Brad first showed signs of hyperactivity in kindergarten, where he often lost his daily recess because he, “couldn’t keep his hands and feet to himself.” During story time, he’d be flopping his legs from side to side, or playing with the braids of the girls sitting in front of him.

Brad Johnson is your typical American teen. He grew up playing baseball, watching MTV, and taking two Adderall pills each day for his ADHD.

Brad first showed signs of hyperactivity in kindergarten, where he often lost his daily recess because he, “couldn’t keep his hands and feet to himself.” During story time, he’d be flopping his legs from side to side, or playing with the braids of the girls sitting in front of him.

When the class colored, he drew an Army tank and went around the room shooting classmates with it, and when the class played games he was often “too competitive and rowdy.” He loved PE and loved playing with his classmates, but struggled with class instruction.

Soon, however, Brad figured out the regimented patterns of elementary life. He craved approval and worked hard to get good grades that would earn his teachers and parents praise. He was by no means a genius, but he did well. Still, there was the occasional report of overly rough play or running in the halls. His mother had noticed similar patterns at home.

Brad was always running and climbing where he shouldn’t be. He was always fighting with his little brother. If Mom let him outside he’d come in dirty from head to toe. The only time he seemed to settle was when she’d let him play on her iPad or his video games. Consequently, these became his staple home activities.

An avid baseball fan, his father hoped America’s pastime could provide another outlet for his rambunctious child. Brad was kept busy with year-round baseball and evening hitting or pitching lessons. He seemed to like the activity, particularly the attention it brought from his father, but similar reports started coming from his select baseball coach. Brad was great as long as there was action, but he struggled to focus while sitting in the dugout.

Finally, in 5th grade, his parents took him to the doctor where they found the problem. It wasn’t Brad’s fault. He was suffering from a disorder known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This explained everything. He was prescribed Adderall.

“Alarmed by something in the present, we grab for a solution without thinking about the context, the roots of the problem, and the possible unintended consequences.”

–Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature

From then on, Brad was never a problem. He paid attention in school, did whatever his coaches asked, and was compliant at home. He changed in other ways, too. He was unengaged. He lacked intensity. He felt almost numb. But how could you complain? By every societal metric, Adderall had made Brad better.

The Melody of Life For Modern Youth

Then, in 6th Grade, Brad got a smartphone. His days settled into a steady melody:

• Wake.
• Pop Tarts, Adderall, and phone games.
• Play on the phone as mom drives me to school.
• Go to class. Text and scan social media whenever possible.
• Soda and school lunch (pizza or nachos), while playing phone games with friends at the table.
• Go to class. Text and scan social media whenever possible.
• School ends. Adderall. Play on the phone as mom drives me home.
• Get a snack. Soda, Gushers, and Cheetos. Head to the bedroom to play video games.
• Go to select baseball practice or skills coaches. Either mom or dad drives me.
• Fast food dinner on the way home. A burger, fries, Powerade, and dessert.
• Come home to video games, or play on the phone in front of the TV.
• Head to the bedroom and watch TV from bed until falling asleep.

By all accounts, Brad lived a very typical life. As he entered high school he began to stand out for his success as a pitcher. By junior year he’d made varsity. Summers, evenings, and weekends became even more filled with baseball.

The rhythm of life persisted, while always accelerating. Brad often felt anxious and tired but was doing fine. To deal with his growing exhaustion, Brad started throwing a morning and afternoon Monster energy drink into the mix. Also, typical of the American teen, he became increasingly enmeshed in social media—constantly posting, commenting, and scrolling no matter where he was.

Brad now oscillated between anxious and depressed, while always appearing irritated by any personal interaction. He rarely laughed and showed little interest in anything but his phone. His mother worried about his malaise and the growing distance she felt from him, but his father assured her these were typical teenage growing pains. He feared upsetting Brad when he was so close to securing a baseball scholarship.

Congruent with typical high-school rebellion and in hopes of counteracting the purposeless lethargy he felt in life, Brad began smoking marijuana and trading Adderall for Vicodin. When he wasn’t on drugs he became even more irritable and confrontational. Any attempts by his parents to address his now fledgling grades or steer him towards SAT preparation were met with angry tirades. They couldn’t talk to him.

At 2 am one May Sunday, right before the end of his junior year, Brad’s parents got a call. He’d been speeding around in his truck when he lost control and swerved over the sidewalk becoming stuck in the bushes of a local dentist office. No one was hurt, but Brad was visibly intoxicated and high. After a search, Vicodin was found in his vehicle.

Distraught, his parents took him to a psychiatrist who quickly concluded Brad had bipolar depression. Again, the answer came from a pill, Risperdal. Just as with Brad’s previous struggles, the only possible conclusion could be that something was inherently wrong with Brad—time to go to the miracles of modern science to correct this for us. A drug will fix the problem. Yet, might this be a bit too convenient and simplistic?

By masking each challenge with a pill, we miss the opportunity to honestly evaluate our environment, learn about ourselves, and force ourselves to grow through the process. We numb life’s feedback, thus blunting minor pains that should have prompted consistent modest corrections all throughout the chain and, instead, kick the can down the road until it finally manifests in a major blowout. Brad’s adaptable biology tried like hell to accommodate a bizarrely unhealthy world, but they were simply too insane.

While Brad’s upbringing may seem normal, it could hardly be more terrifying for his biochemistry. It’s easy to forget that our brains and bodies are developed for the nomadic world that defined over 90% of human history. We are animals, unprepared for the intense industrialization and domestication of modern society. When we refuse to honor our primal nature and the consequent human needs, we ensure a life of poor physical and mental health.

Now, let’s explore Brad’s challenges and changes with a different lens.

Brad’s Childhood Hyperactivity

Running in the halls. Legs flopping during story time. Rough play. Bored watching baseball. Brad might have ADHD, or maybe he is just a kid. Children learn through their senses, most notably the physical senses. Trial, error, and experimentation are the best teachers they’ll ever have. As always, but especially at this age, children need the freedom to run, to explore, and to play independent of the constant intervention of adults.

Certainly, they need to learn limits and boundaries. I understand the need to operate well in this world and that learning math and reading will require some still-time practicing focus. Still, we too often ignore and demonize the developmental needs of this stage, while ignoring far better methods for combining movement with learning.

Even if Brad was uncharacteristically active, is this a bad thing? Perhaps this is his strength and will unlock countless future gifts as he faces the challenges of applying a physical life in our overly-sedentary world. We needn’t all fit one model.

I don’t have the expertise to comment on whether ADHD is a bunk diagnosis, but, as explained in the book ADHD Nation, the evidence is overwhelming that it is disturbingly overdiagnosed. Keith Connors, the doctor who originally created the ADHD diagnosis, says it best: “The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

And who is driving this concoction? Big pharma. The billion-dollar industry who has made an art of manipulating studies to confuse doctors, while creating an environment where parents beg for the diagnosis. These arrogant companies shamelessly broadcast their desire to medicate as many people as possible. Adderall was named by Shire pharmaceuticals to profess their intent: ADD for all.

Driven by a need to meet societal expectations, Brads parents began giving him drugs that changed his biochemistry.

Brad’s Middle School Detached Behavior

With the introduction of Adderall, Brad became docile, compliant, and passionless. Then he was given a smartphone. Suddenly Brad was immersed into a world that constantly demanded his attention. He began creating profiles, taking pictures, sharing pictures, commenting, playing phone games, finding funny apps that manipulated pictures, watching funny YouTube clips, entering dozens of group messages, and beginning snap chat streaks.

There was simply no moment of the day, Brad couldn’t go to his phone and find dozens of activities to distract from less interesting or more challenging pursuits. In the car, waiting in line, sitting in class after a test—every opportunity in life that would have provided mental space or allowed him to develop the desire to pick up a book was now occupied by the phone. The activities of life became an irritating disruption.

“All our unhappiness comes from our inability to sit alone in our room.”

–Blaise Pascal

This technology is simply overwhelmingly powerful. Technology designers have studied human neuroscience to create amazingly sophisticated applications that stop at nothing to keep you scrolling longer. Addiction is their intent and we are all susceptible to the alluring vortex.

More and more, smartphone use consumes the free time of all Americans, particularly our youth. We’ve all seen the lobotomized passive postures, heads tilted, thumbs swiping steadily. According to Common Sense Media, Teens spend an average of nine hours a day online compared to six hours for children between ages eight and 12.

That is in addition to the hours of their day spent seated at school and the hours at home seated in front of a television. A generation is being conditioned to live their lives passively entertained by a screen—an era of voyeuristic living.

The Consequences Come to a Head

By high-school Brad was always tired, irritated by any interaction, unmotivated, depressed, and anxious. We see these patterns more than ever in modern youth. But, you’d have to be blind not to expect to. Brad, like all of us, is a hominid whose biology expected foods available in nature, sunlight, novel movement, authentic human connections, and a sense of meaning that came from group purpose. Instead, Brad’s biology has been given:

• Two daily doses of a drug stimulant known as Adderall.
• A daily Monster energy drink full of caffeine and over a day’s worth of added sugar.
• A diet consisting of candy, chips, fast food, and other sugar-laden, overly salted or fried foods that would have been impossible 100-years ago.
• Days spent in nearly constant sitting that is briefly disrupted by repetitive throwing and swinging sessions.
• A mind that is constantly toggling between multiple activities on one screen and constantly tugged to return to that screen whenever he has been pulled away.
• A phone he looks at in bed and a television in his room that virtually ensures he stays up later and gets superficial sleep.

Our mental patterns and physical abilities are the product of all the decisions we make in our life up to a given moment. Brad is ingesting a disturbing cocktail of food and drugs that have his mind and body thrown terribly out of whack. He rarely moves and engulfs his mind with flashy electric lights and a billion bizarre, unhealthy advertisement-driven messages creating unrealistic life expectations.

As if this isn’t enough, he’s going through the physical and mental changes of late adolescence and he’s added depressants like alcohol, marijuana, and Vicodin into the mix. The doctor thinks he has bipolar disorder, but I think his body has done a miraculous job of processing this toxic environment. The fact that he, and the millions of youth like him, aren’t sitting in the corner, twitching while repeating non-sensical phrases is a true testament to our human resiliency.

The End of Brad’s Story

Brad’s scary encounter and Risperdal prescription proved a potent cocktail to slow his drug-abusing behavior. The scare came at a perfect time. Summer ball was starting, and this being the summer before his senior year, he’d be playing tournaments in 15 states. Every Thursday until Saturday was to be spent in tournament play.

Tangent to his emotional breakdown, Brad’s elbow had begun to hurt badly. This only worsened during summer play. On one July Saturday, he threw a pitch and felt excruciating pain. After years of very little time away from pitching, he’d blown out his UCL. He wouldn’t be able to play baseball in his senior year. Brad’s father was beside himself. Brad was relieved.

Admittedly, Brad’s story was not fun to write. It is a fictional name combining two nearly identical stories I’ve encountered in the past few months. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot worse. This story bears mentioning because it highlights so many of the common flaws and misconceptions of modern parenting norms.

We must come to terms with the reality that the standard model most children are fed is deeply unhealthy and unfulfilling. Brad may have never wanted for much, but even with loving parents he’s been deprived of the deepest human needs: authenticity, competency, and connection.

It could have been so different for Brad, but only with parents who determined to look at the norms, reflect, and intentionally craft a better path. Strong parents make strong kids. Life is too short to be normal.

This Week’s Mission

Get the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger, in either hardcopy, e-reader, or audiobook form. The Audible version is read by the author and a very quick way to digest the content.

It is a short book that will radically shift how you look at human health and the needs of our human nature. When you understand the environment humanity evolved to thrive within, deviating from unhealthy modern norms becomes far more obvious and purpose-driven.

The post A Cautionary Tale of Modern Youth Development appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

She doesn’t like your dinner so you make her mac and cheese. He doesn’t like crusts, so you cut them off. Your nine and 12-year-old won’t wake themselves up, pack a lunch, or make breakfast, so these responsibilities fall to you.

She doesn’t like the kids at her bus stop so you sit through a car line so long and tedious that you begin to yearn for a day at the DMV. He forgot his homework. Better skip your exercise class and bring it up to him. She wants to play volleyball. Looks like the family is now indentured to four nights a week and travel every weekend until she leaves for college.

Turn on the TV and the news tells you that you’re a horrible parent if your children so much as open the blinds in this child-predator saturated environment. Hollywood indoctrinates children in the methods of victimhood and parent manipulation. Society has broadly accepted that kids should be allowed to blow us off at the dinner table and storm off to their room whenever parents aren’t adequately meeting their needs (to their warped standards, of course). When children say, “You can’t do that,” adults often listen.

Today’s parents believe they have to acquiesce the tantrums and feel bad when the young narcissist spins some yarn about us not loving them enough, not spoiling them like Johnny’s parents do, being “too hard on them,” or doing more for their sister.

Do More Than Provide and Protect

Modern parenthood is about providing and protecting maximally while neglecting every other pursuit in your life. Social media is full of brags about how parents forgot to eat all morning, spent their summer traveling to baseball tournaments, or stayed up past 3 am assembling Christmas presents.

High-schoolers are given cars their teachers could never afford, some brand new, while the average US family remains in staggering debt that precludes much of any retirement. All the while, depression, divorce, and unhappy marriages grow more prevalent as we are told we have to lose ourselves, making our children the center of our universe.

The standard model would have you believe that the duty of a parent is to accept every childhood need. A generation grows more dependent than ever as mom and dad are convinced they have to be an ever-present bulldozer, there to grant wishes, clear paths, and mitigate any resistance.

We are constantly pulled in by a world that convinces us that our children are somehow epically disadvantaged, at risk of irreparable damage. In reality, they’re epically soft, and so are we.

Photography by Jeffrey Perez of Oahu, Hawaii

These expectations are killing your health and your spirit while removing the most necessary ingredients for children’s development. If your only interest is your children, that is very destructive to your children.

We instill impossible expectations that ensure our children’s dependency and disappointment while neglecting to become the sort of models that would have inspired them to greater heights.

We convince them they should be catered to while allowing ourselves to be fractured into a shell of who we were meant to be. Exhausted and pulled ever thinner, our health wanes and we don’t have the strength to fight the battles that actually matter.

Strong Parents, Strong Children

You cannot pour from an empty glass and without personal strength and purpose, all your efforts have a low ceiling. You are a duller knife, far less capable of cutting through the BS standard model to deliver powerful parenting and a model of strong living—as even airplane safety states, you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself first.

You have to be growing or you are dying. What is it you are trying to learn? What is it you want from life? I don’t care if you have kids—that is not an excuse to sit there and call it a life. The greatest thing you can do for your kids is to model passion and chase your dreams. The worst thing you can do for them is to delude them into thinking your world should revolve around them. They need you to have interests other than them and they need to support your goals and dreams just as you do theirs.

Remember that the point of parenting is not to over-provide and overprotect. Once baseline needs (food, shelter, love) are taken care of, the overwhelming emphasis becomes creating great people, capable of overcoming inevitable challenges and oriented towards contributing to the world.

We want our children to be more, not to have more. Children are young citizens, not glass china. Let’s not pretend they need to be sheltered from the world and coddled incessantly. They need to become people who yearn to live a bold life of adventure. That follows your model.

Be a badass and live with strength so they will. Stand for the things that matter, so they will. Do cartwheels, muscle ups, and handstands so they want to. Join a mud-run, a Spartan Sprint, or a gym full of awesome people so they are enthusiastic about staying active after age 18.

It is the age of choice and opportunity. The sky is the limit and often that creates paralysis by analysis. If you are looking for where to start, or want to successfully re-start on this path to self-development, start with the principles of successful action.

Justin Lind and I have written a free e-book, The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery. At only 23 pages, it is easily digestible and ends with a 4-Week Habit and Willpower Training Program that prompts you towards seamlessly adopting the habits that amplify every pursuit in your life.

This Week’s Mission

If you haven’t already get The Essential Guide to Self-Mastery. For those who have already worked through this guide, I challenge you to take the next step. Sign-up for an event that puts you in the arena and forces the family to support you.

This could be a 5k, a mud-run, or even a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class you’ve been wanting to start taking a few days per week. It will be easy to talk yourself out of this. It will be uncomfortable to break out of the routine and choose yourself. Imagine who you could be in six months, in a year. Do it.

The post Put Yourself First for All the Right Reasons appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“Just wait until you have kids.”

“Must be nice to have that kind of time.”

“Yeah, I used to be in shape, too, before… them.” (The speaker points to his children while drawing a long sip of soda.)

“Just wait until you have kids.”

“Must be nice to have that kind of time.”

“Yeah, I used to be in shape, too, before… them.” (The speaker points to his children while drawing a long sip of soda.)

I’ve heard sentiments such as these more times than I can remember. They are the go-to of friends and acquaintances who’d rather rationalize my fitness habit as one of those selfish pursuits only habituated by the childless. They find comfort in believing that even their routine-oriented, fitness freak friend, Shane, will let his health fall by the wayside when he has kids. It is just the way life works. Until recently, I’ve always just smiled. What could I say?

However, in the past month, I’ve experienced an exceptionally crazy introduction into fatherhood, while maintaining a daily exercise discipline. My wife and I drove to Georgia and adopted two beautiful babies, a 5-week-old girl, and her 19-month-old big brother. Due to adoption law, we could not leave Georgia to head home until all paperwork was finalized.

True to its reputation, the bureaucratic processes stretched what we’d hoped would be a five-day stay into two and half weeks, three different lodging arrangements, two separate U-Haul rentals, and one frantically rushed departure just in time to elude Hurricane Michael. Now, having returned to work, I’ve experienced a fairly broad spectrum of the fathering constraints that often preclude exercise.

Things certainly do change when you have children, but when you prioritize your health, it is fairly simple to find a way to exercise. The trick is to take advantage of the short intervals when they present themselves. This requires a degree of self-mastery. If you are yet to have kids but know they are around the corner, I highly recommend learning to train willpower first.

Taking Time to Exercise Is a Gift

There is this myth that parenthood requires an absolute sacrifice of health, hopes, and dreams. Marriage must become passionless, purposeful work must be reframed as a necessary evil, and any individual pursuits must be abandoned.

The reality is that self-neglect is the worst thing you can do for your kids. First of all, if you allow yourself to become a fractured version, you will have less to give your children. You cannot pour from an empty cup. Taking time for your own health will magnify your positive impact. Our world often focuses on quantity, but quality time is what always matters most.

Coach Shane Trotter of Inspired Human Development in Mansfield, Texas

Movement is not an activity you fit into your life. It is the essence of living. This is true both figuratively, as nothing is static and we are always growing, and literally. Movement is the foundation of all learning and development. Watch children and you’ll truly begin to respect this truth.

A few years ago my father-in-law fell off the roof, lacerating his kidney. Doctors quickly got him stable and comfortable, but his condition turned scary after days of not moving. His hospital bed induced extreme immobility halted most of the bodies natural processes. An ileus developed, where his bowels completely shut down causing his body to stockpile toxins. He was miserable for days as a tube pumped black poison out of his gut. All of this occurred simply from not moving.

Your model is the most powerful tool you have for influencing conduct. Children will see your example as the gold standard of appropriate behavior. Children whose parents value health are far more likely to grow up exercising, eating well, and, consequently, thriving. In a time when lack of impulse control and lifestyle-related illness are the leading killers, your model may, literally, save their life. You’ll never know it did, but that is alright.

Make no mistake, children complicate everything. They are masters of inserting chaos into your perfect little plans. I do my best writing first thing in the morning. Yet, writing takes a pause when baby girl needs a bottle. She ain’t waiting! The certainty of chaos does not preclude planning, rather it necessitates systems. Just as with the military, there is not one singular routine, but many routines set up for each unique brand of chaos.

Lift Heavy at the Gym

Finding time to exercise could be as simple as communicating this need to your spouse and setting a time where he handles all childcare duties. Having a home gym or gym at work can make this even more doable.

For many, this is all you’ll need to do to fall into normal exercise patterns. If you can only get to the gym a couple days a week, or only for short periods, I recommend prioritizing heavy lifting and compound movements.

Pick one day a week where you do heavy squats, heavy rows, heavy RDL’s, and heavy overhead or bench press. In less than 30-minutes, you send an overwhelming signal to your body that it needs to maintain every muscle. If you get another day later in the week, consider barbell or kettlebell complexes for a tremendously metabolic total body blast, in a very short time.

Become a Bodyweight Guru

Those who are simply trying to make home fitness fit into their daily routine will have to be a little more creative. At our Airbnb, I spent a week with nothing but a TRX. Despite having access to motel gyms in the next week, daddy duty often precluded my escape and resigned me to training in a small, packed room.

If you invest the time becoming a master of bodyweight exercise, there will be no situation where you can’t sneak in fitness. Your training may not be as well-planned and intentional as you’d like, but some movement is better than none. Consider this randomized approach a rediscovery of the unplanned movement the typical human body experienced throughout most of history. You can still be very productive by following a few directives:

1. Always train total body. It is the best way to stoke your metabolism and ensure balanced movement. With no certainty how long you will be able to train or when the next workout will fit, it is best to hit every muscle, every time. This is really always the best way to train. Shoot for a push, a pull, a knee-dominant squat or lunge, and a hip dominant glute-bridge variation. As Pavel Tsatsouline has shown with his grease-the-groove philosophy, you can even get positive results training total body every day, provided you aren’t hitting extremes.
2. Alternate strength circuit days with metabolic conditioning days.
3. Auto-regulate when you need. There will be times you are exhausted. Go low and slow.
4. Take advantage of low hanging fruit. When your baby boy is at the playground, play with him. Do pull-ups on the monkey bars. When he squats, you squat. If you are going somewhere and not walking ridiculous distances, leave the stroller in the car. Using your baby for a form of loaded carry is a great workout that you don’t have to seek out. You could even standardize a path and progress your loaded carries by doing these daily, just as Milo did with his calf. Your child will grow, increasing the difficulty in congruence with your increased capacity.

Here is a sample of my freelanced work-outs from those weeks in Georgia:

Scenario One: My 19-month-old wakes while mom and the baby are still asleep. No time to waste. I make an executive decision to throw a new diaper on him and initiate a 30-minute workout. This is a new automatic routine. If the 19-month-old is up, but no one else is, I work out with him by my side. He loves this. To him, we are just playing.

After my standard morning 5-minute flow I do 5 rounds of this strength circuit:

• TRX inverted rows – x10
• TRX pikes – x10
• TRX 1-leg squats – x10/side
• 1-arm push-ups – x3/side
• 1-leg glute bridge – x10/side
• Finisher: Bear crawls chasing my young boy around the house along with somesidewayss monkey walks, a la GMB.

Scenario Two: Both kids wake up at the same time. I let Mama catch up on sleep after a few nights of broken rest. At this point, I’m tending to the children’s needs for most of the day. I know I’ll have to insert fitness into whatever breaks the day offers. Around 11, my youngest falls asleep for a bit in her dock-a-tot.

The 19-month-old is playing with blocks, so I know I can get a few quick Tabatas in while I keep my eyes on him. A Tabata protocol is 8 rounds of one exercise, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. The whole metabolism spiking circuit takes less than four minutes. I do a push-up tabata, a superman tabata, and a jump lunge tabata.

Scenario Three: My wife gets sick. It’s Saturday and we’re both exhausted. She’s napping and I’m watching both the kids with the Texas versus OU game on. I’m tired and have done nothing today, but both kids are up and needy. It’s time for a 5-minute wakeup. I hold a kid in each arm and begin 5 minutes of lunges in place.

Baby girl is snug and secure and baby boy thinks this is awesome. I’d only recommend holding children if you feel very strong in your lunges. I rest and repeat this 5-minute challenge after moving each kid to the opposite arm.

Scenario Four: We’ve moved again to the world’s smallest motel room. Morale is low. We can’t believe we haven’t been released to drive home yet and we have no clue what to do in this small town on the Alabama border. Mom is holding the baby and my eyes are on the young wild-man as he explores everything. I set up right next to him and start repeating between this pattern:

• 50 push ups
• Play with baby boy
• 50 air squats
• Play with baby boy
• 25 push ups. Stop. Tell baby boy that the outlet is “no.” Get his fake, noisy keys for him.
• 25 more push ups
• 50 frogger hip thrusters
• Pick baby boy up, tickle him and hand him back his keys.
• 50 air squats
• Pack up baby stuff in case we get released today.
• 50 frogger hip thrusters
• 50 push ups
• 50 air squats
• Take baby boy to lunch
• Put baby boy down for a nap
• 50 frogger hip thrusters
• 50 push ups
• Give baby girl a bottle.
• Set her up for tummy time
• Set her down to sleep
• 50 air squats

There is no rule saying each day’s workout has to happen in a neat 30-60 minute period. I’ve called this strategy of inserting short bursts of exercise throughout the day the 5-alarm method. The basic premise is that by setting five alarms or five consistent three or four minute intervals throughout the day, even the busiest people can piece together a full workout.

This is ideal for working out with children. You can make this as simple or varied as you like. At home I’ll do airborne lunges, front levers, handstands, and 1-leg glute bridges. Some days I’ll just go back and forth all day inserting pull ups and push ups, whenever I get the chance.

The point is to pick a balanced array of exercises and insert them in small, convenient doses throughout the day. To make this easy, select an exercise from each category:

• Squat or knee dominant: split squats, lunges, jump lunges, air squats, burpees
• Hinge or hip dominant: hip thruster, 1-leg glute bridge, donkey kick-backs
• Push: push ups; Judo push ups; typewriter push ups; crawl
• Pull: reverse push up plank, lying Y-W-handcuff, superman
• Core: side planks or reverse crunches

Do one round of each exercise at a prescribed number of reps at five different points throughout the day. As you find routines this should be easy to habituate. Define five specific times that you associate with one round of work. The intervals will be specific to you, but if I was staying home it might look something like this:

1. During baby’s first nap
2. At 19-month-old’s snack time (he’s in his high-chair crushing a cut up banana)
3. Again at 19-month-old’s lunch time (I could easily fit multiple rounds here, right next to him)
4. After baby’s early afternoon bottle, while brother is napping
5. One round as soon as my spouse returns from work
6. Any missed rounds are completed immediately after the kids are put down for bedtime

For more clarity and more ideas, I highly recommend consulting my 5-Alarm Method article.

You Can Do This

The reality is that exercise is essential and possible. When in doubt, decide that you will move when the opportunity presents and just start moving. I recommend selecting one go to movement, like air squats, that is your default fill-in whenever you are in a pinch.

All it takes is a little willpower to overcome the inertia. Whether air squats, lunges, push ups, mountain climbers, or supermans, by committing to daily movement you give your family the gift of health and vitality.

The post Parents, You Must Find Time for Fitness appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Two things happened on my last night of a working trip to New York: I had my first poke bowl ever, and my girlfriend Facetimed to tell me she was pregnant. Both events caused me to close my eyes and take a moment to appreciate. But only one caused me to holler out in delight in the middle of the street. Why had I waited so long? Was this really about to happen? Isn’t this all I ever wanted? It was like all the little happy feelings and ideas I’ve ever had were coming together at the same time. It felt like God had made this little perfect bundle of tuna and avocado just for me. I would cherish every moment I had with it.

Meanwhile, back on the Facetime call, I was left speechless. The thought process, in five seconds, went something like, “Okay. Oh! I got it. That’s a pregnancy test. There’s two lines in the box. What does that mean? Oh… two lines means pregnant. Okay, this is a positive test. Wait. This is her positive test. She’s going to have a baby? I’m going to have a baby? I’m going to have… a baby?” And then it hit me. I was going to have a baby. With a thousand thoughts to choose from, my mouth opened to shout one of them out, but all I could come up with was, “How did this happen?”

The next few months were full of phone calls to family, listening to heartbeats at doctors’ visits, and clever Facebook announcements. As an alpha male that spent his life playing sports, I naturally wanted to have a little boy. And as it happens to most men like me, I was going to have a girl.

I had a moment where I was disappointed, I’ll admit. That moment was fleeting. I knew I was up for the challenge. I knew that my little girl would be special. If anyone could do it, we could make this girl into a strong, independent, cultured, kind, courageous woman. The disciplined athlete in me took over, and I realized I was prepared. I had trained for this.

Girls Become What We Tell Them They Can Be

The past five years of my life, I traveled the world, documenting and teaching the art of calisthenics, or bodyweight exercise, to youth. This was part of my life’s mission, and I was a hell of a teacher.

One of the battles I had to fight the hardest was proving to women and girls that, despite what society had told them for their whole lives, they could do pull ups and push ups. They just had to train for them. Time and time again I had to say, “Do not call them girl push ups. They are modified push ups, and everyone has to do them before they’re ready for regular push ups.”

A four-year-old boy is physiologically not so different from a four-year-old girl. The biggest thing that makes women have “less upper body strength” is their mental conditioning, not their physical potential. Around puberty, we slide our kids into these gender roles, and girls are told that they just can’t do certain things. So they stop doing them. If they keep doing those things, however, the results are exactly what you see with men: the ability to control their bodies in time and space with strength and beauty.

The Great Equalizer

Nothing puts people on equal footing quite like calisthenics. Whether it’s age, gender, race, nationality, orientation, or socio-economic status, anyone can do calisthenics, and everyone starts with one rep. During the production of my documentary, Raise Up: The World is Our Gym, I saw this phenomenon in action from the mountains of Norway to the beaches of Spain, and from the jungles of Africa to the concrete jungle of New York City.

The film focused on the rise of freestyle calisthenics, as it becomes one of the fastest growing sports in the world. While this sport is still dominated by men in many parts of the world, that paradigm is shifting fast.

In 2013, I was on a beach in the south of France with the president of the World Street Workout and Calisthenics Federation just after the French National Championship. I saw the opportunity for massive growth in this new sport, and thought we were neglecting a huge female audience that also wanted to compete. I asked if he’d ever thought about doing female competitions, and he simply replied “There will never be women’s world championship. No one wants to see this.”

Photo credit: Mauricio Merino

Four years later, some of the most intense battles in calisthenics competitions are between the ladies. International stars are rising up and leading the way for our future generations. My daughter will look up to amazing women like Gina Scarangella, the high-flying nurse from Philly, and Simone Ming, the mild-mannered beast from the UK. She’ll study the moves of the Dutch Melanie Driessen at one of her workshops. Or she’ll train at Brooklyn Zoo with the two-time World Champion, Jessica “Russian Red” Borgadov.

These will be her heroes, because these girls didn’t listen when people told them they were wasting their time playing on the monkey bars. These girls didn’t listen when people told them their training would take them nowhere. Instead, they boarded planes and traveled the world, cashing first-place prize checks, learning new languages, making new friends, and accomplishing new goals. They were becoming strong, independent, cultured, kind, courageous women.

Don’t Believe You Can’t

Now I’m back at home in North Carolina, preparing for my life to change in ways I don’t understand yet. I spend most of my days working on new film projects and writing. But a couple times a week, I head to Syncstudio in Durham, a yoga and cycling studio, to teach women from ages 20 to 70 that no matter what they’ve been told their whole lives, they can do push ups and pull ups. The term “girl push up” does not exist in our classes, nor in our minds.

I’m still not sure if I will be a great parent to a girl, but I think this is the best way to start. I just have to train for it.

You might also like:

• How To Progress Your Way To A Perfect Push Up
• 5 Drills To Help You Achieve Your First Pull Up
• 8-Week Workout Plan For Push Up Strength And Power
• 8 Weeks To Mastering Pull Up Power
• Push Up Progressions For Everyone
• The Proof Is In The Pull-Up: 10 Tools For Getting Better At Pull-Ups

The post My Daughter Will Never Do Girl Push Ups appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Our morning is a sprint to eat, pack lunches, workout clothes, work bags, and get out the door. We give each other our goodbye kisses, hugs, and we’re off. This is the life of our typical young family. Of course, we have all the normal stresses any family would: bills, work, my business, our personal health, and friends and family time to manage. Being healthy has become a way of life, but it didn’t start out that way.

Our Journey to Health

Our journey to health started about eight years ago after never paying attention to diet, sleep, or having any kind of regimented schedule. Prior to living a healthy life, we were both professional athletes who worked out for our sports, but never had much of a long-term health plan. Because of this, we both suffered from injuries related to malnourishment and had poor recovery and inflammation at relatively young ages. At the age of 23, even though I looked healthy from the outside, my blood work didn’t show the pinnacle of health. I was severally B-12 deficient and had high insulin levels. When you’re uneducated, you think you’re impervious to a healthy diet and that exercise will be enough. Much of my issues were due to this. I remember eating pizza after a workout and practice and thinking it was completely acceptable because I could burn the calories off anyway. I was one of those guys who spent a lot of time in the gym but ate fast food, drank alcohol, and never stuck to any scheduling or anything regimented. I used to think that fitness just happens and that my genetics would carry me through. But this was far from the truth.

Most people live their lives in a cause and effect scenario. When I was 26, a college teammate and ex-professional football player friend of mine passed away from a sudden massive heart attack. He was 27 years old and looked like Superman from the outside. In the autopsy, it was found that he had high cholesterol that went undetected. This ultimately lead to him dying within hours after a run on a treadmill. This concept shook me. How could someone so fit and athletic pass away from high cholesterol? I immediately changed my habits and took a deeper consider my overall health. Yes, we wanted to be able to compete in Crossfit and Olympic weightlfting competitions for fun, but we wanted to make sure our bodies were as clean as possible. We started to pay attention to labels, we dissected a menu when we would go out to eat. We started shopping a farmer’s markets and asking better questions of the vendors there. We stayed away from processed foods, gluten, sugar, and anything else we thought would hinder our health.

What my wife Katie and I do to stay fit may be unorthodox to some, but it has become highly effective for us. We are not your freakish 5:00 am workout people. We don’t eat 100% clean like robots. We enjoy food just as much as the next person. We are not personal trainers or gym junkies. We are now professionals who have careers outside the scope of fitness. My wife is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and I am a financial consultant and business owner.

We feel we can teach you to have it all.

It Starts with a Calendar Commitment

To us, Sunday is not only a day of rest and spirituality, but it is a day of planning. From what we’ve learned, most people don’t plan to fail but they fail to plan. One of the biggest steps we take in controlling our life is controlling our calendar. We plan our week every Sunday—from meals, pickups and drop offs, to workout times, and even a date night every Friday. One of the greatest gifts sports gave us is to create a schedule then stick to it. We recently bought a dry erase calendar board and posted it on our refrigerator. What Katie and I know is that we must stick to our calendar to get optimum results.

Every Sunday our routine looks like this:

• Wake up at 7:30 am
• Arrive at the gym by 9:00 am
• Katie works out while I hang with the baby 9-10 am

Katie packs in about 60 minutes of a very intense workout. Using this discipline can be rigorous. Prior to having our son, we would take our sweet time in the gym and be there for three hours doing whatever. Our intensity wasn’t as high, which means we would focus more on building muscle over maintaining health. Now we know we have to get in as much as we can so it has forced us to focus on what is most important—overall health versus aesthetics and performance. Our intensity is higher during our workouts, which adds another element that I’ll add to in our next article.

Once she is finished, I’ll do the same workout from 10-11 am as she watches our young son. Then, we are off to do our Sunday shopping from 11:30-12:30 at the local farmer’s market and Trader Joe’s.

We eat all organic, non-GMO vegetables and fruit. We also get our grass-fed meat, eggs, and poultry from the farmer’s market, as well. Trader Joe’s gets us the other essentials we can’t find at the market, things such as gluten free breads, almond milk, sparkling water, etc.

The remainder of our Sundays look like this:

• 12:30 pm – Eat lunch
• 1-3 pm – Meal preparation for the week – We make/prep full meals and package them in containers. At minimum three lunches each and three dinners. We will share these recipes in later articles.
• 3-8 pm – Family time
• 8 pm – Calendar review for the week – This is when we schedule days and times to workout, organize pick ups, drop offs, and any other plans that week. Obviously, calendars may change, but we schedule the most important weekly activities first and workout around those sacred times.

Our priority ranking system looks like this:

1. Family time

2. Exercise time

3. Work and business time (This is mainly for me because I run my own business.)

By organizing beforehand, we are fully in control of our week. As opposed to being reactive to what happens to us, we are active. This is a huge deal for most people because they get caught up in their busy lives and forget about themselves. We have been there. With all that life throws at us, we found that having a priority list keeps us focused, and the most important things, such as family and health, are never disregarded. What we have found is that by having control of our calendar, and living up to all of our high priority commitments, there is no way to fail.

Keeping Our Commitments

The biggest objection personal trainers get from their clientele is that they don’t have the time to organize themselves. However, time is just a matter of priority. Fitness is high priority for us, but family comes first. There are days where we break a workout commitment to spend time as a family after a long day at work, as opposed to going the gym. If you are struggling with regular exercise or healthy eating, usually it’s because there isn’t a strong enough reason for you to take action. As Malcolm X said, “That in which you do not hate, you will eventually tolerate.”

We believe discipline is what you want now versus what you want most. I’ve never met a healthy person who didn’t embrace challenges and change. Most people coast. They just don’t have a big enough reason to change their lifestyle. They do just enough to survive, but not thrive. Katie and I want to thrive, and we want to teach you how we do it.

Live Life On Your Terms

We believe that people should live life on their own terms while keeping health a priority. We have weeks where unexpected events occur, just as everyone does. We have times where we feel overwhelmed and fearful that we are letting certain things slip through the cracks. The key for us is that we want to be there when our grandkids graduate from college, get married, and have babies of their own. We want to live the longest and most fulfilling life possible. We want to be there for the special moments, the athletic and scholastic achievements, the travel, our grandbaby’s first Christmas, and everything else that life’s experiences will bring us. Without our health where would we end up?

Katie and I want to help you invest the time in what is going to grow your health, family, and spirit. Pay close attention to our next few articles and video logs. You won’t want to miss them.

The post Juggling Family and Fitness: Live Life on Your Terms appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Every top college and pro sports organization has figured out the obvious: what you eat fuels your performance. Sure, athletes might splurge on cheat meals following exhausting training gauntlets, but by and large, the performance industry has become aware of the edge proper nutrition offers and the disadvantage of inadequate fuel and nutrient deficiency.

Unfortunately, few high school and youth athletes have benefitted from any trickle down effect. On the contrary, the lack of nutritional education and overwhelming availability of sugar-laden sweets in the youth developmental sector is a tremendous embarrassment. Kids subsisting on fast food and treats alone has become a cultural staple, like fireworks on the fourth of July or drug company commercials during the evening news. What’s really needed is a plan of action and exposure to inexpensive, easy staples every young athlete should know how to cook.

Meal Planning Is Critical

Yes, I believe food preparation is an essential skill that every youth should learn. Without this knowledge they have little control over one of the most important arenas of life: what you put in your own body. We should give each child the tools and understanding to promote their own physical vitality. They should know what actions and skills are likely to help them live a longer, higher quality life.

The opposite trend has become the norm, however. Fewer kids than ever know how to prepare healthy meals, likely because the family meal is becoming a historical relic, or at least a holiday novelty. Far more common is for high-schoolers to have fast food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In fact, this is probably even more common with athletes, whose busy schedules keep both child and parents running around most evenings.

Healthy Food Is Less Expensive

Eating healthy is far more expensive than it should be. Our government ensures this by subsidizing corn, making high fructose corn syrup practically free. Consequently, all those packaged, addictive filled foods, scientifically engineered with ingredients unpronounceable, become the cheap staples of the average American’s diet. Even if it is more expensive, and it doesn’t have to be, consider why wouldn’t you be willing to pay more for food? As the old adage goes, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what your priorities are. Most budgets would indicate people value convenience and temporary pleasures far more than their health.

Still, it is actually more expensive to eat fast food a couple times a day. We often reference McDonalds as the convenient, cheap staple. Using them as our example, a sausage biscuit off the dollar breakfast menu and a small orange juice adds up to $2.78, before tax. A quarter pounder with cheese meal that comes with fries and a soda is $5.79, before tax, and to mix it up at dinner we’ll go with the BBQ pulled pork sandwich meal for $4.99. Without adding tax, you’re looking at $13.56 for this day of eating.

Compare this to a trip to Sam’s Club:

• 10 large chicken breasts average around $17 ($1.98 per pound).
• 12 pounds of pork chops go for about $27 ($2.28 per pound).
• 5 lbs of minute Quaker Oats is $3.99.
• 32 oz of organic chia seeds is $7.48.
• 3.75 lbs of Sun Maid raisins is $7.16.
• A 6 count of 12 oz. bags of steamable mixed vegetables is $5.88.
• A 16 oz bag of Taylor Farms Organic Baby Spring Mix is $3.98.
• 3 lbs of bananas is $1.38.
• A package of 2 40 oz jars of natural peanut butter is $9.18.

That may look like a lot of money, but let’s remember this shopping is done before the week begins and is split into meals. Thus, one day’s breakfast of oatmeal, chia seeds, and raisins takes less than three minutes to make and costs $1.50 or less. One day’s lunch of a full pound of chicken and two ounces of baby spring mix is less than $3. Dinner of a full pound of pork chops, along with steamable mixed vegetables, is less than $3.50. These three meals add up to $8 or less. Add to that a daily snack of a banana with natural peanut butter and you are looking at about $8.75 or less per day to eat on this healthier plan. That’s almost $5 cheaper than the fast food day, leaving plenty of room for whatever mixed nuts or additional snacks you think are necessary.

As for the habitual cravings, you must understand this is a process. Only sustainable changes matter, as the yo-yo up and down dieting trends of most people are tough on the metabolism and no fun. Gradual incremental changes will put you on the path to change the way you think about food. It is essential that your approach to food shifts, especially if it is your family and young athletes who you are trying to get eating better. Very little else could be as helpful to their future development as demonstrating healthy eating patterns. Not only do you build willpower, perseverance, and delayed gratification (perhaps the number one indicator of future success), but you provide skills and experience that greatly enhance the likelihood that your child lives a long, quality life.

The Value of Food

Most of human history was spent in search of food. What we eat is important. The expectation that we’d just drive up and be given our food is a level of comfort that truly is startling to think about. We have to value food and take an interest in what we are putting in our bodies. It does not have to be as expensive as many people make it. There are plenty of cheaper options, and even if you don’t eat quite as healthy as the plan I proposed, planning meals and preparing them at home will undoubtedly save money and improve everyone’s health.

Resources:

1. “McDonald’s Prices and Locations.” Menu With Price. Accessed July 11, 2017. https://www.menuwithprice.com/menu/mcdonalds/.

2. Sam’s Club: Find Wholesale Clubs Near You or Shop Online. Accessed July 11, 2017. https://www.samsclub.com/sams/homepage.jsp.

The post Cheap, Healthy Fuel for Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

About fifteen minutes later, she paraded them in proudly. Their outfits matched and she had proven to be adept with the diaper. She had even brushed the four-year-old’s hair. But there was one problem.

“Sweetie, they look amazing! Great job! But…where are your clothes?” I asked.

(She was buck naked.)

“It was too hard! They were all squirming and he kept taking his diaper off and I just forgot!”

Immediately I thought of the many times I’ve made similar excuses. Suddenly they seemed so ridiculous.

My three kids, fully clothed, during a family workout.

The Parenting Challenge

Parenthood can throw all sorts of wrenches in peoples’ routines. The nights you don’t sleep more than three hours at a time. The medical scares that bring out a kind of anxiety you’ve never felt before. The desire to give your child everything he or she needs, even at your own expense.

It’s easy to be on top of things for a week or two, but when you have a family there is a new kind of ebb and flow. And fitness is one of the first things to get lost in the current, right up there with date nights and extended periods of quiet.

Shift Your Perspective

For four years, I was a smoker. And not a casual smoker, but a pack-a-day smoker, and that was on a good day. I tried quitting many times, and I failed over and over again. Quitting for good didn’t happen until I got pregnant with my first child during graduate school. There are two reasons I finally succeeded:

1. I Had a New Focus: Once I got pregnant I just stopped caring about cigarettes. I was shocked out of my addiction by something with more gravity than my Marlboros. That new motivation outweighed any setbacks I faced.
2. I Created New Habits: With new focus came new habits. My diet changed and I didn’t spend as much time in the pub with my professors and classmates. I started exercising more and said goodbye to Belgian beer. I found a new clarity about what I did and didn’t want in my life.

Staying active and in shape as a parent requires both of these elements. You have to want it, and your life has to reflect that. There is no shortcut.

How to Change Your Ways

If you are struggling to get back into fitness after becoming a parent, there are three things that might help:

1. Enlist Your Family: This means including your family in your workouts, but it also means making fitness a family goal, not just an individual one. You could have a family workout once a week, or go to the gym with your spouse and get a sitter for the kids. Your family is your support system, and you will be much more likely to succeed if you all pursue similar goals.
2. Don’t Be a Weekend Warrior: In my experience, weekends are the hardest time to work out when you have a family. Don’t save fitness for the weekends. Find simple, efficient ways to incorporate movement and exercise into your weekdays. It doesn’t have to be drawn out and complicated, but higher frequency will help you make fitness habitual.
3. Own Your Stuff: Literally. Outfit a home gym and use it. Having your own equipment will prevent you from having to outsource your fitness at a gym. This will come in especially handy on the days when you or one of your family members is sick and you can’t make it to the gym. It doesn’t have to be fancy, either. In my home we have a bench with a set of dumbbells, five kettlebells ranging from 10kg to 28kg, a pull up bar, a punching bag, PVC parallettes, jump ropes, and a barbell we found on Craigslist. (And of course, three children ranging in weight from 20lb to 50lb).

Me working out while wearing my youngest child.

Jump Start Your Fitness in Four Weeks

Here is a four-week program I designed with parents in mind. It has five components:

1. 1-mile run/walk: Five days a week. If running is too challenging, you can walk, jog, or use run/walk intervals.
2. Grease the Groove (GTG): Five days a week. GTG is one of the first things I recommend to busy parents. It’s a simple method that is very effective, and if you stick with it you will see results. If you’re unsure what Grease the Groove means, read this in-depth article detailing how to do it.
3. Strength Workouts: Three days a week (See Sample Workouts below)
4. Flexibility/Yoga: Two days a week (See Sample Workouts below)
5. High Intensity Workouts: Two days a week (See Sample Workouts below)

You can distribute the workout components however you want over a week-long period. You can do the components at the same time to create one long workout (for example, a one-mile run followed by a strength workout), or you can do them at different times during the day. The individual components each take about twenty minutes.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A PDF VERSION OF THE CHECKLIST AND SCHEDULE

Use these basic guidelines to create your own weekly schedule, based on your daily commitments. Here’s an example of what one weekly schedule might look like:

Sample Workouts:

Sample Flexibility/Yoga Sequences:

• Hip Mobility Stretch Sequence with Keira Newton
• Flexibility Yoga Flow by Mindith Rahmat

Sample Strength Workouts:

Find a kettlebell that is challenging to press for five reps. For ten minutes, press the kettlebell 5 times on each side, with one minute rest between sets. So it looks like this:

• Press (Right) x 5
• Press (Left) x 5
• Rest 1 minute, then repeat as many times as you can in ten minutes.

Follow the presses with 10 minutes of push ups:

• On minute one, do one push up
• On minute two, do two push ups
• …and so on until you reach ten minutes of total work.

You can also do this sequence with lower body exercises. For example, replace the presses with goblet squats and the push ups with weighted lunges.

Sample High Intensity Workouts:

A.

Perform the exercises without resting. Rest 1-2 minutes after you complete all the exercises. Repeat as many times as you can in 20 minutes.

• Goblet Squat x 10
• Chin Up x 5
• 30-second Plank
• Lunges x 10 per side
• Dips x 5
• Jump Rope x 30 seconds

B.

• Warm up for 5 minutes with light jogging.
• Sprint 30 seconds. Rest 90 seconds. Repeat 3-5 times.

Create a Habit

If you haven’t worked out in a while, the plan above might be challenging. Creating a habit requires focus and dedication, but I guarantee if you stick out the four weeks, you’ll see fitness in a new light. After week four, take a week of active recovery – you deserve it. Good luck, and let me know how it goes!

More Like This:

• Exercising With Your Baby: The Babywearing Workout
• Parents Who Move More Have Kids Who Move More
• Is My Slow Progress TOO Slow?
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

The post Life After Kids: 4 Weeks to Get Your Fitness Back appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Thanks to our amazing team of kids’ writers, we’ve acquired a sizable library of resources to help you choose the best sport for your child and keep him or her fit and active. Here is a bit about each team member and his or her perspective on kids’ fitness:

Jeanne Goodes

Former Marine Jeanne Goodes knows a thing or two about working with children of all ages and backgrounds. While living in Japan, she worked as the strength and conditioning coach for the Japanese elite adolescent baseball team, and has coached adolescents in many other settings. Her articles are an immense resource for parents and coaches, covering topics from growing pains, to hydration, to being a good sports parent.

Click here to read all Jeanne’s articles.

Becca Borawski Jenkins

In addition to being a founding member of CrossFit Los Angeles, Becca Borawski Jenkins founded the CrossFit LA Kids program in 2010. Becca taught kids ages five to seventeen and drew a lot of wisdom from her experience. A strong believer in starting fitness from a young age, Becca’s articles delve into the benefits of CrossFit for kids and how to encourage kids to engage in fitness by making it fun, whether that happens through skateboarding or comic books.

You can read all of Becca’s articles here.

Rich Kite

Rich Kite is an Olympic weightlifting coach who is also passionate about making the Olympic lifts accessible to kids. If you teach Olympic weightlifting – or any form of strength training – to children, don’t miss his articles on preparing kids for weightlifting and adapting training to children’s specific physiological development.

Click here to read all of Rich’s articles.

David Varnes

David Varnes and his wife opened the International Academy of Matsumoto in 2010. He currently lives in Japan, where he works as an English teacher and trainer. David is a wealth of knowledge on all things kid-related, from encouraging your children to eat healthy food, to fighting for physical education in schools, to steroid use in youth athletes.

Read all David’s articles here.

Mike Tromello

If you’re looking for some solid programming for kids, Mike Tromello is your guy. Mike is an accomplished strength and conditioning coach with extensive experience coaching athletes of all ages. Mike’s articles provide insight into the benefits of strength training for kids and how to program workouts that are age-appropriate.

Read all Mike’s articles here.

Nicole Crawford

As a pregnancy exercise specialist and mom of three young children, Nicole Crawford’s primary interest is fitness during the early years – and that means infancy, not elementary school. Nicole’s articles focus on the benefits of exercise for young children, healthy eating for kids, and the importance of healthy movement habits from a young age.

Click here to read all Nicole’s articles.

The post Raising and Coaching Healthy Kids: Meet Our Kids’ Fitness Team! appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The Dilemma

Our society faces a serious dilemma, and it’s summed up well in the title of an article by Eric C. Stevens: Kids Are Fatter, Sicker, and Slower – What Can We Do About It?

Childhood obesity and high rates of diabetes in kids are well known symptoms of some of our less-than-healthy cultural habits. So what do we do? Eric proposes a shift in the way we as a society address and encourage health during childhood:

The time has come for action. It’s no longer enough to say it’s up to families to change their eating and exercise habits. What’s needed is action both on a personal and on a policy level. All of us need to get involved and not just pass the buck by stating the obvious – that everyone has a choice to be fit or not. Kids need help, not just a lecture that it’s up to them or their parents.

So let’s start with one of the most basic habits we can address as parents, coaches, and teachers: food. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done when you have fast food and candy on every corner. Here are three easy steps you can take to make some headway.

Step 1: Vanquish the Sugar Bugs

If you asked people to name the biggest food player in the childhood obesity epidemic, they would probably mention sugar. Unfortunately, obesity isn’t the only problem that stems from an indulgent sweet tooth. Author Jonathan Precel explains the link between excessive sugar intake and other common childhood problems like ADHD in his article, The Deadly Ways Excess Sugar Is Stunting Your Child:

Within our brains resides a chemical known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is responsible for creating new long-term memories, learning, and higher order thinking. Exercise has been shown to positively influence the growth of BDNFwhilst diets high in sugars reduce the growth of BDNF, making it hard for kids to learn new things. So when your son comes home from school and says he didn’t do anything, maybe he really didn’t or maybe he did, but just can’t remember because of all that sugar he’s been eating.

According to the World Health Organization, the average American child consumes 32 teaspoons (approximately 512 calories or 128 grams) of sugar daily. That’s a whopping 25.6 percent of daily calories for the average child. The first step any parent or caregiver can take in improving their child’s diet is to decrease sugar intake, whether the sugar comes from Cap’n Crunch or those “healthy” organic granola bars.

Step 2: Search and Destroy Highly Processed Foods

Additionally, the almost unavoidable processed foods that line the grocery store aisles contribute to common childhood conditions like ADHD, autism, and type 2 diabetes. I outlined ten common food processing ingredients to avoid in my article What Processed Food Is Doing To Kids and How We Can Change It:

1. High fructose corn syrup 
2. Trans fat – or in its common guise of ‘partially hydrogenated oil,’ which you might find in products even if the trans fat percentage is listed as 0%
3. MSG, or monosodium glutamate – or any other disguised versions like textured protein or hydrolyzed protein
4. Artificial colors
5. Brominated vegetable oil
6. Artifical sweeteners/sugar alcohols
7. Various offensive oils – corn oil, palm oil, soybean oil
8. Wheat flour
9. Nitrates/nitrites
10. Butylhydroxytoluene, or BHT

Teach your children about the importance of eating a variety of whole foods. They might resist at first, just like anyone who’s trying to break a bad habit. Help them out and don’t keep junk food in the house on the high shelves, stored away like the forbidden fruit. Instead, provide accessible, tasty, healthy snacks for your children to eat throughout the day. As Fred Fornicola noted in his article, 5 Ways You Can Help Prevent Childhood Obesity:

With some proper planning, a child can have a very good day of eating healthy. Providing a child with easy-to-access foods can make all the difference in the world. Having cut up vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds available can fill in for great snacks while breakfast, lunch, and dinner can supply them with the majority of their body and mind building nutrients.

Bottom line when it comes to highly processed foods: save them for parties, where they are often unavoidable, and emergencies when you don’t have time to prepare healthy food in advance. Otherwise, prevention is key – keep junk food out of the house. Because we can guarantee, if it’s in the house, they will find it and eat it.

Step 3: Have Fun

In her article, Comic Books Inspire Healthier Eating for Kids, Becca Borawski Jenkins explained how a unique project helped improve eating habits in young children:

As part of the project, children in grades 3-5 were asked to create comic books and comic book characters. These characters were to embody healthy, fit lifestyles including daily physical activity, eating fruits and vegetables, drinking water instead of sugary drinks, and cutting down on television and computer time.

Sure enough, this fun activity helped the kids establish better eating habits. Children have a natural openness to things they see as fun and enjoyable – and who can blame them? So once you’ve overcome the two common addict foods – sugary treats like candy and highly processed foods like salty frozen dinners and fast food – it’s time to get to the good stuff: fun. As writer David Varnes noted, allowing your kids to have fun creating meals will also encourage them to take ownership of their eating habits, which is a real achievement for anyone:

Kids will enjoy food more if they can take ownership of it. Give them the chance to help in preparation. Make food preparation a family fun activity. Young children can peel and chop (we’ve had children as young as four handling vegetable knives in our school, and there are specialty knives made for young hands) or even just rip apart leafy greens. Older children can be taught how to prepare foods. Give them a hand in the meal preparation and they’ll want to try the results of their work.

For more tips on getting picky eaters to be more open-minded, read the rest of David’s aarticle, I Don’t Want To Eat That: 6 Tips on Making Healthy Eating for Kids Not So Difficult.

Give this advice a shot and let us know how it goes. And if you know any grown ups who don’t like to eat their veggies, you might try it on them as well.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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That’s more than the population of 46 states. It’s greater than the population of many countries. Yet, every year, school districts cut funds from physical education (PE) and sports programs. According to one 2010 survey, 61% of PE teachers report that their yearly budget was less than $1000.²

More and more children are growing up uneducated about what it means to be a healthy person. They’re getting heavier and heavier, and becoming ticking time bombs for diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and other diseases. That’s not even getting into the numerous “minor” health problems, self-image issues, and other conditions that overweight and obese children and adults face.

The overall threat to the United States in terms of lost economic opportunity, money lost through treatment of health issues, and even things like the additional one billion gallons of gas the United States uses transporting obese people around (a cost of about $330 billion dollars) easily adds up to over a trillion dollars annually.^3,4

But what can we do about it? Are we to throw our hands up, gnash our teeth, and hope for the best? Move to countries that don’t have such a high percentage of obesity (if so, start learning Japanese, Korean, or Chinese). If this is what you think, please stop reading, and go spend the next few minutes doing something more productive with your time. If you feel that something can be done, that something should be done – then read on.

1. Make Some Noise

Go to your school, talk to the principal and teachers, find out who you need to take your concerns to. This might be the school board, it might be a superintendent, or it might be the city council. Once you find out who to talk to, go talk!

I would recommend not kicking in doors and raising a ruckus (at first). Try to be firmly polite, but make the decision-makers aware that cutting PE is not acceptable, and that PE should be funded and treated with the same level of respect as math, science, and reading.

2. Get Involved

Volunteer at the school. Ask if you can work with the PE teacher (or if your school lacks a PE teacher, then ask about the homeroom teachers) to get activities onto the schedule. This volunteering might be as simple as donating old equipment (balls, bats, or other gear) or as involved (and rewarding) as teaching the activity yourself.

Most schools will jump at free stuff or free teaching, and every teacher I know loves having some assistance. You don’t need to have a teacher’s certification in order to help out. You just need to have the heart to do so.

3. Don’t Give Up – Band Together

What if your school or school district is not receptive to your efforts? You’ve talked, you’ve kicked, you’ve screamed, you’ve volunteered – and you’ve been rebuffed. Don’t give up! Keep making noise, but also put in efforts outside the school system.

Outside the schools, the first thing you can do is band together. You are not the only parent in your town or school who feels the way you do. Network with those other parents. Form a group that can continue to advocate inside the schools, but also gets the kids together outside the schools for physical activity and education. I’m not talking play dates (I still shudder that particular phrase has even come into being), but extracurricular physical activity.

This could be group kids sports, working out, or even just getting everyone together for bike rides in the park. Look around your town, and you might be surprised at how much is out there that could be cheap or free. My only caveat is that if your child tells you he or she would rather do math homework than go do PE with friends in the park, then you’re doing it wrong.

4. Go It Alone

If all else fails of course, you can still go it alone, or go at it as a family. Educate your children on your own, and get them into activities. Find something (anything) they like that is physical in nature.

If your child thinks your CrossFit class is cool, talk to the box owner about children’s groups or classes. If your child loves watching a sport, investigate what it would take to get him or her playing it on the local level. There are numerous advantages to this method.

First of all, you can tailor it to the specific desires and needs of your child, which will greatly increasing interest and chance of continued participation. On the other hand, going it alone can be rather expensive, and in a budget-conscious family this could pose a problem. Educating yourself can help alleviate these costs, but the cost of this option is still most likely going to be higher than any of the others. I personally feel this cost is worth it though, as an investment in my son’s future.

Obesity is not a foregone conclusion for our current generation of children. Additionally, the impact on the United States can still be turned around. Let’s work together, use the strategies I’ve outlined above, and get national fitness back on track.

References:

1. “Childhood Obesity Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2. “School Physical Education Budgets a Cause for Alarm in New Trends Surveys,” National Association for Sport and Physical Education.

3. Rick Ungar, “Obesity Now Costs Americans More in Healthcare Spending Than Smoking,” Forbes, April 20, 2012.

4. “Petroleum and Other Liquids,” U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Photo 1 by Lance Cpl. D.J. Wu [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Photos 2 & 3 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post 4 Ways You Can Fight Back Against the War on Physical Education appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I find it challenging at times to convey what I consider to be a healthy approach to nutrition because of all the “authorities” and “diet experts” circulating among the American population. More diet gurus have come and gone and have come back again to suggest that you “Stop the Insanity” and “Deal a Meal” yourself to a better body. Personally, I can’t imagine buying prepackaged food and being told what to eat or running out of points and not being allowed to eat. Better yet, how about having extra points left over and being told its okay to eat that big piece of chocolate cake and not to worry?

It seems that almost every diet propagated amongst friends, co-workers, and the media all seems to work to some extent as far as weight lose is concerned. (Well, for a while anyway.) But the focus should not just be on weight loss. It should be on losing excess body fat and improving health. This is where many dietary recommendations miss the boat and fail miserably at providing a life long approach to eating. It’s my contention that people need to focus on achieving a favorable level of health through proper nutrition and exercise.

“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” – Hippocrates

Your Health at Risk

With all the diets out there, why are we as a nation still seeing a majority of people carrying excess body fat and suffering from stressed immune systems, heart disease (the number one killer in America), stroke (number three killer), elevated cholesterol levels, hypertension, and other self-imposed diseases? Why are there still unsuccessful attempts at losing this unwanted body weight and fat? Why are we still so unhealthy? Most diet plans are short term in nature, whereby the individual sees some weight loss in the beginning and once he or she goes back to what is deemed as “normal eating” they then tend to yo-yo or rebound. Essentially they gain the weight back that they lost and on most occasions go above the weight they started at.

Inevitably most people find themselves back to their previous – standing in line at their favorite fast food eateries (I just can’t use the term restaurant when referring to fast foods) with the hopes of maintaining their weight loss while returning to old routines. What most people fail to realize is that not only are they consuming way too many calories eating these unhealthy foods, but that most of what they eat provides little in the way of nutritional value. Your body needs to consume nutrient-dense foods daily to assist in fighting diseases. Ignoring these facts and having the opinion that “it won’t happen to me” increases the possibilities of acquiring a disease due to poor eating habits and lack of consistent exercise.

For example, let’s take a look at an average American meal at from McDonald’s that consists of a Big Mac, an order of small fries, and a vanilla shake to wash it down. Based on the nutritional information on the McDonald’s website, this meal consists of the following:

That’s 55g of fat, 161g of carbohydrates, 39g of protein, and a grand total of 1,310 calories. And this does not include any additional calories consumed by adding condiments to the meal.

If you are one who frequents McDonald’s or their equivalent, hopefully you are sitting back in your seat and thinking, “Wow! Do I eat that many empty calories at one time? Do I consume that much fat?” (Which by the way totaled over 20 grams of saturated fat.) But remember, eating healthy means more than just not eating junk. It means consuming nutrient dense foods daily.

Eating well comes down to some fundamental principles and implementation. Eating wholesome foods and structuring a sound eating plan doesn’t revolve around meetings or the need to be afraid of fats, nor do you need to join the anti-carb committee to achieve positive results. You need guidance, time, patience, and dedication to make it happen. You have the ability to make a permanent change that will benefit you for life and you need to start by becoming educated about what are healthy food choices for you and your family.

And Don’t Forget the Kids

With frequent social engagements, fast food establishments on every block, the Internet, TV, a lack of a healthy awareness, and a host of distracting activities, it’s no wonder the youth of this country is battling obesity. Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill compared trends in calorie intake, obesity, and physical activity for students from twelve to nineteen years of age over a twenty-year period. The study showed the caloric intake of these individuals has not deviated much at all, but physical activity has dropped significantly. The statistics show that only 29% of young people today participate in at least thirty minutes of exercise, compared to 42% back in 1980.

These figures are staggering and with the lack of enthusiasm from today’s teens along with the sedentary adult population, this number will only become increasingly more devastating. This ought to raise concerns for the parents of these teens (and the teens themselves) that will hopefully have them take stock in the fact that their health needs to be addressed. This problem can be countered by undergoing a regimen of daily physical activity along with an attention to proper nutritional habits.

According to the National Institutes of Health, 280,000 adult deaths each year in the United States are related to obesity. Remember, today’s youth becomes tomorrows adult, and people who are overweight or obese have an increased health risk for chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney disease, stroke, and heart disease.

It’s time for us to make an effort to stop the vicious cycle of teen (and adult) obesity and encourage the future of our nation to take stock in themselves and their health. Those of you who are the parents of these children must lead by example, encourage your children (obese or not) to partake in daily physical activity, eat a healthy diet and make a pledge to each other to work together to succeed at your goal.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post One Nation, Malnourished: Take Control and Change the Future appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It should go without saying that the fitness of your children is dependent in part on how active they are, but that’s not all. Study after study and article after article has demonstrated the positive health benefits of getting up and moving around. Heck, a recent article I wrote here indicated that for us office workers even just standing up every now and then might help save you from premature death. It’s not just adults that need to exercise for health, but kids do, too. In fact, the practice of movement is critical for their physical and mental development.

In the study the researchers hoped to put a number on what are called “shared risk factors.” A shared risk factor is when a disease-inducing trait that may not be genetic occurs in both a parent and child. Many of these factors are behavioral or environmental in origin. This means that parents who are lazy themselves, and create a living space and environment that isn’t conducive to physical activity, not only are more likely to become diseased as a result, but so are their kids – even without a genetic history of disease.

The researchers put pedometers on parents and their kids and measured the results. The kids ranged from 5 to 19 in age, and there was an even distribution of boys and girls. For every 1,000 steps or more per day a father took, his son’s increased by over 300 and his daughter’s increased by nearly 300. For every 1,000 steps more a mother took, her son experienced about the same increase as with the father, and her daughter took a little over 200 steps more. When either the father or mother took 3,000 more steps per day, there was a 1.9 to 2.5 times increase in the chance that the child would be in the upper two tertiles (the top 66%) of children for activity.

If you want your children to be healthy and active the message of this study is clear: You need to be an example. The more you move, the more your kids will move. The better the environment for exercise, the more your kids will move. And, finally, engaging with them directly and moving together will have the best impact of all. That last part wasn’t in the study, that was my own input, but it’s true. Exercise is better when we team up, especially with our kids.

References:

1. Cora Craig, et. al., “Relationship between parent and child pedometer-determined physical activity: a sub-study of the CANPLAY surveillance study,” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2013,10:8

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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