What a Child Can Teach Us About Fitness

As someone who makes their living teaching people to be strong and fit, I would like to believe I am in fairly good shape. But after spending my first week working with kids at Parker Street Ministries, I may have to revisit some of my assumptions:

- I can deadlift, bench (almost) and squat) twice my bodyweight, therefore I am strong. Wrong.

- I can run a mile in under six minutes, there fore I have endurance. Wrong.

- I can beat an eight year old kid in arm wrestling?!! Dead wrong.

The reality is that the formula for kicking my ass are is as simple as twenty two 7-9 year olds running, jumping and crawling across a small gym for 45 minutes.

Unlike an adult class where we can simply set up interval stations or tell the kids to "get water" when we tire, coaching a group of youngsters who have no clue what any of these things means we perish with anything less than completely dialed in focus and energy.

1. Seeing is believing- Though adults complain and drag on certain exercises, it is fairly easy to explain a concept and run them through an exercise. With a kid whose attention span is less than six seconds, the ONLY way to ensure participation is to keeping showing them EXACTLY what you want.

In our warm up for example, I realized this meant choosing two basic exercises-- lets say a push up and a squat-- and making these the focus of the warm up. Standing in front of the kids, I held my arms (branches) in front of me and I was suddenly a shrinking "tree".

Counting down 1-2-3 shrinks the tree, the kids followed and (laughed hysterically for some reason) as we moved from top to bottom several times.

2. Fun versus Fitness- While adults hide their discontent with certain tasks, kids simply lose interest and run away if something sucks. This is why a focus on games and partner activities really seemed to work well. We attempted (key word) to separate our kids in to partner drills (standing in lines side by side to perform toe taps thru a speed ladder) and "follow the leader" drills where the kids follow the instructor.

I liked this rotation because the kids can learn in a fairly ordered environment first followed by a more relaxed, game like atmosphere with their instructor second.

3. Training attention span- If a kid's attention span lasts around 30-45 seconds, it is no wonder a sixty minute class can get boring! In fact, it seemed no longer than 25 minutes before the class began to degenerate and run amok (in fact the only way we kept them in line was by breaking out the big gunz)

This means that when planning your work with a child ages 7-10 years old, keep each activity to no more than 10 minutes and the class to around 25-30 minutes:

- Warm up- 5 minutes

- Partner games- 10 minutes

- Follow leader drills- 5-10 minutes

- Cooldown/stretching- 5-10 minutes

Overall, I have to say I have a new found respect for the work of my teachers and parents. I am looking forward to doing a regular kids class in the future (once per week only!) and learning more from our Parker Street crew.

Here are a few resource I will be leaning on and I highly recommend for any trainers looking to learning more about teaching kids of various ages:

Crossfit kids

Developing Athletics

Food for thought- Standing core exercises

Food for thought- Deadbug

Daily Food for thought- Getting to the core

Weekly Theme: Getting to the Core

As someone who has become semi-obsessed with core training (so much so I put out an education course on the creation of effective ab circuits), my view of what this region actually does has evolved along with my training.

While sit ups and crunches have long been cast down as ultimate evil, the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper.

Core stability exercises such planks/side planks/standing carrys and other exercises promote the resistance of forces trying to put us out of place.

On the other hand, exercises such as crunches, leg lifts, torso twists etc cause movement in these areas are MUCH better at promoting muscular development and definition because they are actually requiring the muscle to produce force versus merely resist.

In order to effectively utilize "core" training, we have to understand the purpose of the core in different scenarios:

• Daily life- hold the trunk stabilize while bending over, rotating, etc  
• Sports- Act as a stable base to transmit force generated from the upper and lower body
• Beach- Look like sexual chocolate (or white lightning)
  

My point with this comparison is that we want to spend the majority of our training time focusing on what the core actually does (stabilize) versus sit up and crunching motions which train this area to move.

This also means that we would spend a lot more time doing core stability work with a stay at home mom who is required to pick up her young children than a beauty pageant competitor seeking to get ripped for competition. Ask yourself: how much of each tool does the client need to get their job done? Everything is specific.

But before diving in to crunches with your physique oriented clients, also consider that we much develop stability FIRST to ensure the proper muscles are doing their job during more advanced ab circuits.
 Here is an example of an ab circuit progression we utilized for a Ms. USA competitor recently:

• Phase #1- Static plank hold
• Phase #2- Plank crawl + plank hold
• Phase #3- Ab wheel rollout + plank crawl + plank hold
• Phase #4- Ab wheel rollout + plank crawl + plank step outs

As you can see, we went from static to dynamic movements which require more stabilization. We also included a higher stress exercise (rollout) at the beginning to pre-fatigue the abs and create more bang for the buck with our endurance based planking movements.


For this week, we will lay out our the concepts of our system and key exercises for progressing each exercise. Here is some background reading to get things rolling:
1. How to restore the core
2. Power up your planks
3. Basic core training progressions

Food for thought- Side Plank

Food for thought- The plank

Food for thought- Midline stabilization