Strength Coach Collective

Coaching Kids for Life With The Brand X Method

• twobrainbusiness@gmail.com • Season 1 • Episode 18

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Movement is a language—and kids need the right foundation to speak it for life.

In this episode of the “Strength Coach Collective” podcast, host Kenny Markwardt sits down with Jeff, Mikki and Keegan Martin of The Brand X Method to explore what it takes to coach young athletes successfully.

The Brand X team members break down their pillars of Base, Build, Boost and Prepare, Practice, Play, and they explain how programming with these principles in mind helps kids develop physical literacy and ensures longevity in fitness.

They discuss why many kids start with a movement deficit, how coaches can cue complex concepts in age-appropriate ways, and why building competence and confidence early is essential for long-term motivation and success.

They also highlight the importance of parent education and buy-in and explain how to design results-driven youth programs that keep kids coming back for years.

If you’re running a youth program or thinking about starting one, tune in to hear practical tips from a business that’s set the standard in youth athletic development.


Links

Strength Coach Collective

0:49 - Overview of The Brand X Method

13:57 - How youth sports training fails

21:55 - What keeps kids engaged?

35:00 - Communicating with parents

49:49 - The process for coaches & owners

SPEAKER_04:

If we're going to help our clients live their longest, best lives possible, we need to start with them as early as we can. How do we do that optimally? Jeff Keegan and Mickey are here from the Brand X Method to tell us how to work with kids. Welcome to the Strength Coach Collective, a podcast brought to you by Two Brain Business. We are here to help advance the strength and conditioning coaching community by bringing you a wide range of experts in the field. Join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com. For today's episode, I'm your host, Kenny Marcourt. Mickey, Jeff, Keegan, thanks for doing this. I'm excited. Youth coaching is one of my favorite aspects of our gym. I just love giving the gift of fitness to the future of our kids, and you guys are leaders in that. So very, very excited to chat with the three of you guys this morning. Awesome, Kenny.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for

SPEAKER_04:

having us. Cool. Let's just get straight into it. You guys, you know, we start working with young athletes. Like where do we go? Like how do we start them? What's the age group? Like what does that flow look like? I'm going to let you guys kind of run with this thing because there's probably a lot to cover, a lot of different age groups and specifics within them. So I'm going to let you guys run.

SPEAKER_00:

I think I can start with the basic where we start with our methodology and the littles since I work with the littles. And so the two things to keep in mind are we have two predominant methods or pillars that we use. And the first one is base, build, boost. And that essentially is go in order. Start kids with what they need first. Don't start them with, you know, the combine camp. They actually need to know position. They need to have certain things in line. And so we use that methodology and you're going to hear a lot about that throughout this. And the second one is prepare, practice, play. We need to prepare kids for movement, practice that movement so they can have a lifetime of playing with movement in whatever way they want.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So we want to affect health span. We want to affect strength span. We want to affect their lives, but we have to do it in this order. And it's like anything else, there's a foundation first. So our foundation, and I'll just quickly dive into it and let these guys expand, is something called movement skills. Now you hear that all the time within the fitness industry, strength and conditioning, long-term athletic development, movement skills, but we have brand X movement skills, which are pieces and parts of essential movements that they need to know to move safely. So for instance, we call core midline stability, right? We need to teach them, how do you teach a six-year-old midline stability? But shouldn't you if they're going to hold something over their heads? So we have ways of doing that. We need to teach them how to externally rotate the femur. Shouldn't they know how to do that if they're going to squat? So we start there. So that's our kind of overall umbrella of where we're coming from.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, I think going back to that original question, right? Where do we start with kids? Where do they come through the door? Well, ideally, they would come to us at two, three years old. And we would start with those movement skills. Like my mom was saying, movement skills are pieces and parts of movements. They're not whole movements. They're pieces and parts of movements that can't be broken down any further than what they already are, right? So like she said, the ability to externally rotate the femur at the hip. That's critical to a ton of other movements, not just the squat, right? But it's critical to other movements that they're going to be using later in life. And so if we can practice those movement skills, those pieces that can't be broken down any further, but are applicable to several other movements, if we can perfect those at a young age and then progress from there, well, now all of a sudden we're applying those movement skills to whole movements. then we're applying those whole movements to complex movement patterns things like olympic lifts later on down the line when it's appropriate yeah right so we that's ideally that's where we would start right two to three years old with movement skills and like she said that's our that's our base phase referenced our base build boost phases um base for us it's you know all kids regardless of their age or experience are going through these three phases So if we get a 12 year old that walks through our doors, uh, you know, has been playing soccer for the past six years, seven years, uh, is considered a good athlete, uh, you know, by, um, regular means, right. Considered a good athlete has been playing sports is, is fit. He's in shape. Um, he still needs to learn the rules for movement. So we'll still start with those movement skills with him. regardless of how many years of experience he has, regardless of how big his engine is. Right. We're still starting with base. We're still starting with those movement skills.

SPEAKER_04:

And possibly probably untraining some stuff too. Right. Like I tend to see that kids are moving fast first and they're not doing what you're talking about. Right. Like they're playing soccer, playing other sports. And so they're going full, full clip, but they've never talked about what you are describing here is, is, positioning and proper mechanics. So anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I've just seen it so many

SPEAKER_03:

times. And you're not wrong. Right. Uh, so yeah, we have kids skipping to sport and, and foregoing all of the uh movement training that they need the weight lifting that they need to safeguard themselves for sport there's all these things that they're skipping to um and it's not their fault it's not the parents fault right they just think oh i want to keep my kid healthy and active so i'm going to put them in basketball or i'm going to put them in soccer and they're just doing the best they can with the info that they have right so but yeah there's all that unlearning that needs to happen we start with those movement skills and then Once the kids understand the rules for movement, then we progress them towards doing whole movement and allowing them to explore how many of those movement skills they can apply to how many different movements. Um, and that base phase sets them up for build the base build. Once they're in build, they're really, this is where we say we're making kids extremely good at moving because they're taking those movement skills now and applying them to as many things as possible.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

And it's our job in that phase to coach them. So we go from teaching them movement to now coaching them inside of build. And then finally, boost. Boost is about performance, right? How many things can we apply this to? And really, that's when we switch from coaching to mentoring and kind of guiding them towards them finding and figuring out how many complex patterns they can apply those movements to, how many movement problems they can come up with solutions for and continue to do it.

SPEAKER_04:

That's awesome. Now, do these correspond to age or are they within each age group? Because I know you guys talk about different age brackets. Is it base build boost within a young group and then base build boost within an older group?

SPEAKER_02:

You will hardly ever see a nine-year-old who has moved to boost. Okay. But every kid needs to go through the base build boost process. So a 16-year-old, like Keegan was saying, a teenager walks in your gym, they've been playing sports their whole life, they still need to start at the beginning. We still need to make sure that they understand how to brace their body, how to hinge at the hip, how to externally rotate their femurs, all of those things. And so they will tend to go through that base build boost process much more quickly than a younger kid. But... Every kid needs to go through that process. And we came to that really, you know, I mean, the history of how we started into strength training really was that, you know, we started, we developed CrossFit kids. And so we were really focused on the CrossFit kids and kind of bringing CrossFit down to kids section. And then somewhere around, I think it was 2009, 2010, it was actually Keegan came to us like, I really want to get stronger. I just want to really focus on strength. And there was a couple of things. One, business-wise, we realized that if we did strength training for kids, just had a class that was strength training, we could bring more kids in. So you have a soccer team. They come in our door and they would say, what do you guys do here? And we go like, well, we're showing them Fran or something like that. And they're like, we're uninterested in that. Show them squatting, deadlifting and pressing. And they're like, I can see that's useful. And so we would gather these athletes when we started doing this. So it was good for us business-wise because it was something the kids needed that the parents understood and it helped our business. But on the other side of that, it was developmentally appropriate for the teens. Like this is something where the teens are, you know, not only are they interested in doing it, but this is the prime time for them to get stronger. And so what we did was, you know, took Keegan's suggestion and because we're obsessive compulsive type A people, we dove into every single, all the literature we could find about strength training kids, all of the research we could find about strength training kids. And really that idea of this base build boost kind of came out of that. When you talk about that, when you read the research, they say start with moving. Make sure the kids move well and then move them through to strength training. And if you read the research, even today, when they talk about strength training for kids, they say you can start as young as five or six years old with strength training for kids. But it's all about... monitoring how they're moving and are they moving well. And so that's base, teaching them the rules for movement, moving into build, and like Keegan said, coaching them to move really well across a broad spectrum of movements. And then they move into boost, which we look at as performance, increasing their performance. So we built a system that takes kids who never touch a barbell, and brings them out the other side to where they can use the barbell for whatever strength activity that they need for whatever sport activity or adventure that they choose to get strong for. And I think the flip side of that is what we see in a lot of gyms is let's get the kids under the bar as quickly as possible. Let's put the weight on them. And then you see some kid squatting 225 and the coach is still saying, you need to be out, remember to brace. those things should be inherent in that kid who's in that phase, lifting those kinds of weights.

SPEAKER_03:

He's there. He shouldn't need those

SPEAKER_02:

cues.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_03:

And you know, like, like he was saying, you know, it's very rare to see a nine-year-old in the boost phase for us, but it's not rare to see a 17-year-old in the base phase.

SPEAKER_04:

I imagine. I mean, or adults, right? Like I'm, I personally do a lot of work with adults and I'm still working through a lot of that stuff on the unwinding of patterns that they've been doing for 40 or 50 years. But when you guys get them with a relatively blank canvas at an early age, like you should, I think you guys have a really unique opportunity to refine those patterns early. So like you said, they do not need those cues as they get older in the high school weight room or as adults. which I tend to see, again, a lot.

SPEAKER_00:

We're really developing those patterns with them. And more and more so because most kids now are not super active outside of maybe they have a sport, but they're not super active in the rest of their daily lives. And so we do have them come in with super tight hip flexors or motor patterns where they cannot jump initiate two feet explode land with two feet there's a stutter step and that started we started seeing that 2010 2012 that timeline and it's just gotten 13 years now more and more a higher percentage of kids come in with you set a blank slate and it's truly blank their movement exposure in general is just going downhill all the time so we do feel a responsibility that I To let other coaches know. How do you, you know, they're starting in this place, often starting in this place where they're kind of in a hole. They have a negative movement exposure. All the things that we used to assume that a child would know how to do, they haven't been exposed to. So we're starting there and we're trying to, from my end, I particularly work with young kids, trying to just give them those experiences and broad physical literacy and those movement patterns that we would think of as assumed, we want to make sure that's delivered.

SPEAKER_02:

That's where we start. But the goal, let's discuss what the goal is. The goal isn't to have kids be really strong. We want the kids to be really strong.

SPEAKER_00:

That's an outcome.

SPEAKER_02:

That's an outcome. But our goal is for the kids to move well and be able to lift weights and move well for the rest of their life. So it's quite a bit of a different goal. Like if you're a football coach, you might be like, I need my kids to be strong for this coming season. And that's your only focus.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, which I think is unfortunate. I mean, again, my personal perspective on this, and I imagine you guys are going to share it, is 99.9% of these kids suck at sports. And I mean that gently. But they're never going to the next level. They're never going to play professionally. This is not... Like the, the realistic goal for them is not to play professionally. It is to give them the gift of fitness for the rest of their lives. And I think that like, I see that unfortunately expressed in, in way poor training, like horrendously poor training in high school rate rooms or whatever else, because it's so performance oriented. And when I think of the perspective of the goal being, Hey, this is for you the rest of your life is something that is, I think it's, it's lost a lot in, in youth sports.

UNKNOWN:

So.

SPEAKER_02:

But if you take that idea, our idea, and you apply it to sports, you still get great outcomes. Yeah, sure. So we can sometime talk about Brand X Nashville is now running a strength program for a high school in Nashville. And I think they were second or third in the conference this year in football. I mean, it was in the state. So we have great outcomes. But the, you know, We had great outcomes. Our gym, we had over 100 state and national powerlifting records with our kids and with our youth. We had 90,000 training hours with zero injuries that required intervention. So we took these kids and we moved them through this process. And yes, it took a little bit longer, but they did have great outcomes. They were able to apply it. We had kids who We're in our program who went on to play pro sports. They went on to walk onto college campuses and play sports they'd never played before. So they moved well, they were strong, and they had these outcomes. I think that the key, though, is that you're focusing on teaching them the rules for the movement. and having them then learn to apply it. And if your goal is, I want them to be healthy, move well, and be able to lift and do things for the rest of their lives, certain things are more important than how much they're lifting. So you see a lot of debate, things like, well, when somebody's lifting valgus, they can lift more weight, so it's okay to let them go valgus with their knees. Well, if you're us, we want their kids to come into the gym, and leave the gym and do other things like sports. Well, a valgus knee, when you're jumping and landing in sport, is the position that somebody tears an ACL. So we don't want to just allow it so that they can make more weight. We want to teach them that the proper knee position is the way that they move when they're doing anything athletic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Habit.

SPEAKER_02:

Habit.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, let's get into that because the– In the beginning, you touched on this a little bit, referring to some big words and some exercise science terminology that I imagine doesn't convey to two- and three-year-olds especially, but I mean, it often doesn't convey to adults either. What does that look like or sound like or what's the perspective as a coach to think through coaching youth positioning without using external rotation, valgus knee, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

So using the proper cues for their age groups, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Movement

SPEAKER_03:

skills. And movement skills, because later on down the line with the teenagers, they understand, they have some sort of understanding of anatomy and physiology, right? So we can use anatomical terms and discuss with them more like we would with an adult on what we're expecting of them. But a lot of times with three-year-olds, four-year-olds, when we're coaching them, a lot of times it's us showing them what we want them to do and them attempting to copy it. without explanation. Right. So

SPEAKER_04:

like,

SPEAKER_03:

yeah, exactly. So if we're, if we're talking about external rotation of the femur at the hip, I'm not going to say that to a three-year-old, right. But I will say, Hey, make a footprint in the sand and I'll show them with my leg, what I want them to do. Pretend like you're making a footprint in the sand and I'll show them what I want them to do. And I'll have them try and copy it right now. It might be a year of working on that before they actually get it done. But once they understand it, Now I've got it and I can apply that to their squat. Hey, look, make a footprint in the sand with both your feet. Okay. Now let's bend our knees for our squat. Right. And now all of a sudden I have a five-year-old that understands how to externally rotate their femurs at the hip. How much better off now when we start to load it later on at 12 years old, you know, we put a barbell on their back and all of a sudden now they have the perfect pattern and the physical cascade to actually gain strength the way that you and I do. It takes off. We have those movement skills that we talked about. We have tons of different cues that we use, but a lot of times with those younger kids, it comes down to us showing them and having them attempt to copy us. It's visual.

SPEAKER_00:

In the age range where we usually start classes, some people will run that preschool group that Keegan's talking about, but most start around five or six and others at eight. But in that age range, we're developing their neurology as well. So repetition, repetition, repetition. So in as many ways as you could show, footprint in the sand in the summer, make puddles, have them walk into the puddle, get a footprint, walk somewhere else, externally rotate and see those footprints so there's there's all kinds of creative ways to create that constant repetition for consistency and remembering that neurology is building and we don't want that pruned out we want that retained when we get to build and boost right so we repeat it at a massive level in that that youngest class and then we we repeat it not as often but it Again, in different ways, through more of a higher volume and repertoire of exercises as we go to build and boost.

SPEAKER_03:

Repetitivity, right? Because that's how kids gain strength. Kids don't gain strength the way that you and I do, right? Through breaking down the muscle tissue, through more load, right? They don't gain strength the same way. they gain strength through building a more robust neurological system. So making sure that we repeat things and repeat them in different ways, as many different ways as possible is key for us.

SPEAKER_02:

We would hope that most coaches would have a way of coaching or teaching bracing to their adult clients. Look, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. This is how we're doing it. Ours just expands. It goes down to, you know, a five-year-old and saying like, look, we want you to stand this way. We teach them, you know, a strong tree. We teach them what we call muscles on. And then we move them as they start coming into the teen years, we can start talking to them about what their bodies look. Here's your spine. This is what your spine core, what spine looks like. And we have ways of talking to them about what the spine does, what the diaphragm does, so they can kind of start to begin to understand exactly what their body's doing and why we want it to do, you know, why we want it to do the things we want it to do to brace. And then they can rely back on like, oh, yeah, I remember a strong tree and I remember these muscles on and now I'm seeing why I'm doing that and how to do it. And then you kind of moved into the, and this is how you brace, right? And it's really appropriate because middle school, high school, now they're starting to go like we're actually getting under load.

SPEAKER_04:

Love it. It sounds like the creativity within there sounds like a lot of fun. I like to learn the ways to communicate with kids and just using different cues that are relevant. That sounds great. It sounds like it'd be a lot of fun for them. Is that a big part of keeping it fun while also teaching them a lot of the basics there?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I mean, the word play is in there for a reason. We want movement to be exciting and playful. And so, yes. And it does change, obviously, over time. 17-5, that's going to be pretty different. But yes, for someone like me, I love doing that kind of thing. How do I take a regular game and make it into... It delivers physical literacy. It delivers positional strength. It delivers language even. We want children to be able to translate movement to language. So how do we do that and make a fun game that kids will like? That's a big part of keeping them engaged. Doing that also includes observing kids enough to know what currently they think is fun. And that changes fast now. You know what? When we were little, we made paper airplanes and thought that was fun. Not a lot of 10-year-olds are into paper airplanes anymore. So that kind of thing, you have to really be aware of what's changing in the culture, what kids are loving doing. You know how a couple of years ago it was flipping those water bottles?

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And then the strike ball was a big deal. Everybody was doing the strike ball thing. So knowing those kinds of things and then putting it back into that thing, how do we get the things we want them to practice and retain? And they will retain it better in a state of play. So the less rules, the less stress, they'll retain lessons more readily. The memories are stickier and the science backs that up.

SPEAKER_02:

Everything needs to be fun. I don't care what age group you're working with, young kids, middle school kids, high school. You've got to find what's fun for those kids and use it. But that can't be the goal of the work of the program. That's

SPEAKER_00:

super important. Good catch. So often

SPEAKER_02:

I talk to youth program directors and, what's the goal of your program? Well, I want the kids to have fun. Great. Yes, have fun. We actually have to provide outcomes for these kids.

SPEAKER_00:

And their parents. And their parents,

SPEAKER_02:

or else your program is just an activity. Yeah. It'll come and go from.

SPEAKER_00:

That's the business side. Right. Right there. The parents have a goal, even if the child doesn't.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that's great. So it's not just playing tag and fill in 45 minutes or a half hour, whatever it is. They're not just screwing around. getting some activity out while they're getting babysitting, there actually is an outcome.

SPEAKER_03:

Sorry, go ahead. Exactly. And fun's just a byproduct of the program, I would

SPEAKER_04:

say.

SPEAKER_03:

If we do what we're doing correctly, they're going to have a good time because they're going to see its application to other things, especially when you get towards the varsity years, the 12 and up, when we've had them for so long working on this base, this build. Now we're in boost. And we're starting to see the fruits of our labor, really, with all the movement skills and motor pattern training. I think it's just a byproduct. They start to then go, okay, wow, I progressed 50 pounds on my back squat in the last six months. It's

SPEAKER_00:

more fun to be competent. Right.

SPEAKER_02:

To be competent. I think you hit a word earlier, complexity. When you teach kids... through this process of baseball boost when they're in the performance it's they're looking for complexity of movement so you know if you think about how like we you know somebody's teaching kids to do handstands or handstand walking what they do is they normally put lines out on the floor and they say get upside down try to do your handstand walking and we'll have you know 15 kids and One kid goes along, he looks like a spider, kind of a scorpion with his hands like this. And eventually, one or two of the kids will make it, but most of the kids don't. But if you follow this base build boost process, you teach them how to hold their shoulder in a good, stable position, how to brace. You teach them to do wall walk-ups. Then you teach them to do shoulder taps and then walk along the sides of the walls and then kick up and hold a handstand. They've learned the rules for movement. They've learned how to apply them. And then they can start to handstand walk. And it isn't just go five meters. And now it's go five meters, pause, and then go another five meters. Go five meters, pause, and tap your shoulders freestanding. And the kids are coming in going like, what is coach going to ask me to do today?

SPEAKER_03:

What am I going to find out that I can do that I didn't know before I walked

SPEAKER_02:

in the door? And it keeps kids in a program. So if you have a strength program that is constantly delivering success, so in our program, I don't think I ever had a kid show up for a testing month that didn't PR every lift in all of our time. I And so why would they go to another gym? They're PRing every single time. If they walk in the gym and they're being asked to do skills they've never done before, and they're finding the success with this, and they're finding that they can move from one skill to the next, the older kids are excited about that. And then as far as the business side, that keeps kids in your program. We had over 100 kids that were with us longer than five years and almost 40 that were with us longer than a decade. And that says something about what's going on inside the program for success and progress for these kids and keeping them engaged. And then because we've been doing this for 25 years, I can tell you what a kid who's, you know, came in at 10 looks like in their thirties and what they're, what did, what did you just pull the other day?

SPEAKER_03:

Triple body weight for three.

SPEAKER_02:

So, you know, you, that's what we're trying to, you know, we had success with them as teens, but that's success down the road. And that's what we were really, really our fundamental goal was with the, with the program.

SPEAKER_03:

And it's critical for us to understand how to, how to get them to that point. Right. Cause sometimes, like we said, we get the 15 year old that we haven't had 10 years working with come through the door. So how do we, how do we get him to have a good time? Well, He's, you know, maybe inside of our barbell class and he's seeing other 15 year olds lift 200 pounds more than him and he can't figure out how to get his knees in the right position. You know, that's not necessarily a great time because now we're working on movement skills with him and he sees his buddy who's PRing. So, you know, how do we progress that child? Well, we use low skill movements and allow him still to go fast and hard and heavy on those. And we reserve the more complex movements for going slow, focusing on patterns. So that back squat maybe, for example, right? A back squat day. We'll have him come in and he's focusing on his brace. He's focusing on his hip hinge. He's focusing on his external rotation. He's focusing on that on the platform. But in between sets, we're doing sled drags. And I'm going to load that sled drag up until he's like crawling on the ground. I can't move any more weight. I'm out of breath. Right. Like that portion was hard. And I might even have him pull more on the sled drag than his buddy. That's squatting a PR, you know, over on the other platform, just for him to get that, that little bit of now that he's having fun.

SPEAKER_04:

Totally.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. But I'm doing it in a way that's conducive to learning the patterns that I need him to learn. Right. With those low skill patterns. the high skill movements, he's moving slow. And then with those low skill movements, I can go hard, heavy, fast.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. That, I mean, what we started talking about handstand walking and how it was, I think a lot of times it's like, here, like, let's just see what happens. And there's going to be kids that can do it. There's going to be kids that fail, fall on their face. You know, they're terrible. And again, no, no insult to them. It's just like, that's, that's their, their patterns, but they lose confidence. And I think what a lot of what you just outlined was building confidence. both in and out of the gym that make that a rewarding experience that, you know, we'll keep them in there for a long time, but, and also successfully. So like the individualization and making sure to focus on their, their individual progress and confidence and fun is what I heard from a lot of that. Um, which again, I think that just builds so much of a, it just reinforces that the gym is a good thing in life, uh, which is going to be good for them in and out of it.

SPEAKER_03:

We have three pillars we found that keeps kids coming back. It's competence, confidence, and motivation. And we focus on the first one. As coaches, we have direct control over how competent they are as movers. And we found that competence breeds confidence. Because if you're really good at something, it's going to make you more confident in doing it, correct? Yep. And then confidence breeds motivation. So the more confident you are, the more skill you have, say, hey, I can tackle this task. It makes me more likely to go out and do other tasks.

SPEAKER_04:

For sure.

SPEAKER_03:

Motivate you, right? So we have direct control over competence. That's where we start. We found that that breeds confidence and that breeds motivation to continue.

SPEAKER_04:

A hundred percent. Yeah. And again, in adults, I see that that's just so lacking a lot of times when they have no, no exposure to the gym. They come in unsure of themselves. They come in scared. They come in and they just have no desire to cross that threshold every day because they know it's going to suck. But if you can build that as a kid, like, oh my gosh, like they'll never, they'll never stop.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Most adults come to the gym. Why do most adults come to the gym? Because their doctor said that they should lose weight. The doctor said that their blood work didn't come up right, or they've got a hurt shoulder or hurt back, or they need to get back in shape. We wanted kids to come to the gym so they'd be using the gym to get better at the things outside of their gym. And we recognize that no parent brings their kid to the gym to be good at gymming, to be good at the stuff outside of the gym. So it's a completely, when you kind of follow this path, base build boost, when you follow this idea of confidence or competence leading to confidence leading to motivation, the outcome is quite different. You know, our kids, you know, and we can show this with all kinds of kids who've gone through the program. will use the gym to get better for rock climbing or bike riding or something else outside of the... I go on the long backpacks and things like that. They're using the gym to enhance their life versus using the gym because they need to fix something.

SPEAKER_04:

Totally.

SPEAKER_03:

I think that's... you know, really a unique aspect. Right. Cause it's, it's the theory of, you know, how do they view fitness for what it's worth in their, in their life. Right. Cause you have the kid that, you know, and this is average, the kid that maybe on Sunday sits down with their dad, who's crushing, you know, an 18 pack of beers and a pack of not a thing of nachos, right. Watching football. And it's like, that's if they're, if their view of fitness is so that I can get better at football, then it's a very narrow view.

SPEAKER_05:

Right?

SPEAKER_03:

I have this specific memory of when I was a kid. Our Saturdays, we would sit down on the bed, my dad and I, and we would have protein shakes and we'd watch World's Strongest Man.

SPEAKER_05:

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_03:

I don't know why, but it's burned into my memory. It's like every Saturday, you know, we'd go to the gym, we'd work out as a family, we'd come home, we'd have protein shakes, and we'd watch World's Strongest Man. And my view of fitness was so different than what other kids had. I viewed fitness as the, really the starting point, the launch pad to do whatever it was that I wanted to

SPEAKER_05:

do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

It just made that the whole view completely different.

SPEAKER_00:

Kind of worked out for you.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. So that's a super interesting topic. So I think, you know, you get the kids two or three hours, maybe, maybe more than that a week, but yeah, what's the communication like with the parents on, on both ends of the spectrum? So like how, you know, just talking about what you guys are talking about, but also talking about how they can help those kids at home. Cause a lot of the times these kids are, they're products of parents who are not involved in fitness or who do not have those habits or who have a negative experience with the gym. And sometimes they get, you know, the kids come in because their friends are in there or whatever else. Like, what is that? Can you talk about that at all? Or do you have any, any advice for us to be talking to their parents, the kids? We

SPEAKER_02:

have a lot to say about that. Yeah. The first thing with youth programs is that in an adult program, the customer and the client are the same person generally. Walk through the door, they tell you what their goals are, and then they pay you to help them get to their goals. Well, the parents in a youth program, parents are the customer. The client is the child. you know, you always, you know, in every, in every fitness program, every gym, you create a relationship with the client. So adult programs, you do this with the kids programs, you make the relationship is really easy with that client. Often in youth programs, people forget about the customer and they forget that the customer comes in, brought that child in for a reason and you need to tell them what's going on. So we have I'll let Mickey talk about some of the specifics, but we kind of have an overview. When you're talking to a gym, you have an intake when the customer brings the client in. You have an intake process. You want to discover what the customer wants. Then you have a secondary pillar where you start to educate them about what your program does and why it's important to their child. It's not just an activity, but it's essential to the child's development. And then finally you have a process where you are individually telling the customer, this is how your child is progressing. These are the things they've done. This is what's going on. So you are showing them that you have addressed what's going on for the child. So we have a, this is what you need to do these three stages. That being said, sometimes the customer doesn't want to hear what's going on, doesn't want to address things like this.

SPEAKER_00:

We have a doc that is constantly being re-updated for when we get new information. It's kind of like everything we do. Things change somewhat. We have a doc, it's 10 avatars of the common parent types and how to address each type. So you kind of define the two most common are I want my kid to be a D1 athlete. And my kid's too sedentary, and they don't really have any self-reflection on why that might be. They just want to acknowledge that they're sedentary. They don't want you to talk about anything else.

SPEAKER_02:

They didn't bring their kid home and put him on the bed and say, we're watching World's Strongest Man.

SPEAKER_00:

He seems to be eating really bad food that I don't know where he gets it. So anyway, those are the two most common that everybody recognizes who's dealt with parents and kids in any program. But there's a lot of sub... I had a really bad experience. I was humiliated in sport. I'm not talking about me, but that could have happened. But they come in saying, I had this terrible experience, and so I'm fearful of sport. I don't want my kid to be fearful to move in front of other people. How can you address that? Or my kid needs discipline. Weirdly enough, I want to abdicate on that. Can I get them in a program where they're going to show them discipline? So we get, as you can tell, there are so many parent types and there are ways that we've worked out to deal with them, each of them slightly differently to either calm their fears, educate them. maybe bring them along as an adult as well. Well, you know what? A lot of this is, you know, we are going to do this together. Do you think maybe as a family you guys could go do this one thing once a month so that we get them thinking, hey, maybe this is something we should all do, not just my sedentary child who just was born that way, right?

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So we do have information to help gyms really dig into that? And how are we going to really get that parent connected through the education process?

SPEAKER_02:

We found it was really difficult to sit down with a parent and say, you're feeding your child incorrectly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05:

Yeah, that doesn't come

SPEAKER_02:

up. Parents tend to think of nutrition almost like religion. You want to change how you eat today? No, it's tough. But one of the things we did was... about once or twice a year, I would have the team class, I'd hand out log books, and I'd say, I want you to do a week, and I want you to tell me exactly what you're eating all day long. So they would just log their food. And at the end of that week, we'd schedule a seminar on a quick 15-minute seminar on nutrition before class. So We're just going to come in. We're going to sit down. We're going to talk about your logbook. We're going to talk about nutrition. And I'd invite the parents to come in. And sometimes, I mean, I remember toward the end of our time there at the gym, we have 35 to 40 kids in the teen class. And we might have 70 to 80 parents sitting in on the nutrition program. class and so we're talking in generalities about nutrition about what's good nutrition and what we'd hear was parents coming back going like we changed this we did this this is what we're doing wow and um it was pretty amazing all of a

SPEAKER_03:

sudden you make it a community effort

SPEAKER_02:

yeah i got

SPEAKER_03:

it dive in right

SPEAKER_02:

yep and we could do things like have um a family a family workout on saturday morning where the families would come in and work out. And then we do like maybe a potluck afterwards and everybody brings something. We talk about what we're making. And it was, and that was another community event, but it, it was, it didn't point out a parent for having bad or

SPEAKER_00:

less than optimal,

SPEAKER_02:

but it helped them understand how they could better help their child and, and, And I think it worked really well.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. And we're talking just broad concepts,

SPEAKER_05:

right? Sure.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Like, Hey, let's come in. Let's talk about what, you know, what foods we should be eating all the time. What are some foods that are good? And we call them all the time foods. And then we have sometimes foods, which retreats, you know, we found with kids in particular, if you say, Hey, don't eat this, don't eat that. The first thing they're going to reach for when they have the opportunity is those things.

SPEAKER_00:

Or stash them under their bed. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_03:

Right, hide them. So it's kind of one of those things where if you focus on the good stuff, focus on what they should be having all the time and allow them the opportunity to have treats every once in a while and still be a child, it goes a long way. But we talk about broad concepts. Hey, what is protein? What are some examples of all-the-time foods that are proteins? What are carbohydrates? What are fats? What do they do?

SPEAKER_02:

Just

SPEAKER_03:

start there.

SPEAKER_02:

It gave us the opportunity then to check in with kids. We'd always get these logbooks back and you'd have the new kids that hadn't been through this. You'd look through their logbooks and they'd go five days without having protein. Well, okay, we need to have a discussion here about this. But now... We've had this discussion, and we would do a group warm-up called the Brand X warm-up, and we'd walk around and go like, hey, Junior, what did you have for protein this morning? I had this, and I had that. So you could talk to them about what they were eating, and we saw some major changes.

SPEAKER_04:

And so are you mostly involving the parents? Are you trying to convey this to the kid to then convey it to the parent? Cause I would wonder how much they're like, if the kids go home and their parents have poor nutrition habits and they're like, well, Hey, coach says I can't eat this anymore. Like that might, that seems like that would cause some. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03:

So, so we, we want to involve the parents, but we're going to talk to the kids about it. Okay. Open invite to the parents. Okay. We want you to be a part of our community where we talk about food and what's good food for your child to be eating. Right? We want you to come in and be a part of those nutrition discussions. We want you to be a part of the product, but. we're going to be talking to the kids about it. And, and, and it's, it's just going to be very broad. Like I said, you know, Hey, this is what a protein is. These are the types of proteins that you should be eating. And we're never saying things like, Hey, don't eat

SPEAKER_05:

that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03:

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Or

SPEAKER_03:

that's bad. It's

SPEAKER_00:

easy to slip that into the communication process. Like Jeff was talking about bright spots where you're communicating, maybe texting the parent and saying, Hey, Today, Billy was a great leader in class or Susie did perfect squats or whatever you're saying. You have that cadence of those communications with the parent. And then sometimes they'll tell you, well, hey, you know, I'm wondering about this. And it feeds more questions from them. But you can easily say this week we're going to talk to them broadly about food categories. So it's set up.

SPEAKER_05:

But

SPEAKER_00:

they don't feel picked on or it's, you know, their culture or their family traditions. All those things are hugely emotional. And we want to stay away from that. So like Keegan keeps saying, it's very broad, not specific nutritional advice. We don't want kids to, we don't want anybody to feel bad. We just want to demonstrate a way that can make them healthier.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. One great story is that Mickey talked about the broad categories. One time, I think Mickey was explaining to her kids class that the good food, the food you really wanted to eat, the all the time food was on the outside of the perimeter of the store. And we went shopping and saw one of our moms with one of the kids and the kid is pushing the shopping cart. away from the middle and he's yelling at his mom, we can't go down the middle aisle.

SPEAKER_04:

That's great. I love

SPEAKER_00:

that.

SPEAKER_04:

No, no, no, no. There's bad stuff down there. That's great.

SPEAKER_02:

So

SPEAKER_04:

sometimes it does

SPEAKER_02:

backfire, but, but even the broad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. That's great. What does that case? So we talked to, you were mentioning a little bit like a client customer, uh, journey as far as touch points and cadence and communications? Like, do you guys start with a consult with a parent and kid? Do you touch points? Like, what is this? What is the client journey for lack of a better word? Look like, um, client customer journey look like for the, for you guys or what do you recommend? So

SPEAKER_02:

especially unless it's, unless it's a child that is a, an athlete and that child that's in it, it's very few kids are, um, true, like, you know, they're six years old and they know they want to go to the major leagues and they're, and they're standing outside throwing a ball at the wall over and over. It's like that. Most kids want to get directly into being with their friends and being in a class. So sitting them down with the coach and having a consult is not really, um, something that is conducive to, um, to signing the kids up.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So we would, And what we did was kid could go and join the class, and then we would have a coach sit with the parent and ask them questions. Oh, okay. And you're writing those questions down. That also develops a relationship. And then when the class is over and the kid comes back and you had a great time, yes, you're signing them up. So now they're signed up and you have information about them. They want these things. They're looking for these things. They're concerned about these things. They think that their child does well at these things. So you've got all of this information. Then they've signed up and they start the communication process. The communication process is teaching them about your gym. So we have blogs that we give when we're doing mentoring that we give to our students. gyms, and they just send them out every two to three weeks. Here's blog number one. Here's blog number two. Here's blog number three, educating about the gym. And then finally, we tell our coaches that what we want them to do is after every class, part of your SOP is to sit down and to write out bright spots. Joey got a PR on the mile. Jimmy got his first pull-up. Susie helped clean up the chalk that someone else kicked over, something like that. Billy

SPEAKER_00:

tied his shoes.

SPEAKER_02:

Billy tied his shoes on his own. But you've got all of these bright spots, and then every four to six weeks, you're texting the parent saying, I want to let you know what a great kid Susie is. She helped me clean up the chalk after class, and just what a bright spot she is in class. I really appreciate her. A couple of things. One is the parent goes like, oh, I got a coach, something from the coach. That's awesome. And they can just accept it and you don't hear back from them. That's fine. Number two, they can have an interaction with you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate your care for Susie. And sometimes they give you information. I'm really glad Susie's in class. She seems to be enjoying it. She's really concerned about her pull-ups. Awesome. So now you've got more information. Next time you text me, go like, you know, when Susie came in, she couldn't hold herself on the bar longer than 10 seconds. She's up to 45 seconds now. We're all on the way to pull-ups. Just want you to know that we're moving toward there. I understood what you told me about her, and we're helping her, kind of giving her a little bit of extra work there on the pull-ups. So that helps you with retention with the child. You kind of can head off some problems there.

SPEAKER_00:

And I would add that you don't want– to necessarily use a generic template because people are pretty savvy now to what a generic template looks like. So if it's... Dear Mr. Smith.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, dear username.

SPEAKER_00:

Take the five seconds and just say the truth about what you saw in your words.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, yeah, totally. That's awesome. Okay. So we talked about a lot. We talked about training philosophies. We talked about communication with parents. Talk about what's, what does the process look like for the, do you recommend coaches go through this? Is it owners? It sounds like they're both like, what does it, what does the process look like for how you guys coach coaches and coach owners?

SPEAKER_02:

I think there's two things. One is we love owners going through. I mean, even if you're not running the, the youth program, um, If an owner understands it and they're involved in it, then they can set an environment up where the gym thinks of youth programs as important. So we don't want the youth program to be something that's like on the back shelf of a 7-Eleven that's kind of like this leftover products. We want to be right up front. Like, look, we walk in the door. So

SPEAKER_00:

much board.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's really important. But we have our professional youth coach certification that goes through a lot of the information that we went through here in depth.

SPEAKER_00:

NASM, Australian Strength and Conditioning Association. You can get CEUs.

SPEAKER_02:

Cool. And so there's that. And then there's If you're really serious about setting up a youth program, you can call us and we'd be happy to talk with coaches and gym owners about how to run a successful youth program.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we do mentoring. Plug and play. How long does the

SPEAKER_04:

certification take? How long is the mentorship? Can you go into some of those programs for duration and what they look like?

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. The PYCC has two parts. The first part goes over the why in science underpinning training a child on the biopsychosocial model. So instead of taking an adult program and dropping it down on top of a child, we're talking about the developmental needs of each kind of group, grouping biopsychosocial group. What do they need and how can we best address those needs? And it goes over the science of that. And the second part is all about implementation. How do you take that and apply it? The The second course is constantly expanding. So I think we started off when we launched, we had 100 videos on how to teach kids. We now have, I think... Over 400. Over 400 videos and games and things like that. Research

SPEAKER_00:

papers.

SPEAKER_02:

So it's constantly expanding. It was designed to be a reference material. So one of the things we saw when we went to live courses was you teach somebody something and then they'd walk out the door and 90% was gone. Yeah. Now we've got videos like, look, this is how you teach the back squat. You can play it for the kids. You can play it for yourself. The first course takes about 25 to 30 hours to get through. The second course is not designed to get through. It's designed to be reference and continuing education. The mentoring is 15 months long because we want people to be really committed to starting a program and running a program. And we have kind of front load the mentoring. So we do like a call every other week for the first two or three months to get them set up and get them rolling. And after that, we have a call once a month with them.

SPEAKER_00:

And they receive programming.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. And basically what we're doing is we're helping them set up the business of running a youth program and then secondarily coming in and saying, okay, look, we talked about base build boost and the hinge pattern. Here's what goes into base and the hinge pattern. Here's what goes into build. And here's what you can do once you get to the boost pattern. And this is how the process goes. And so we kind of go through each of the movement patterns and give people an outline of what to do. So business and implementation.

SPEAKER_04:

That's awesome. Cool. Where can people find you guys to find out more?

SPEAKER_00:

LinkedIn, Instagram, and Jeff and Mickey at thebrandxmethod.com. Keegan at thebrandxmethod.com. We're on Facebook, kind of, just not so often. Not so

SPEAKER_02:

much anymore. It seems to be a

SPEAKER_03:

trend, yeah. Instagram's got a ton of good videos and information on there. All of our links can be found there as well. So if you click up at the top in their bio, you can find our website. And from there, you can contact us directly or just start the process there.

SPEAKER_04:

And that's Brand X Method on Instagram?

SPEAKER_03:

The Brand X Method, at the Brand X Method.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah,

SPEAKER_00:

we're in the middle of a good website upgrade, so... Check that out at first week of April.

SPEAKER_02:

And if you want to reach out to Jeff and Mickey, Mickey is M-I-K-K-I.

SPEAKER_04:

Awesome. Thanks, you guys. I mean, thanks for doing this, but thanks for the gifts you're giving to the future of our youth. I mean, I think it's like we started off in the beginning, like the best thing that they could ever have as far as their futures and their confidence in the now. So thanks for doing all that you do. Thank you. Thanks

SPEAKER_00:

for having us. Nice talking with you.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. As always, thanks for joining us. And don't forget, you can join our group at strengthcoachcollective.com.