doing it. You withdraw from physical or typically from sports, which means then often you withdraw from physical activity, which means you stay further behind, maybe, hopefully. Then as an adult you catch up and realize, okay, I gotta start working out. But you're physically illiterate or your literacy is low.

You don't know how to move well. You don't have the tissue tolerance, you don't have the experience. You don't know how to creatively solve movement problems. You don't know what good technique is because you never learned that feedback, either directly from a coach or indirectly. You just never figured out how your body moves best. So then when you start moving as an adult, bada bing, bada boom, you get hurt more often. This is not, oh, you're old now, you're 25, you're 35, you're 45.

This is in large part, not exclusively, but in large part a physical illiteracy issue. And it started by poor movement support as a kid. So it harms them now or then, and as a child, and then it also harms them later in life. That physical downward spiral thing again has been shown multiple times and is a real issue. And there's ways you can solve it. Not every kid needs to be an athlete, not every kid needs to be good at sports. But when that happens, if that happen as it happens, we need to have other solutions that are not just, okay, the kid withdraws from all physical activity because that causes a cascade of problems.

So what are the benefits? I'm going to talk about all the benefits of again, mostly gearing on strength training or strength training related ideas from the physical body. We'll talk about it from the cognitive perspective as well as the mental or mental health. So from a physical perspective, this is very easy and very fast. Any positive benefit from exercise you see in adult, you basically see it in a kid as well. Lifetime physical activity. Kids that are more physically active will be more physically active their entire life again, on average.

Most likely they're more skilled, they're more confident, they're less injured. We just talked about why. Cardiovascular fitness, metabolic health, obesity, body composition, muscle mass, bone health. We've talked about that earlier in this show as well as our previous episode on bone health. The connective tissue, the ligament health, this is an easy one. Well rounded strength training programs, ones that perform everything from endurance and strength and motor skill and balance and agility, comprehensive programs, these things reduce injuries in kids by up to 50%. In fact, I saw some papers showing up to 60% reduction so your kids won't be hurt.

As often as kids and they won't be hurt as often later in life. The physical ones are easy. I could do an entire show on that. But I wanted to actually spend a little more time on ones that are less intuitive. And this is things like the actual intelligence. At least five different global areas across many studies now, across many years, in different populations, whether we're talking about really young kids, adolescents, somewhere in between. So I'm kind of summarizing, well, I'm summarizing a lot of literature here, but in general you will see a important, not huge, but an important clinically significant and statistically significant enhancement in intelligence with strength training in kids. That's true. Right? That is exactly what you think you just heard.

Couple things to think about. One, there is a very well documented benefit in executive function with endurance exercise. It's been long established. Executive function in this case is typically defined as things like working memory, flexibility. Again we're talking about mental flexibility and well as inhibition. So that's been well established. More recently we've learned about things like the more variety in sports and the more overall physical activities.

That's two variables. Just doing more variation in sports, playing more sports as well as overall physical activity. Both of those have been shown to enhance academic performance in schools. Big areas you see improvements in overall cognitive function, direct academic achievements as well as on task behavior. So a lot of direct, what I'll just again call intelligence benefits. The list of what one would maybe call mental health benefits is even longer and I'm not going to take the time to go through all of these because it is very, very long. It is everything from kids who play sports are oftentimes slightly happier than kids that don't.

Anxiety, depression, ADHD have all been shown to be benefited from resistance exercise, confidence and self esteem like we talked about, especially in females. These are huge ones. A perceived competence. We've mentioned this one before as well one more time. This is really important because one of the big drivers in physical activity involvement in kids is just how bad they think they are relative to their peers. Resilience, ability to get, demonstrate grit or develop grit, another really common measure for strength training. And again mental health factors.

So those things are all important to consider. The physical, the cognitive and the overall emotional or mental benefits of exercise. Lastly, stronger kids tend to be stronger adults. There's actually direct evidence looking at things like type 2 diabetes. Kids that are more physically active, strength trained more, played more sports are less likely to develop diabetes later in life. Right. You're talking about now years to Decades later, independent of what happened in that time, if you're more active.

And this is actually true after accounting for familial co founders. So this is research specifically looking at things like siblings. So it's not just saying, oh, kids are, you know, if you're in a more active family, of course you didn't get more diabetes. No, no, no. Accounted for something inherent to being active as a kid. Will protect you somewhat, won't totally save you of course, but will give you some protection about from developing diabetes. And we can be confident in this because there's lots of other similar research.

Similar things have been shown directly on atherosclerosis, heart disease. In fact, I'm thinking of a 40 year follow up study. The kids that were more active, you know, getting younger in life, 40 years later, directly measuring those same people, again, lower rates of atherosclerosis. Yes, there is some association here, but again, we're seeing it in multiple areas. Diabetes, heart disease. We're seeing it when accounting for family history. We're seeing it in direct follow ups, we're seeing it in intervention studies, we're seeing it in questionnaires, we're seeing it in epidemiology.

So when you start to see the same kind of thing across multiple domains of research design, multiple domains of dependent variables, multiple domains of magnitude of effect, it starts to paint a pretty clear picture that says, okay, there's something going on here. Second thing that's important here, this is nothing specifically to do with sports. So even if your kid doesn't play sports, you don't play sports, you're not into sports, you don't think your kid will ever play sports, doesn't matter. You need to be physically active in a broad sense of the word. For all of these reasons, I just established, not only for them as a kid, for their bones and their muscle health and their cardiovascular health and their current metabolic health and blah blah, blah, for their academic performance, for their mental health, but also because it sets them up with a much better future when they become adults later on in life. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral drink with probiotics, prebiotics and adaptogens.

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By this point, I hope I've convinced you of the necessity for these things. Regardless of the situation or scenario that you're in. I want to transition now and start getting into our three eyes. First ones we're going to tackle, investigate and interpret. And again, if this is new for you or your first time listener or perform, what I'm really just trying to say is how do you even test your kid? What should you test them on? What should you look for?

How should you set it up and how do you interpret? How do you know if your kid's way behind in gross motor or fine motor skills? How do you know if they're way ahead or on point and so forth, I wanted to give you a really simple system here. And so actually there are some resources. One of them that's available to everybody is called the Y Fit Right? That stands for Youth Fitness International Test Y F I T.

This is open access. This is peer reviewed, published, but anyone can go do it now. The benefit of this is it's simple, it doesn't take a lot of technical savvy, the tests aren't really complicated and so forth. So what they came up with is five unique tests. These tests are your height, your weight, and they can use those first two, height and weight, to then calculate what's called your body mass index or your bmi. No, BMI is not a perfect measure of body composition at the individual level. But if you're trying to run 30 or 50 or 150 or 1500 kids through something and you're trying to get a broad scope of where they're at.

Again, remember how this was developed and who it was for. The BMI is reasonable. So test one and two, height and weight. Test number three is actually a 20 meter shuttle run. This is a good way to get an overall understanding of their cardiovascular fitness. Number four is a hand grip strength test, so maximum grip strength. And then number five is a standing long jump.

And so you can see, all right, height and weight. Tell me a little bit about body composition. Tell me a little bit about metabolic health. 20 meter run tells me about my cardiovascular fitness, my grip strength tells me about my strength and my jumping ability. Tells me a little bit about my coordination and my power. If you want in that paper they have a handful of things, they tell you exactly how to do these tests. So you can literally print it out and follow the instructions, how to set it up, what the rules are, how to standardize it, all that I'm not going to walk you through them.

Now some people will care about this, others won't, but you can go pull that up. Will also of course have direct links to the paper as well as the standardization tables in the show. Note captions, you can always check those out. That's true for everything we're going to talk about. One of the things that's also important about this YFIT test is it comes with a national database. And so if actually if you go pull up the paper again, open access, meaning anyone can access it for free in the supplemental data they share with you, their normative value databases. So you can go test your kid or look at numbers there and then see where your kid stacked up on all five of those tests.

Another one that also gives out the normative database here, the normal values so you can compare and contrast is something called fitback that is F, I, T, bac, B, A, C, K. Again, this is open access. This was published just this year, I believe. Really cool paper where they walk you through exactly how this testing thing was built and how to do it. And the fitback program I believe is free. And what it allows you to do is you can go online. And I think it is.

I'm not sure, I think it's fitback.com I'm not exactly sure. But the link to fitback will be again in the show notes. But this is cool and I liked it and I tinkered around with it a bunch because you can take your kids information, their results on all those scores, plug them in and they'll generate with you a custom report for your kid. So if you are working and you're maybe even volunteering and you're doing something like this, you can create custom little reports for all your kids and your parents, and the software will do it all for you. It doesn't take you a lot of time. You just enter in their scores and they'll plug it in completely free. So I thought that was a really nice resource, regardless of where you're at.

And so both of those papers and those resources are my best and strongest recommendations for going out and getting some testing done for every kid. You can also do them, you know, boys or girls, you can do them at any age and you can see where they stack up again according to their most relevant peers. Now, whether your kid is in sports or not, I really strongly encourage you to do this for a bunch of reasons. Number one, it's really hard to establish what's called return to play without normative data. What that means is if your kid gets hurt, your doctor's not gonna know if they're fully healed or not. Now, if they have an MRI or something like that, sure. But just because it doesn't have any structural visible damage, your kid may or may not be all the way back.

If you don't know what their normal vertical jump was or broad jump was, then you actually don't know if that knee is fully healed, even if it's not a serious injury. Even if it's, ah, yeah, it doesn't hurt that bad anymore, Mom. Okay. Are you sure? Well, if you go out and they're jumping as far as they possibly can, and they're still, you know, only at 85% of their max distance, then you know, they're not really back yet. And so having a baseline is really important. Number two, one of the things that people don't appreciate about youth development is development happens really fast.

Growth and development are not the same thing, though. Growth and development also happen in a non uniform fashion. Translation, you'll go through spurts. Your kids will get really strong, really fast, and then they'll stop for a while, they'll get really tall, and then they won't grow. They'll go. And it's not necessarily the same. Their quadriceps, the front of their legs may develop really fast and their hamstrings won't.

And so when your kid used to be normal, maybe you had tests done, they look great, they didn't have huge asymmetries, everything awesome. Well, now, three months later, they might have A large asymmetry somewhere because something grew in a specific area. Because the whole body doesn't grow uniformly, bones grow differently, structures grow differently, abilities, motor skills, muscles I just talked about. So for all those reasons and more, I would recommend some type of standardized testing. If you want to do the simple one like I just talked about with the YFIT test, great. If you have more access to maybe a quality strength conditioning coach or a physical therapist and you can do some more specific strength tests and, and movement tests or movement skills, that's great. Anything objective you can get, even if they're not an athlete.

For all these reasons and more, I'd recommend getting some baseline testing done. Other ways to think about this and the way that I actually like to frame this is say your kid's done some testing, maybe you've got all those stuff done. At what point are they ready to get a private coach? At one point, are they ready to focus more on, say, sport development right now? Again, I've got this question a lot. Here's kind of my answer to it. I'll give you nine or ten things Your kid is ready to have a skills coach, so that golf coach, or that pitching coach, or that kicking coach, or whatever you're trying to do, when and only when they can pass the following test, are they good at these few things.

If they're good at these things, they can do those skills coaches. Number one, can they skip in a straight line? You'd be stunned. You do not need a sprint coach or a speed coach or a shooting coach if your kid can't skip in a straight line, if they can't backpedal, if they can't do a crawl for 20 yards with low hips, right? So do a bear crawl without their hips going way up in the air for 20 yards. Can they do a crab hold for 30 seconds? Can they do a dead hang?

So grabbing a bar and hanging for 30 seconds, right? Can they do a one legged balance for 30 seconds? Can they do 10 lunges in a row without falling to the side consistently? Can they hop forward on one leg? You'll be really surprised how few kids can hop forward on one leg. Not in place, but actually moving forward. Can they do a cartwheel, a somersault?

Can they do a shoulder roll? Right now you don't have to do all of these things, but you get the point. If they can't do some of these basic rudimentary movement patterns, they probably shouldn't spend too much time developing specific sports skills. If your kid is active and involved and aggressive and mom, dad, I want to do more. And you're looking at this list and they want to, you know, practice golf more, play more, get their soccer coach or whatever. I would probably say great, we can do more coaching, kid, but we're going to work on this stuff. You need more foundational movement before we're ready to not necessarily do any skill coaching.

You can teach your two year old skill, right? I'm fine teaching whatever age skill, but the bulk of the training is what we're talking about. Don't do most of their training, don't do all their training if they're in this situation. Okay, so hopefully between that standardized test and this more non scientific test that I just gave you, this gives you a little more insights and is some help here. Outside of that, giving you more details about what to test and what to look for are incredibly hard. And that is fundamentally because kids develop at such wildly different rates, it's impossible to say, oh, a good leg press for a 10 year old is this. It just doesn't exist.

In fact, if you were to find those databases outside of the ones I gave you, I think you would see so much pushback from the scientists and the practitioners in this area of saying that's just an inappropriate way to frame it. You shouldn't look at your 7 year old and see how fast she can throw a softball in terms of understanding her development.

She's good, bad. That's a really bad way to think about it because again, kids are developing at such wild ranges. I can tell you normative values for a VO2 max for a 25 year old and I'm confident in those numbers. I can tell you how much muscle you should have as a 48 year old. I could tell you what a good vertical jump is for a 65 year old. I'm fine because most 65 year olds are pretty similar, or you should be, but most six year olds are not. There's no such thing as most 6 year olds.

I hope that point is coming through. The deviation is just wild. So while I would love to give you more direct exact tests to go do and more standardizations, I hope you can just follow those guidelines I gave you and say that is intuitive as we can get it. All right, it's now time for us then to move on to our third eye which is intervene. And at this point I'm going to talk about exact programs, how to lift, what to do, what not to do, and we're going to go over all the details as we understand it. Within the concepts and guidelines we have. So if you've been chomping at the bit to know, just.

Andy gave me the workout programs. I'll do my best. Right now, let's start off by understanding just what global physical activity should look like. Remember, this is all things human movement packed together first and foremost. The standard should always be positive experiences. We went over this countless times now. Fun, positive, set them up for the rest of their life.

Good relationships with exercise and movement. This is above and beyond anything else. Past that, you want to think about first and foremost, what we just call open play. When I hear strength training in kids, I honestly translate that to play for the most part. And most practitioners in this space do that same thing. So you want to think more play, less structure than you probably anticipate.

Child centric, not adult centric. Think about exercising kids the way kids think about it. Don't think about it how you think about it as an adult. Now this is especially true for the quote unquote kids that are not good at traditional sports. Have them do parkour, ninja warrior, obstacle courses, martial arts. If they suck at ball sports, find different ways to allow them to enjoy and be a part of physical activity that's just as good, if not better. Second thing, we gotta do our best to encourage and try to change overall philosophy on physical exercise and activity in schools. Pe. We've gotta keep it no matter what happens, we just have to keep it.

We're gonna have a hard time surviving as healthy adults if we eliminate PE from school. I understand why it happened. I understand why a few decades ago there was this big push to eliminate it. There's certainly the philosophy that my kids go to school to learn. I don't need to send my kids to school all day to play sports. We're not a sport family, we don't do sports. So on and so forth.

I get it. But I hope in the previous hour I've argued why that doesn't matter. That is irrelevant to the conversation. Physical education in schools is incredibly important to having a healthy, alive adult. And we're just not going to have the time to do that on our own. If we can do that. We're encouraging kids to play whether they're good or sports or not, especially ones that are not.

We're keeping and holding physical activity and exercise and physical education precious in schools. We're making sure recess is truly recess. Then if we're going to add sports on top of that. For those who wish to afford to. You want to choose a variety of sports we don't want to stick to just one. We'll talk more detail why. But big guidelines are more appropriate here than individual programs.

I will, I promise you, give you a sample program. But guidelines are more informative for everybody listening. What I mean by that, development in kids, like we said, is non specific and irregular. It doesn't happen linearly. The variance is enormous. Right. So classifying kids into programs based on age is suboptimal.

We will do it. I get it. You show up, you own a swim center, you have to give some sort of ways to group kids, right? You own a gym and there's basketball. You don't want your 4 year olds playing on the same basketball team as a nine year old. Great. Doesn't make sense.

But when possible, if it is at all possible, you want to try to group kids by actual skill rather than age. One thing that happens very often is late developing kids get left off, they get kind of ignored. And that's because they're continually the last person and there's no future there. And consciously or subconsciously, coaches, you know, probably don't put a ton of attention and the worst kid on the team, especially as we get into middle school and high school and so on. So by developing, making sure kids are always in groups based on their development, they always have a chance to be met where they're at. That's the guideline. So give programs to your kids that push them a little bit, but it's realistic for them in these situations.

I also can't give things like heart rates, I can't give zones. You don't hear us talking about zone one, zone two, zone three for kids. You don't hear us talking about percentage of 1 rep max. You're not gonna hear me talk a lot about this many repetitions. And that's because their physiology is different. I said this a little bit earlier, but I can say definitive things about muscle size and strength and performance in VO2 max for a 25 or 35 or 50, because for the most part a 25 year old physiology is the same. But a 5 year old's not example of this.

Kids are way more oxidative than adults are, which means they can recover from high heart rates like instantaneously. You'll see a kid get up to a heart rate maximum, five seconds later, be back down to normal where the rest of us are on the floor throwing up for 35 minutes. Right. And so the heart rate zones are irrelevant with kids. You can't use them. I can't say this much time at this heart rate. I can't say again from a strength training perspective, this much time, it's just the equivalents aren't there.

And so I know you want tangible examples as programs, but that's not how programming kids works. And if you look across again the practitioners and the clinicians and the scientists that are in this space, you're just not going to see much talk about that style of programming. That's an adult centric view rather than a kid centric view. Okay. The models that we like best are what are called long term athletic development models. Ltad. This is the scientific phrase to look for.

This is how we work now. Ltad. It does not stand for long term athlete development. It is athletic development development. The goal here is to teach every kid to be as athletic as we can. Whether you do sports and become an athlete, I do not care. So this is not an athlete development model.

It is a long term athletic model. Right? The National Strength and Conditioning Association, NSCA has a position stand on ltad. You can learn exactly what to do and not to do. Sample programs. All those things are in that. You can see that in the show notes.

What should you distill from it? Here's what I think. Number one, again, not all kids are athlete and we don't even care about that. But all kids should have a physical activity practice for the 12th time or 15th time already in our conversation. Number two, we want to start early. Remember, just like academics, movement, vocabulary, same thing. Number three, we need to create solutions for all ages, abilities and interests.

We've said that indirectly multiple times now and we don't like to use those arbitrary age cutoffs. It's all about the individual kid. We also don't want to abandon those late developers. I'm going to make a good argument for this a little bit later in terms of getting elite athletes by not forgetting the ones who are late developers. But number four, and this is probably the ones that stand out the most, a long term athletic development model LTAD will develop the whole kid, not just their athletic attributes. So this is the body, the mind, confidence, decision making, all those things. LTAD models encompass holistic, helping kids become better humans.

After that, you want to maximize that physical literacy. You want to think about things like strength, endurance, aerobic capacity, flexibility, agility, balance, power, speed, coordination and so forth. You do not want to focus only on one of those things. Don't worry about just maximum speed or worry about maximum strength. It's all of that stuff that is athletic development. And all humans should have those skills. In doing this, in building your program, you want to make sure that those skills are developed long term, not just short term.

That positive experience with physical activity is met. And then ultimately it leads to a reduction in injury rate. If your program does those things, I would say that that model is effective conceptually. This is what we're talking about now. The International Olympic Committee has its own long term athletic development model. Here in America we have our own. Canada has a different one.

They're all pretty similar. I'm just going to cover the one that's right in front of me. That is, of course, what's called the American developmental model. Not suggesting it's better than the Canadian or the IOC or whatever, but it's just one example we can go off of. Here's exactly what these models look like. They have five key principles. Principle number one, they're universally accessible.

Try to get these in a way that every kid can do it, or as many kids as possible. Number two, they're developmentally appropriate for the kid. They emphasize motor skills and foundational human movement. Again, you may be surprised. There's no maximum cleaning jerks here. There's no vertical jump. This is the stuff that athletic development model should be after.

Number three, it is multi sport participation. You'll be surprised to learn even the Olympic Committee here wants kids to play multiple sports. They do not want you to specialize early. I'm going to reiterate that point a bunch. They want multiple sport participation. Number four, they want fun and engaging and progressively challenging climates. And then number five, they want quality coaching at all ages.

And so their model has a stepwise system and it has multiple functions and criteria. So their model, number one, is called stage one. So stage one is what they call develop and learn and play. This is appropriate for anyone ages 0 to 12. What they're really saying here is, look, you might be 10 years old, but you have one year of experience. You start at stage one, you're not starting at stage three. And so rather than defining these stages by age or defining it by experience levels.

So stage one, develop, learn and play. Stage two, develop and challenge. So now you've probably been doing this stuff for somewhere between three and six years. You're generally a little bit older, maybe even up to 15 years old or something like that, and we're pushing you a little bit. We are challenging you. Stage three is true training and competition. You're now six, eight, ten years into active sports or engagement here and you're, you know, maybe even an 18 year old.

Stages 4 and 5 are more classically what you're going to think now. We're maximizing, we're competing, we're trying to peak, we're trying to become elite and specialist. And the experience is, you know, you've been doing things for 10 years or more. The top tier actually is going to surprise people. But in our athletic developmental model, stage number five, the top tier is what they call thriving and mastery for life is you coming back and being a mentor. It is you being active the rest of your life. And so their athletic developmental model encompasses.

We're not just going to let people walk out of this thing at 22 years old and they're broken and they're done and they're not engaged in activity for life. If we've done this model correctly, you are active your whole life, well past your sport years. You might even come back and mentor and you're having an active, healthy, phenomenal life the next 70, 80, 90 years. That is an appropriate long term athletic development model. Today's episode is sponsored by Momentous. Momentous makes the highest quality supplements on the market, Period. Many of you know me and you know that I do not trust the vast majority of supplement companies.

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So that's why I stick exclusively to Momentous. If you'd like to give Momentous a try, go to livemomentous.com perform to get 20% off your order. Again, that's livemomentous.com perform to get 20% off. So now that you got the bigger picture of what LTAD should look like in general, what are the concepts? I want to actually give you one example. Now, anytime you give a direct example, it is just that there's tons of ways to do it. What I actually did is I looked at a bunch of different models.

I talked to many people, and I kind of combined what most people are doing into one global model. But I know it is easier to conceptualize with your examples, so let's go ahead and do that. Before we get started, though, I want to thank a number of people. A guy named Pat Cullen Carroll, someone I've known for many, many years. I was fortunate to work with his son a little bit as a student. He's been around this for a long time. Rodri Lloyd, Avery, Fangen, Mama Mention, as well as very specifically a guy named Jeremy Frisch, I.e.

f, R, I, S, C, H. And I'm calling out Jeremy because I actually reached out to him directly. He gave me a bunch of material, shared with me exactly what he does in his programs. He was really kind and generous and made this process a lot easier. I love Jeremy's stuff. We're going to show more of it a little bit later. His websites and his courses and all that stuff can be accessed in the show notes.

But really wanted to thank Jeremy and everybody else who helped out. So what is this overall model? Well, again, as one particular example, ages I'll give you, but remember what I said earlier about ages, okay? Not a perfect way to go about it, but what I'll call babies. So kind of 0 to 5 years old. The focus should be on play. You're not coaching that much right now, if any.

You might be sharing safety rules and, you know, start when the timer hits this and things like that. But you're encouraging play at that point. There is no technical instruction happening basically at all at this range. You want them to be solving those movement problems themselves. You want them to figure out what helps them go faster, what they can do with their body to make them jump higher, what doesn't work. That's what we mean when we say solve the problems themselves. You also want enormous variety.

Walk, run, jump, roll, crawl, balloons, balls, big balls, small balls, implements, soft landing on the sand, on trampolines. And just everywhere that you can think, you're exposing them to tons of variety. After that, you move on to what we In America would call kind of the elementary school. This tends to be this 6 to 10 year old range at this point. With the previous Ltd models would call this the fundamentals. Right. So Jeremy uses a similar.

He has kind of some fun. I think he calls them speed demons or something at this age. But it's still fundamentals. We're expanding past the baby or the toddler age and we're doing the same kind of stuff. But now we're making competitive games. So we're doing some relay races, we're competing against a sibling or a peer. Sometimes we're jumping over hurdles, we're doing multiple step scenarios.

So this is jump over a hurdle and then spin around in a circle. It is an army crawl under three benches and then into a hula hoop. It is get on all hands and knees while you're holding that position. Or you're maybe doing a bear crawl while also dodge a ball. How do you dodge the ball? You could duck it, you could roll, you could flip over, you could do a somersault. You can see it's multiple steps combined and it's not, it's not a drill, right.

It's just a different activity. It's jump up and touch an object. It is attention, it is specific, it is multiple steps and so forth. Right. So that would be general fundamental principles at this point. We would now cross into again here in America what we call the kind of middle school. This is 11 years old to 14 year olds.

Just broad ranges here. Right. And now we're actually learning to be a multifaceted mover. So we're able to do probably more traditional strength conditioning at this point. Now just to be really clear, not many people are going to advocate waiting until you're 11 or 12 to start strength training. The general accepted position with strength training, as I said earlier, but to be really clear, you can start lifting weights as soon as the child is mature enough to pay attention to, want to do it and to follow instructions. Another way to think about this, if you can play an organized sport, you're probably ready to do some strength training.

Now what does that look like? Exactly what I'm talking about earlier, your strength training. Things like, you know, jumping, pounding, rolling, that's still strength training. So they're still doing those things. If you want to use kettlebells and dumbbells and barbells and machines, great, you can do that too. But it's the same kind of movements here, ideally as most of our training. Okay, so we only want to point that out because I didn't want people to think we're advocating for only starting traditional weight training at 11 years old or 12 years old.

You can start as soon as the person, the kid wants to, as soon as they can pay attention to safety rules. You're not going to obviously go after maximum strength or muscle growth and things like that, but you get the basic point. Okay, so moving on with again Jeremy's and colleagues, rough model here. Once we are in this 11 to 14 year old range, it looks probably more like a traditional strength and conditioning environment. We are more organized, there's less freedom in many aspects of the training, but there's still a ton of variety. Right. You're not just doing the same couple of exercises.

Your coaching technique very hard at this point. You start a coaching technique a little bit earlier, but you're really, you know, specific and focused on it now and you're doing more direct sporting related activities and exercises. More hopping, more skipping, more jumping, more lunges, more squats and hinges and things like that. Once you get into early high school, this overlaps again like with those previous ltad models. Early high school is when you're now becoming an athlete. So we are competing, we're trying to get stronger, we're trying to get faster, we are working on skill development of the individual sports and activities. Once you get to kind of late high school, this would be sort of 16, 17, 18 years old range.

You can become optimized for that sport. We can start really competing, emphasizing winning, what it takes to be strategic tactics, techniques, game plans, specialization, focusing on one sport now and so on and so forth. If you make it to college or sometimes you're any situation past high school now we're we're elite into specialization. You're basically optimizing everything you're doing for that individual sport or activity that you've chosen to. The final step, like always for every ltad model is then life and getting back to the basics. Lacking specialization, opening movement back up, being less precise with the programming and more varied, more movement patterns and so forth. So you can actually kind of see you're going back to the basics in one way to think about it.

If you want to think about some more specifics in terms of the exercise selection, we generally would call this movement skills rather than exercises. Again, child centric versus adult centric. Just a handful of concepts to think about. First one is, which I said one moment ago, you want to think about games rather than drills. An adult, you're going to go do this exercise a kid, we're going to Play this game, okay, in both how you're speaking to the person as well as how you're actually treating it, you're building games versus doing an exercise. Number two, you want to let them solve those movement problems themselves. They want to figure out what's faster, what's slower.

Where an adult you're going to be coaching, you're going to go right to the techniques that you know are going to be work, most likely for their body. Number three, in terms of the loading, you want to use a variety, especially doing your warmups. And so you really want to hit them with tons of different movements. Way more than you want to use a lot of variety with adults, but way more in children than you do later in life. Range of motion should be exceptionally high. One thing we want to be really careful of is not many coaches are going to spend a lot of time specifically working on flexibility in kids. And you don't necessarily need to.

You want to build range of motion through the activities that you're going after, rather than sitting down and doing static stretching. If you're doing a lot of variety and a lot of movement pains in the way we were discussing earlier, the range of motion should take care of itself. Obviously, the younger the kid, the less organized you are with range of motion. The wider range of activities, the older they get, the more organized you need to get, the more specific you need to get. You need to be doing dynamic warmups, but maybe now you're incorporating some static stretching based on an individual's needs or limitations or movement pattern restrictions or so forth. But the default setting for kids is a large range of motion possible. Once you get into those later high school years and you're becoming more specialized.

If you want to change and alter or shorten a range of motion for a very specific goal or outcome, that's fine. But at this stage, we're not optimizing for sport, so we should be optimizing for range of motion most of the time as our default strategy and setting. Last thing to think about conceptually, for these basic movement pattern skill development tools, you're rarely doing exercises at high volume. You want to go low volume, high intent, very moderate to low fatigue. Most of the time, you can do some fatiguing stuff. If it's. If, say, you're playing a game of dodgeball and kids are, you know, working really hard for 10 minutes, that's your conditioning, right?

Or you're doing some other game there where there's some fatigue associated. But most of the exercise, most of the lifting, most of the drills, there are a couple of seconds, there are a few repetitions. You're trying really hard, you're going really fast, you're focusing, trying to win, and you're resting and recovering. The goal is not at this point in their life to develop fatigue resistance. We're not trying to enhance fatigue resistance at this stage of life.

We're trying to develop better skills. That means they need to be somewhat fresh, they need a lot of practice, a lot of repetitions at it. They need a lot of repetitions at a lot of different scenarios, setups, situations and implements. And they need to do it with high intent, right?

Figure out what works for them. So those are the big concepts, some of the targets in terms of the skill development, things you want to go after a balance.

We said that earlier. Something people don't talk about a lot though is grappling. Grappling is a very important skill for kids. This is pushing, this is pulling, this is lifting and carrying. We would collectively again call that grappling. Locomotion is everything from sprinting and running and agility, jumping and landing, two legged, one legged, rotating. So jump and turn and land, jumping on things, jumping off of things.

These are actually fundamental skills for kids. Tumbling, rolling, side rolls, shoulder rolls, butt rolls, all of those things are important. You also want to incorporate target practice. So be able to throw, be able to catch, be able to hit something, be able to aim at something with the upper body and the lower body. Kids often get this with the upper body, right? They're going to throw a football at something or try to hit something, but make sure they're getting those same skills with the lower body as well. Climbing, very specifically, whether this is hanging from a bar, this is rock climbing, this is ninja warrior or parkour or climbing fences.

Fundamental movement skills that are a little bit different than everything that we've talked about thus far. Pay attention to rhythm. I said this really briefly earlier, but this is something that is oftentimes forgotten. So this is often. You think about this in drills where you have to do multiple things at different speeds. So imagine like a three part drill or game, I should say, Sorry, violated my own rule there, where the first part, they have to step over some hurdles that are pretty high. Now they can't do that very fast, so they're going at one particular speed.

They finish that and then they sprint 15 yards backpedal, 15 yards back. That'll be really fast. And then they get that and they do a fast foot drill on a ladder on the ground. Those are all gonna Happen at three different speeds. So they're practicing, learning to try as hard as they can to try to go fast. But the actual rate of movement, the rhythm, big steps, small steps, change of pace, not change of pace, open up the throttle, hold things back. These are all how you develop rhythm of movement, which is critical to overall skill development.

Spatial awareness, judging distance. Right. So being able to throw an implement. I actually was, funny enough doing this with my kids very recently, where you take an object and put them at many different distances and they have to learn to throw. In our case, we were throwing a medicine ball at, we were knocking something over. But one of them was short, one of them was a long ways away, one of them was close. And so they're starting to realize and figure out how do I manage force input to give me a very specific distance.

Same thing with their own body, figuring out how close I am to another kid. So we'll do activities where we're in close environments and you can't hit somebody. So spatial awareness, kinesthetic awareness, distance judging, hitting a ball that's coming at you. Right. Hitting a volleyball. You get the idea, right. Reaction time is another independent one.

You all know what reaction time is. And then a similar one, but that's actually uniquely different, is what we actually call decision making with speed. And so this is something like, you know, you're going to, your coach is going to give you signal and you have to interpret that signal and make a decision fast as you possibly can. This happens naturally in many sports, but not all. But that's a different thing than just reaction alone because now we're enhancing the cognitive demand. Make the right choice and then give me the physical reaction as well. I could go on and on, but that was 11 or 12 or 13 different targets to go after.

So as you're either designing your own program or you're really watching your kids program, you're watching what your kids are doing. You can use a list like this and go, hey, geez, we're only doing, we haven't done any tumbling in forever. We don't do any climbing, we haven't done any spatial awareness. And then you maybe you can add something, one or two things to what your kids are doing overall and give them a more well rounded physical training approach. That's the best way, I think, to use information like I just covered. Look at what your kid is doing and what you're having them do or what your coaches are doing. Then it may be, say, ah, geez, we have some big things we haven't filled in there and see if we can add a drill here and there or a game here and there or an activity at home to fill in some gaps.

One of the things that's also nice about a list like this, as I said at the beginning, none of this takes special equipment. None of this takes highly trained skilled coaches or trainers.

Everyone can do this. Not every kid will be great at all these things. You shouldn't do this all every day. But almost anyone in the world, regardless of access, can look at a list like that and just try to get a bunch of these things done. And if you were to do that and you were to do it often, as often as you can or as you're willing to do, it's going to be a huge help and you're going to get most of the things we talked about earlier for overall physical development and be in a really good spot with free or zero cost for you at all. I think it'd be nice for me to cover one actual direct example. The way I'm going to do that is I looked at an actual program from Jeremy that he was able to share and I said, okay, if I were to take the concepts and apply it to one individual kid, what could that look like?

So I've sketched up a program here based on again, Jeremy's actual program as well as some concepts, made some modifications. And I just said, if I had a 7 year old, what would one day of a workout look like for that 7 year old? I like Jeremy's approach because in that model he has everything from what is the drill, what is the intent, what's the coaching cues and strategy, how long is it going to take and what's the actual outcome is really high, really highly organized stuff. I'm not going to share all that with you, just drag on a little bit. But I love that part of the model. So I'll share with you the first couple. So let's say the kid walks in.

7 year old kid, right? Nothing else we know about the individual, but seven years old, roughly, we're always going to start with some sort of warm up. Now the goal to warm up, balance, stability and reaction time in addition to having some fun. Again, you could switch out these goals, but what is the goal? Okay. Therefore we know those are the four goals we identified. How long we can invest. Ten minutes. Got it.

What's the coaching cue? You want to be relaxed and semi structural. So you one more time as the parent or the coach or the individual going through it, they're warming Up. You want to coach, but you don't want to be all on them. You know, really grilling them with the details. So it's relaxed, get things going and semi structured, but a lot of freedom as well. What are the actual exercises ones that I saw actually videos of Jeremy doing one called a get up to hop.

This is the kid is laying on the belly and either the kid does it or on a, you know, a stopwatch or a start or you know, ready, go. The kid gets up from their belly and goes immediately to one leg and starts hopping on one leg.

So it's a multiple step approach. He showed examples of doing that as well with a hop to a turn or hop to a twist, hop to one leg, hop to another one. But it's a multi step thing that is a dynamic warmup. We've already checked balance off because we're hopping. We check stability up because we're hopping on one leg. Right. Reaction time because we're listening to the coach's cue and it's pretty fun.

It's also pretty safe. Not a huge injury risk there. There's not a high load or velocity or fatigue. Not multiple steps when the kid isn't ready for it yet. Pretty simple instructions. I think most 7 year olds, regardless of athletic ability, we'd be able to be execute that just fine. And you do that for 10 minutes.

Right now reality is you'd probably do two or three or four or five of those games. But I just picking you one for an example from the warmup, you then move on to step number two or stage number two, which is coordination. So the focus is to work on coordination. The more specific goal is movement efficiency and power. Maybe spend 15 minutes here. The coaching is fast and loose, right? You're picking things up a little bit.

You're trying to be competitive because you want them to work on some power. So they got to move with high intent exercises. Things like a bear crawl through different hoops, hula hoop to a cone throw drill. So you're literally doing a hula hoop and then doing a throw relay. Maybe multiple kids at a time. You got a couple of groups going. We've knocked off movement efficiency, we've knocked out power and we've added we, we made intent, stay high because they're competing.

That's what got the kids to try to throw the thing as hard as they could or go as fast as they could. Okay, so warm up. Then coordination. Then we're going to move on to movement skill. So in this case, movement skill was a focus on speed, agility and reaction time again, maybe now 10 minutes long. Something a little bit shorter. The exercises, a tennis ball catch coach reaction drills.

You could fill in a bunch of them here. You're getting the point, right? You guys can kind of see how this model is working. Again, really highly structured, but probably isn't landing in your head like the way you think about it. When you get your workout programs. Adult centric, kid centric. Okay, fourth final thing we'll do is a game.

This is a five minute fun finisher. You want to get the kids leaving with happiness and joy and remembering the fun part. Develop athleticism. Coaches are going to serve as the referees and maybe you play a competitive game, you know, flag tag where you each kid gets a little flag in their back and you try to grab it from them. You can do this in a lot of different ways. One legged hops only so that the kids aren't just the biggest, fastest, strongest kids are going to kind of always win. You could make the game really ridiculous if you will.

But you get the point. We have some structure. We're going after multiple outcome goals. Here's how we put it together. We're doing it in a short time domain. Nothing is to maximum fatigue, nothing is maximum load. Complicated movements, multiple steps.

And we got a lot of stuff done in a total of, I don't know, 40 minutes including warmup, cooldown. We can't walk away from this entirely without talking about plyometrics. Just because I get a trillion questions about that. Plyometrics is a fancy way of saying like jumping and landing. It's really crazy people. For years. I remember actually I showed this in class for probably a decade.

I think it was like WebMD. Yeah, it was WebMD where you would go on and they would just show you all the dangers about plyometrics and kids and don't do it and so forth. It's probably still up there.

Honestly, I didn't check. So I bring it up for these exact reasons. Here's the rope. With plyometrics. We've already covered it all. It's common sense.

Kids jump and land every day. It can be dangerous. Like anything can be dangerous. Riding a bike can be dangerous. Playing baseball can be dangerous for my kids. Riding with a pencil can be dangerous.

Who knows, right? There's no danger to plyometrics. There's a danger to too much volume. There's a danger to playing 12 months a year of a sport and then adding a bunch of plyometrics on top. That's the danger, right? So just use some common sense here and it should be fine. Kids are meant to jump and land.

They do it all the time, all day. Normal plyometrics are not any different from that. So don't want to spend too much more time on that. I do want to spend a little more time though, specifically on what I call the 10 rules of lifting weights for kids. You know the concepts already. What are things that are specific to weights and free weights and strength training and resistance exercise for a kid? Let me run you through my personal list of 10.

Number one, and stop me when you've heard this before. We're going to focus on quality, positivity and fun. I will give you numbers, but this is not how I have ever coached kids or, or ever had any of my students. And I've actually mentored more than a few master's students who went on and did their projects in this area of kids strength training. So I'm pretty familiar with the research. And again, speaking to many people, this is always about quality. Repetition ranges are really rough guidelines for adults and they're hyper, hyper rough guidelines for kids.

I've made that point now and you're probably sick of it. But number one again, is that number two, something I have not brought up yet. Make sure the environment is safe. In other words, the equipment. Don't have kettlebells laying around, don't have dumbbells on benches. Kids will find a way to get hurt. So strength training will hurt kids if that part isn't taken care of.

And way more important to do it in kids and youth than it is for adults. So make sure the environment is safe for those little squirrels. Number three, generally we're looking at for strength training, two to three times per week, 20 to 30 minutes per session. Now the model I laid out a minute ago was probably more like 40 minutes, but that was a warm up and a cool down and different activities and games. The actual lifting part, you're probably talking about 20 to 30 minutes at max. Start off more conservative two days a week. As they get more competent, build up to three.

Number four, full range of motion with good technique. Now that we're introducing load, we're going to put more of an emphasis on technique. When a kid is moving his own body, I'm going to let her do whatever she wants for the most part when she's putting a load on. Now more rules come into play. Not going to restrict everything and get everything really tight, but you get the point, right? More sense, more load on the Bar more load on the, on the implement, rather number five. We're always still going to start with those dynamic movements and we're going to try to instill warm ups and movement quality like that.

Number six in terms of the actual number of sets, probably one to three sets with somewhere between six to 15 repetitions at a light load. What's light? I don't know.

Call it less than 60%. Maybe counterintuitive, but you can do a one rep max with kids. You're not gonna do it for every exercise. A one rep max is not gonna be the same. You're not gonna rip smelling salts and, you know, really take them up to the end. But you can get a rough sense of what their maximal strength is in program like that. But think about it.

You're doing two sets, 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 reps at 40, 50, 60% of their max. We're not here to maximize muscle growth. We're here to just use weights as a way to develop tendons, bones, muscles, movement capacity, motor skills, focus, movement literacy. It's just another tool in the tool bag. So it's a different outcome goal that we're looking at entirely. We'll increase load 5 to 10% as they become more competent. If they're not, then we don't.

We're not going to hold tight to specific numbers. You're watching every repetition and you're. When you think the kid has learned enough for the day, then we're done for the day.

That's all we're after. So we're not going to push more than moderate fatigue. You can push to pretty high fatigue when you're playing games and you're out there moving around. But when you got loads and we're strength training moderate fatigue at best at this age range. At times you can go past these numbers so you can get to maybe, you know, 80% of your one rep max in certain kids, if they're ready for it. But you're only going to dip into that pretty infrequently. And you're going to do it for small doses.

You want to, you know, kind of run a check and see where they're at. You want to actually do some more advanced strength training because they've got, you know, two or three or four years behind their belt. Okay. But it's going to come in small doses. Most of your time is going to be spent at those much lighter loads. You can go at a lower repetition range below this 6 if you're working on technique or if you're working on speed and power. At that point, it makes sense to do three or five repetitions or something close to that.

But for the most part, most of our time with these kids is going to be spent again, 1 to 2, 3 at most sets per exercise, 6 to 12 reps at a pretty light load. Past that, we want to be working on some basic movement patterns. So you want to do upper body, you want to do and lower body rather, you want to do multi joint exercises. We're rarely doing isolation work, right? We're looking at squatting and hinging and pressing and pulling, horizontal, rotational, vertical, big movement groups. A couple of exercises per day and then get out of there. If you identified a particular weakness and asymmetry has developed or you're concerned about one, then you can add a couple of corrective exercises.

Those can be a little bit more single joint, a little bit more isolation, depending on what's going on there. But that's the appropriate dose. So you add all that stuff together, you do it in a large variety, right? So we want to alter the stimulus, you want to alter the position and everything that we can. You're in and out, you know, in 20 to 30 minutes of actual lifting. You're doing that a couple of days a week. You're progressing somewhat conservatively.

You do all those things, you're very, very likely to have a high quality result, low likelihood of negative consequences and injury, and you probably aren't likely to burn the kid out anytime soon. So those would be my again, 10 rules of lifting weights for kids. If we go past physical activity, which was where we started these guidelines, and then we went into strength training, I want to go all the way up to now. What about exercise and sports specifically? Generally, five recommendations here for youth athletes. Again, we're now talking about people in competitive, organized sports. Very first thing we want to recognize is you don't want to come into your sport after large periods of inactivity and then just start competing.

What's the most common one you will see? University injuries in kids goes way up in the fall. Why kids go off in the summer. They don't do anything. They show right back up. They immediately jump into football practice or soccer practice or whatever they're doing. So they go from periods of really low activity to really high activity and boom, injuries start to happen.

So don't do that. Number two, you still want to focus on foundational movements more and skill development less direct. Example, let's say that you're getting ready for football season or basketball, baseball season. Whatever the case is, we're in baseball season right now, spring training. The mistake here would be oh, I got hurt, my shoulder got hurt. Oh really? What happened?

Well, I threw a bunch, you know, getting ready for season. So throwing a baseball would be a sport specific preparation. But that said you should still spend more time working on running and jumping and sprinting and landing. So if your only preparation for season is the sport technique, you're not fundamentally developing everything you need to be to actually be ready for the loads that will happen in your sport. And so overemphasizing skill development and under emphasizing move and development is still going to potentially leave you in a spot for a bunch of problems. The rule of thumb here roughly is what was say two to one. You don't want to spend more than two times the amount of hours or volume or however you're thinking about it in sport as you do in playtime.

If your sport to play breakdown is 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 5 to 1. Now we're going to have problems because we're under developing those foundational movements. If it's closer to at least 2 to 1, you still got an okay chance. Again, numbers will vary based on individual and age, but it's a really really so and and that number actually is directly from research that was actually been sussed out to figure out like that is seems to be the number kids that have a higher ratio of the of 2 to 1 sport to play end up getting hurt more often. So important to know there another important guideline for youth athletes. Similar things it's this is what we call no permanent seasons. Eight months is roughly the number you generally don't want to spend more than eight months in a year playing a single sport.

You see this routinely. Kids go through their their local school season and they go into special season or AAU or club and they end up having these like perpetual seasons. We have seen this with golfers, we have seen this with baseball players and volleyball players. We've seen this with runners, cross country going into track and then off season and indoor and you end up at a 12 month long season for kids. Eight months is the rule. Can't exactly tell you why, but the research is going to say that's the breaking point where longer than that we start seeing a greater increase in injury risk. So something to keep your kid aware of at that point.

Lastly, here's what we call no early specialization. Below 16 years old kids should be participating in more than one sport. After that, if you want to specialize to one, you can, but, but the more sports the better. And at minimum 2 below the age of 16 if you can pull it off. At this point I've probably gotten myself into a lot of hot water regarding this specialization. I have actually talked about this in small parts before in the past and man, the Internet got mad. And so I do want to make sure we're all really clear when we talk about early specialization in sports, since we're right here.

Firstly, it does not harm your ability to become an elite athlete by playing multiple sports. I can say this a bunch of different ways, but that is obnoxiously clear. If you have your kid play more sports, it will not compromise their ability to be a world champion at all. Pick the data point you want here. There's a fun thing that happens every year during the super bowl where they will report right before the game the amount of people playing in the super bowl, how many were multi sport athletes and how many only played football. You want to guess what that number is? It varies year to year, but it's Generally somewhere between 91 to 96% of the athletes on those rosters were multi sport athletes.

So that point alone should end the conversation. Very rarely do people become world champions at the highest level in sports by only doing one sport. In fact, the data will show the exact opposite. Second point, if I didn't convince you right there. Specific studies have shown kids who play three or more sports from ages 11 to 15 are more likely to play in national versus club level teams by the time they get to the ages of 16 to 18. So if you have your 12 year old and you think your 12 year old is something special, hopefully they are all the best of luck to you. But if you want that 12 year old to reach the highest level possible, have that 12 year old playing in three or more sports.

That will give you a stronger chance to be truly elite by the time that 12 year old turns 16 or 18 than staying in the one sport routinely shown. All right. Now obviously there's some correlation there and associations, but second piece of evidence, right? Third piece of evidence, a recent meta analysis. And this is really about the most concrete thing I can tell you. This Meta analysis covered 51 different studies over the course of it.

It was about 6,000 kids. And what's cool about it is it included almost 800 world top performers. So who actually becomes the best or close in the world? World top performers usually differentiated as things like again, who made the world championships versus only national championships, who made Olympic teams versus just national teams, who made Club teams versus hiring. So like that's oftentimes how they break these things down. Handful of things that came out of that meta analysis 1. The best kids played the most multi sports.

It's just really clear you will not stop your kid's ability to be the best possible by making them play multiple sports. In fact, more likely you're giving them a better chance to become elite by giving them a more well rounded experience physically and cognitively. In my opinion that is the most important stuff for us to understand for exercising kids. We talked about just from a general physical activity perspective, from a lifting weights, directly from a motor development, from an overall sport perspective. The last little tidbit I wanted to throw at you here was what we know about how to motivate kids. You could use a different term if you'd like, but how to just get kids to be more physically active when they don't want to be. Some kids are just more into movement and sports and others are not.

What do you do if you're that parent thinking how do I get them moving? I don't want to push them too much. Right? You don't want to do that negative thing and have them get mad and so on and so forth. What's the right amount of pushing? What are some strategies? Well, number one, just be more active yourself.

That is always a good thing. If your kid is not active and you are not active, that is the easiest way. Kids will model parents, so kids will model community. So that said, the second one is get them in more environments where more kids and more adults are moving. If your community, your friends, your family is on tv, is on phones and stuff all day, they're going to mimic that. If they're just in different environments, they will mimic that. Those are the two biggest steps you can take.

You yourself as well as get them in peer groups of kids who are more active. Doesn't mean you can't let them be friends with their kids who want to play video games all day anymore. But you get the point. Put them around environments where people are just more active. 3 and this is actually something that has worked a lot with my kid. Try different physical environments. This means play on the ground, play in the snow, play in the water, go into the forest, go into playgrounds, going to gyms, going to courts.

Get them in different environments. Maybe they hate sport courts, but they love to play around in the forest. Great. Maybe they are cold and they hate the outdoors. Awesome. Try an indoor pool. Whatever you can do to change the physical environment, maybe something will Resonate and hit with them there.

That hasn't resonated in the sports that you liked or the activities that your spouse or your family liked. Another thing, similar idea. Try different movement modes. If they don't like running because they don't like playing soccer, they don't like playing football or basketball. Try swimming. Try in the water. Make them move their body differently.

Put them on a bike, put them on a board. Have them do skateboarding. Do different things that are different. Not just you moving your own body. Other stuff may do it. I can tell you right now, my daughter absolutely goes bonkers over swimming. Great. I hate swimming.

Hate it personally. Don't like it at all. She's all into it. Fantastic. I will take that kid to the pool anytime she wants to go and we can take her there. Right? Her brother doesn't like it at all. Awesome. Whatever it takes.

Different environments, similar concept. Try different implements. So bats, different rackets, different balls, long things, short things, sticks, flags, whatever.

You're getting the point, right? Just try different exposures. Try another thing that's worked a lot. Try different play partners. One thing that happens with kids being so far behind other kids, if they're around their peers only, they tend to withdraw and fall back if they're below them or delayed. So having them always compete against the same kids who are better than them may not be your best option. Play with them directly yourself.

A lot of little kids don't want to play with other kids for that reason. But they will play with you. So you'll be the one to play catch with them. You'll be the one to play the sports with them. And not only are you modeling the behavior, but they actually are more comfortable not being good at something with you because they don't have any reference point. They know mom and dad are better. They just know uncle's going to be better.

They know auntie's going to be better. So they don't have that negative experience. Being the worst one in the group like that. If they have siblings, same thing. Maybe don't have them play with the sibling if it's causing that negative dynamic. Or cousin or whatever the case is. Or the neighbor, so on and so forth. Or themselves.

Maybe the best scenario is have them play with themselves. More practice by themselves rather than in front of the other ones if that's causing the problem. Finally, try to make things a differentiator between task goals versus sport goals.

Here's what I mean. Maybe the kid has no interest in sports, but you can get them to build a Fort. You can get them to do something where, hey, we got to get all these rocks into the water over there. Great. They're still going to be playing sports, but they don't care about winning, they don't care about points on the board, but they will do something like that. Maybe it wasn't the best example, but hopefully you can come up with your own example there where you're getting them to do different things. Have a start, a stop. Here's what we're trying to do.

We're going to accumulate points, but the points are different. It has an outcome that they like and it's not just reward based. It is just actual intrinsic reward. We did our thing, but the thing is now not a sport or a score. It is great. We build that cool deck. Awesome. We put that bridge across the water.

Now we can go all the way over. You get the idea. I hope that was informative and I gave something for everybody. We try to do our best to stick to what we know from the literature as it stands. I also wanted to cover a lot of different options to meet you at your individual needs, your kid at their individual needs and make sure we've got tools and tactics for everybody. Last thing I wanted to mention and I will go over this stuff briefly and I'll put them all directly in the show notes. And this is just what I'm calling additional resources.

I promised this earlier. There are a handful of books that I know. I have personally read certifications and courses that I thought were great and I wanted to directly mention those. More again will be available in the show notes. But from a textbook perspective, the NSCA's High School Strength and conditioning book is fantastic. If your kid is at that age, you want to know direct exercise examples, programs, how to teach the exercises, the techniques, all that stuff. It's wonderful. Patrick McHenry.

I've known Patrick for a long time. Mike Nitkin. Mike is just a legendary figure in youth strength training. They both wrote that book with a bunch of other people. It is fantastic. Avery Fagenbaum, I mentioned multiple times he has a book called Youth Strength Training also awesome. And then finally the American College of Sports Medicine has a book called Essentials of Youth Fitness written actually by Avery Fagenbaum, Rodri Lloyd and John Oliver, again, three super prominent scientists and practitioners in this field of ltad.

They actually have a certification as well called the Youth Fitness Specialist certification. All of those are available. Jeremy Frisch, who I've mentioned multiple times now has a master's course. All of these books I mentioned including Jeremy's course are all $50 or less. And so again, not everyone can afford that, but many folks can. And these are great resources. If this is a field you care about.

Something completely different that I couldn't do this episode without mentioning is something my friend Jim Davis created out of Chicago. It is called the Good Athlete Project. This is a combination of leadership and mental health and psychology smuggled into an exercise and sport program. The Good Athlete Project is phenomenal. I've done some stuff with it in the past. I've known Jim for some time now and it is great. And Jim is great himself.

Lastly, and this is a really big one, another group that I have been a part of and I'm actively a part of this is led by a guy named Brian Finnegan. Brian spent a lot of time in Amazon Sports department. This is called the Global Youth Sports Innovation Challenge. And Brian specifically is running a project called the Future of Play. Now, why this is important, this innovation allows funding of research. So if you're a scientist in this area and you're looking for funding, you can go there. If you're a donor and you want to contribute, they have a mechanism for that as well.

They also allow you to pitch companies, big ones, the biggest of the big ones in youth sports, whether it's your project, your activity or whatever you're trying to do, you can get in front of these groups and tell them how you're trying to enhance youth sport quality in America at least. Lots of awesome stuff happening by Brian and his group. And again, it's called the Future of Play Initiative. If I had to take these last couple of hours and summarize them all down to 10 things, here's what I'd say. Number one, unfortunately, we are just in a position in our human history where your kids need specific exercise and strength conditioning for their short and long term health. And this is probably the first generation where I would truly say that, but I just don't think we can argue that anymore. Number two, while many people, and probably my circle knows a lot of the things I talked about or at least conceptually agreed with me, we still need to keep spreading the word.

This is a very important topic to share, as evidenced by the amount of misinformation that is out there, the misconceptions and some of the things that are still prevalent in the scientific, clinical and practical field regarding specifically strength training in kids. Number three, always, always make sure whatever you're doing, you're promoting a positive relationship with human movement, physical activity and exercise in kids. Number four, differentiate between developing an athlete and making sure we're developing overall athleticism. Everybody has a body, so everybody's an athlete in their own right. This may look, feel and smell different for everybody. That's fine. Nobody has to play sports, but everybody should have the ability to be athletic. Number five.

This is all about movement literacy for life. We want big movement vocabularies. You can solve a lot of problems. You can give yourself a lot of options. The bigger your vocabulary is. Number six. You start maximizing that vocabulary at birth.

Of course, everything is appropriate to age, desire and abilities. But this thing starts as soon as we can move because we've started moving. So we need to start working on movement and we need to get better at movement. Number seven. Each kid is their own athlete. They are one of one. It's not always possible.

I get it. I've taught summer camps before. I've taught kids, I've taught the middle school. 50 plus groups of kids at a time. You gotta do group stuff, you gotta bucket however you can. I get it. That's realistic.

But when possible, try to meet every kid where they are at and treat them as a one of one. Number eight, all this starts with you. The more you can do, the more you can model, the more you can help promote these activities, the more likely it is your kid or your nephew, your neighbor is going to have success in those things. Number nine, don't over specialize, especially early. We can do that later in life, probably a lot later than you think. There are some exceptions.

Gymnastics peaks at like 12. Yes, I get it. I hear you out there. But for the most part, as a general rule, we want to specialize later in life and spend more of our time on foundational basic human movement principles and concepts and loss on sports tactics and skills for younger kids. And 10th and finally, if we can fundamentally frame this as games and not drills, as fun and not workouts and not exercises. We re switch our brain. We take a kid centric rather than a adult centric approach to how we think about how we program, how we implement and how we coach strength training in kids.

We're going to be more effective in the short and long term. I want to leave you on one final thought. And that is a quote from former President of the United States, Franklin D.

Roosevelt from 1940. And he said, effectively, we can't always build a future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future. Thank you for joining for today's episode. My goal, as always, is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support. First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. And on Apple and Spotify you can leave us up to a five star review.

Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services. Finally, you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content, questions or suggestions, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and X profiles also exclusively for scientific communication, so those are great places to follow along for more learning.

My handle is Andy Galpin on both platforms. We also have an email newsletter that distills all of our episodes in the most actionable takeaways. We have newsletters on how to improve Fitness in the VO2 Max, how to build muscle and strength, and much more. To subscribe to the newsletter, just go to performpodcast.com and click newsletter. It's completely free and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for listening and never forget, in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you are an athlete.