Physical Training for Kids Part 3: Key Principles

This project, Inherent Health, is not about more information. Remember the Derek Sivers quote: "If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs." What we are trying to do here is simplify—cut through the noise and remind ourselves about what matters. We offer up stories, frameworks, principles, and ideas that remind us of what matters and help us take that crucial first step of listening to ourselves.

With that in mind, this series of posts on physical training for kids is about bringing awareness to the undeniable fact that movement matters and is essential to kids thriving. It is not about adding another 'should' to your life as a parent or someone who cares about kids. It is not about loading us up with more information and making us feel inadequate about what we know and provide.

The question I am trying to help us live is this: whether all of us normal people trying to have a positive impact on the next generation can generate the positive freedom (i.e., the freedom to want to do the right thing that goes beyond freedom from external restraint—it is the freedom that only we have access to and exists no matter the external circumstances) to become the parents our kids need? Can we inspire ourselves as parents to do what is right by our kids and manifest the attitude that is necessary to guide right action?

All of the above is the reason that the key principles I am focusing on today are simple. Plus, I'm no youth fitness specialist. I'm just a dad trying to do my best. So just like last week, this post is about taking the pressure off. I'll link to some resources below where you can learn more about this topic if that feels like the right thing for you. But more is not always better—it's often worse. I don't want to crowd out your voice as a parent or caretaker because I believe that deep down, you know what is best when it comes to your kid.

Key Principles

Safety First

"First do no harm." As a physician, this principle of non-maleficence is central to my training and practice. It's a good place to start in this conversation as well because the last thing we want to do is for our kids to get hurt unnecessarily. Stacking up injuries is a recipe for difficulty in creating mind-body integration and a barrier to enjoying the rich capacity our bodies offer.

What does a safety-first mindset look like in physical activities with our kids? Mostly it means we don't instruct specific movements or exercises until kids can follow directions. This often occurs around the 5-year-old age range, but it varies from kid to kid. Before they can follow instructions, I would focus on getting your child in environments and situations where they have opportunities to solve all kinds of movement puzzles. This can look like a million different things.

One other aspect of a safety-first mindset is to not use a lot of added weight too early. There are endless bodyweight movements and exercises that will make your kids stronger. One other great thing about bodyweight and strength training with kids is that the load that is their body weight is always increasing. This means that a core concept of making gains in strength training is being taken care of for you—progressive overload. As they get bigger, the amount of weight experienced by their legs when they are lunging or skipping is increasing, and the force through their arms and chests with push-ups is growing. So don't obsess about adding weight too early. Yes, when kids can use appropriate form, have fun using some medicine balls or light dumbbells, but don't think that you aren't very much strength training just because you aren't using 45lb barbells!

When you do start to add in some weights and coach more specific movements, take that energy you might normally focus on weights or reps and put it into a focus on good technique and moving joints through their full range of motion. Start with a good warm-up that emphasizes dynamic movements. Also, rest assured that when you do start using weights, the myth about strength training stunting kids' growth or being harmful to their bones or growth plates is completely untrue. The evidence is actually very clear that strength training is good for short- and long-term bone development. Please see the resources section where I list what Andy Galpin calls the 6 'zombie' myths about kids' strength training, so-called because they seem to never die despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.

Meet Your Kid Where They Are Physically

During my pediatric anesthesia fellowship year, two common points mentioned by lecturers and textbooks that apply to this conversation are the following: 1) Kids' biological development is non-linear and individual. 2) Kids are not little adults. Let's briefly examine how each of these principles are helpful when it comes to physical training with our children.

Kids' biological development is non-linear and individual:

While this may sound a little fancy, all it means is that you get to meet your kid right where they are. Every system in a child's body is developing at its own rate and in a process of spurts, pauses, and everything in between (i.e., it's non-linear). This means that between kids of the exact same age, the degree of biologic maturity is going to differ tremendously. So view developmental milestones as guidelines instead of definitive time stamps that mark physical success or failure.

Kids often start skipping, hopping, and balancing on one foot around 3-4 years old. But if your kid starts earlier, it doesn't mean they are the most special, gifted child in the world and will go on to become an amazing athlete, and if it's the other way around and they can't stand on one foot for a second until they are 5, that's okay too. Your kid's chronologic age is only a number. Biologically, they are exactly who they are and who they are meant to be. Avoid the cultural reflex to compare kids of the same age. Long-term, this impulse leads to nothing good for the early or late developers. Instead, when you start having fun implementing some physical training with your child, meet them where they are in their process of development.

Kids are not little adults:

The cardiovascular system and metabolic profiles of kids are much different than adults. Young kids especially are not built to be endurance machines, but they can recover from high-intensity exercise way better than most adults. All that to say, avoid the temptation to overdo the length of workouts with your kids. It's great to start building aerobic capacity by making endurance sports fun, but in general, focus on quality over quantity. Spending 20-30 minutes, including a warm-up, is plenty of time for a kid to have a dedicated workout. Andy Galpin recommends low volume and high intent because the goal is not hypertrophy or fatiguing muscles. This is all about developing movement skills!

This idea that kids are not little adults leads nicely into the next of our key principles—that it's a good idea to take a kid-centric view of exercise because they are going to naturally make movement about fun and games, and it would be silly to combat this incredible, inherent perspective.

Take a Kid-Centric View

Kids see the world in such a refreshing way. Perhaps this is because they haven't absorbed so much of our cultural conditioning that leads us towards all the manifestations of striving—the hustle, the 'shoulds,' the emotions we ignore, the reactivity we develop. When it comes to using their bodies, kids have no conception of what the fitness industry and other cultural influences have instilled in us about what it means to 'workout.' They just want to have fun using their bodies. They want to play games.

So when it comes to physical training with your kids, lean into this way of seeing the world! Instead of having your kids run sprints at the end of a session, try out a game of tag. If they resist the circuit workout you came up with, don't insist on its completion. See if turning it into a team relay race through an obstacle course that requires lifting, running, and carrying inspires more excitement. If they are competitive, use this competitive nature to run races up a hill to finish things off. If they are not so competitive but love being on your team, work together on a project together. Maybe the project doesn't even seem like it is fitness-related at all, such as digging up a tree to transplant together or moving stones to build a path.

This focus on making it fun is what inspires the next couple of principles as well. What is cool is that not only will considering these factors lead to greater enjoyment, they will facilitate greater gains and a higher likelihood of you and your kid staying on the path towards enhanced movement literacy. You might also start seeing movement and physical activity as more fun yourself when you put on your kid goggles and learn to play just as much as 'workout.'

Get Involved and Model What You Preach

You might have noticed in my examples above that the adult is included in most of the scenarios I create for kids' physical training. This is intentional.  Your involvement will inspire your kids. It will help them see that you are not another preachy adult that they eventually stop hearing à la the teacher in Charlie Brown—"wah wah wah." You are their training partner and teammate. You are their leader!

Don't miss out on this opportunity for connection. While the short-term effect may be that it inspires them to workout with you, it is also an opportunity to garner some connectional capital. We ask a lot of our kids, and every time that you get on their level or show them that you are really listening or really care about them, you build connection capital. It's an investment. And believe you me, plenty of times will arrive when you have to spend this capital. So take every opportunity you have to not be preachy and avoid nagging and instead get in the game and play, get on the ground and wrestle, put down your phone and participate!

But It's Not About You

With the above being said, don't take it to the extreme and make the workout about you. Balance is paramount. You don't want to insert yourself so much that your kid doesn't have the opportunity to listen to and figure things out for themselves. I can see how I might be making some folks feel like you can't win. All I can say in response is that if you pay attention, you will know when you are starting to overdo it one way or another.

Imagine a clenched fist. Imagine the sensation of a clenched fist throughout your body. This is how it feels when your ego is overly involved and wants your kid to do something a certain way, to get better at something that matters to you, to respond to your instructions or have the attitude or approach to a problem that makes you proud. Release that fist.

My guess is that a youth fitness specialist who doesn't have kids might not mention this as a key principle. But I'm a dad, and I have a sneaky ego that really likes to rear its head in the strangest of ways. I have walked through this world much of my life as a clenched fist, fixated on control, results, and winning. But I won't do this to my kids. I don't want to pass this on because they deserve better and I don't want my ego to inhibit their ability to enjoy their own bodies and physicality.

Embrace Creativity and Variety

The ideas of creativity and variety are baked into everything above, but they are important enough that they are worth emphasizing separately. With regards to creativity, give yourself the freedom to come up with games, activities, movement challenges, and exercises that your kids will like. Not every idea is going to be a hit, but take the pressure off and experiment. Maybe your kid is not into sports. That's okay! Change up the environment and grab some clippers, a shovel, and a hand-saw and head into the woods to build a fort together. Picking up those big sticks, using tools, digging up rocks—all of this is developing movement literacy!

This speaks to the second idea, which is variety. To really be headed in the direction of movement literacy means embracing a wide range of activities. The time for a more adult, sport-specific approach to training may come one day (but who are we kidding, most of us would probably benefit from always maintaining a wider movement repertoire throughout the course of our lives), but that time is definitely not before high school.

Andy Galpin recommends that a child's training not be optimized for a specific sport until the late high school years and that no kid younger than 16 years old should play only one sport. Sure, you can start training skill development for different sports earlier than that, but the point is that the human body is meant to move in lots of different ways and the data shows that kids who play lots of sports and develop true athleticism instead of focusing on mastering one sport at a young age end up with higher movement literacy with all the associated benefits such as lower injury rates and even a better shot at becoming elite talent.

Sometimes it's helpful to me to have a jumping off point when it comes to getting the creative juices flowing. Reading through a lot of articles on this topic recently, I found it helpful to think about different categories of movement.  I think the chart below may serve as a helpful aid:

Of course, don't limit yourself to basic categories! Here are some more 'movement' words I try to keep in the back of my head that I've heard the experts talk about and that get my creativity going when it comes to variety: balance, reaction time, stability, coordination, power, speed, agility, grappling, pushing, pulling, lifting, carrying, locomotion, running, skipping, tumbling, rolling, throwing, catching, climbing, etc. Maybe one day I'll make a more formal list and perhaps an associated exercise library, but for now, my system for aiding my own creativity and variety is pretty rough. Perhaps that is better though as it allows me to come up with inspiration on the fly and not feel tied to a list.

A couple last tidbits from Dr. Andy Galpin that might help you when you are feeling a little stuck:

• Consider getting them in an environment where other kids are playing and moving
• Try out different physical environments (as we hinted at above). Consider going to a gym, playground, court, the woods or forest, water or pool, etc.
• Try out different modalities for moving i.e., bikes, skateboards, etc.
• Consider using different implements such as bats, balls, rackets, sticks, etc.
• Try out different play partners (especially yourself as mentioned above)

My Personal Experience and Some Takeaways

In our house, this idea of getting deliberate about physical training is relatively new. My wife is also very smart to temper my gung-ho-ness on any topic because she knows I'll violate the 'It's Not About You' principle. That being said, the idea of helping our kids build movement literacy and enjoy their bodies is as natural to us as the more culturally promoted idea of developing reading literacy due to our professional training and personal habits. So I have been playing around with "physical training" for our two boys from an early age.

Perhaps my first experiment in this domain was something I called "Secret Warrior Training." This involved the three of us learning how to do various rolls and basically wrestling and jumping off couches and throwing pillows at each other starting when they were two and three years old. Silly but so fun! I also had us do a little warm-up of some pogo jumps or star jumps and various other dynamic movements to start along with a cool down where we would sit together and take a couple deep breaths. Good movement, better character training. And that is exactly what I've found with physical activity and my kids—it's a chance for so many other life lessons to present themselves and conversations to occur that might not happen otherwise.

Eventually, Secret Warrior Training stopped being quite as much of a hit, so for a while we were all about wrestling and a made-up game called "Eye of the Tiger Ball." The details of the game are unimportant, but it is a full-contact game invented at the beach that can be played anywhere. I throw them around a bunch and they have to work together to put a basketball in a hoop or bucket, and I gotta say that in terms of cardio, grappling, and teamwork, it's hard to beat.

For the sake of your time, I'm just going to list a couple of the other "movement experiments" I've implemented in the first 7 years of my being a dad:

Warrior's Way - I write them a message on a dry erase board every morning that usually involves two exercises, for example "Bear walk x 20sec and Air Squats x 20." It also gives me the chance to leave sappy dad messages for special occasions or the occasional joke that lets them know I am thinking about them even though I never get to see them in the morning given the nature of my job.

Summer Surge - Last summer we incentivized getting to 20 minutes of being outside and playing some sort of game or sport every day by taking them to the theme park Carowinds at the end of the summer. I was going to take them to Carowinds anyway, but having a little sheet where they made checks seemed to get them outside more consistently. Better yet, once they were outside, they usually started playing more games outside because human beings like being outside and it's just that we have a lot of inertia to actually go out there. 'Summer Surge' was just an attempt at a creative way to overcome that inertia.

Running a 5K with my oldest son - My son seems to like running, so I asked him if he wanted me to sign us up for a race together as a way to do something memorable together one weekend. He was all-in. It got us moving for a couple weeks before making sure we could handle the distance. The coolest part about this experiment though was seeing how much he enjoyed my telling him stories while we ran. I'm not always the best storyteller, but I do have a good memory for movies. So on race day, I told him embellished and somewhat inaccurate but kid-friendly versions of the movies Alien and Speed. He ran like a little deer with his mind thinking about Ridley, aliens popping out of people's chests, and what it would be like to have to drive a city bus above 50mph at all times through a crowded city.

We've played around with movement in many less formal ways, but you get the point. Make movement a priority but take the pressure off and have fun. It's going to lead to all kinds of cool stuff. Thank you for reading, and I hope you found this helpful.

Resources

Podcast:

• Strength Training for Kids: Building Lifelong Movement Skills

The 6 'Zombie' Myths mentioned in the episode:

1. Strength training stunts growth or is otherwise harmful for kids' bones and growth plates. Completely untrue. Strength training is beneficial for bone health.
2. Strength training is only for athletes. Untrue! "If you have a body, you're an athlete."
3. You should wait until you are 12 years old to start lifting because you can't get strong before then. Untrue. As soon as your kid can follow instructions, they are ready to start strength training.
4. Strength training makes girls bulky. It is very hard for boys or girls to put on much muscle mass prior to puberty. But there are huge benefits from a motor control and neurologic standpoint.
5. Strength training impacts when girls start menstruating. Untrue. Strength training doesn't alter puberty for boys or girls.
6. Strength training requires expensive equipment and/or high-priced trainers. You can do everything we are talking about either for free or at very low cost.

Additional Resources:

• NSCA: 10 Pillars for Successful Long-Term Athletic Development
• NSCA Position Statement: Long-Term Athletic Development