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All right, let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to the show.
Thank you so much for tuning in this week and every week.
Last week we published an essay called Your Ceiling Becomes Their Starting Point A Guide to Building Healthy Family Habits.
Haven't read it yet.
I would love for you to go check it out at chasing excellence dot email.
We'll also put the link in the show notes.
The essay explores something that Ben and I have talked about on and off for years how the same principles that make you strong in the gym make your family strong at home.
How modeling beats managing, how your daily habits become your kids' baseline for what normal adult behavior looks like.
And the essay, of course, didn't come out of nowhere.
It came from a synthesis of all of these conversations that Ben and I have had over the years on this show about parenting, health and how to raise kids who can handle life's challenges with resilience.
So today I wanted to bring all of those conversations back together in one place.
So I've pulled six episodes spanning 2024 and 2025.
These are all conversations about the five factors applied to family life, about training and youth athletics, about adversity and screens and environmental designs.
It's a bit of a super cut.
So if you're a parent trying to figure out how to stay healthy while raising healthy kids, this one is for you.
And if you know other parents who might benefit from this conversation, please share it with them.
We'd really appreciate it and we'd love to bring more people just like you into the Chasing Excellence universe.
So we're gonna start with a bit of foundation setting.
We've got a talk that Ben and Heather Heather is Ben's wife Together at Comptrain New England a few years ago.
They gave a talk about how to apply the five factors of health how to eat train sleep, think and connect to their family.
They talk about how they do it, they give advice, they answer some questions from members of the gym.
There you're going to hear me a little bit in this episode just bringing up the crowd questions because we didn't have a mic on those folks.
So you'll hear me a little bit and then i'll be back after this conversation, this talk, And we'll just keep on rolling through.
Alright, let's go.
We are hosting this event on the five factors, which we'll talk to you guys about what that means, because some of you may have never heard of them before.
We'll talk to you about the five factors how it applies, how we talk about it to the kids because they have their own version of it which is very similar and how to get them on board with what we talk about here.
This whole thing started a few months ago when you wrote, when sammy wrote to me and she's like in her beautiful sammy way, like THAT SHE'S KILLING CHARLIE, HER DAUGHTER, BECAUSE SHE WON'T EAT THE THINGS THAT SHE WANTS HER TO EAT AND SHE'S NOT EXERCISING.
You got to chill, let's talk, let's go for a walk.
And then I got sick and then school vacation and just never happened.
And so people write to me a lot and ask me a lot of questions and people.
You guys talk about it in your classes and we thought it'd be cool to have you guys come together so we can share how we do it with our family and how you guys may find that helpful to, just as an overarching thing.
We, just our background, our family is a blended family.
We have two older kids with my ex-husband.
Maya's 23, she's in the workforce now, living, sharing our house and her dad's house.
So we get her half the time.
And then we have a 20-year-old who's a sophomore at UMass.
He is.
You guys may not know him if you go here, but some of you may know Maya, because she comes here a lot.
And then most of you know, Bodie is 11.
He's in middle school and Harley Love is nine and she's in elementary school.
So we literally have like four kids in four different places in the schooling system and in real world and everything.
And that's not to say that we have figured it out necessarily.
We just have gone through a lot of phases and have seen how things can come out in the end and how they continue to evolve, even when they're older.
And we have hope that the things that our younger children are doing now will not end up with them in prison.
So that's that.
And then Ben's going to kick it off just so you guys know how it's going to work out.
Ben's going to talk to you guys about the five factors and he'll give you some like background on that.
And then I will talk to you about how you may.
I have like a couple of things for each of the five factors for you to maybe take home and try to implement in your own families.
And then we'll do a Q&A and you guys can fire at us with all of your questions, okay?
Any questions to start?
Great, Ben's gonna take it.
Cool okay, so a little backdrop on what the five factors are and why they're the things that we wanna focus on.
It's really what we're doing is we're simplicity is really powerful.
We just have to understand that principle is there's a lot of power in simplicity, and complexity is the enemy of execution.
So anytime you make something more complex than it necessarily needs to be, you're going to lower the effectiveness.
Anytime you make something more simple, you're going to raise the potential power of that thing.
So, with the five factors, are simply a framework for us to be able to focus on the principles, the driving factors that influence our health.
And that's a big concept to understand.
Because what ends up happening?
If you start listening to I'm going to call it the noise, you get confused.
Because there's so much out there in terms of what is it that we should be paying attention to.
Is it about... red light therapy?
Is it about saunas?
Is it about intermittent fasting?
What the heck is keto?
And if I eat strawberries that aren't grown with the same nutrient-dense soil that our grandparents had, should I not be eating strawberries?
And it gets really loud, confusing and basically it takes away your power to act.
So your power to act comes down to five fundamental behaviors.
And I use the term behavior on purpose, because there are other things that influence your health that we should just put on the table, but you don't have control over them.
And because you don't have control over them, it doesn't make a lot of sense to worry about them.
The biggest one is genetics.
Genetics are a thing.
You inherit certain things.
That's a real thing.
But you don't have as much control over that as we think.
I'm going to flip the cards to the other side.
You actually do have more control over your genetics than you think.
There's a thing called your epigenome, epigenetics.
That's maybe if you guys are in the space, you guys have heard that a little bit.
Epigenetics is basically you've been dealt a deck of cards from your parents, your grandparents and so on that are inside of you.
But your behaviors dictate what light switch.
Basically, they've given you a fuse box, but your behaviors determine which of those fuse boxes are turning on and off.
Those behaviors that determine what of your genetics manifest are how you train or move, how you eat, how you sleep, how you think and how you connect.
And connect has a few different factors.
It's how you connect with yourself.
Do you understand your purpose, your passion, your why, how you connect with other people and you get out and experience nature?
Those are the five big, big factors.
And as you delve more and more into the research of health and longevity, there's some crazy, weird bonkers things going on.
Like this is, if we, we, our mission is to kick ass into our nineties.
That's what we're trying to do amongst other things, build a family of humble, hungry, happy people.
But we really, what we really want to do is have a bunch of people that are like like kicking it in their nineties, playing 36 holes of golf a day and still skiing and playing soccer in the backyard with the grandkids.
Like that's what I really do envision.
In order to do that well, somebody say there's a lot of what's.
There's a much brighter future on the horizon, which is if you listen to people like David Sinclair, who's the foremost expert on longevity.
There's a real likelihood that our generation lives to 120.
That's a real thing.
And there's a real chance that our kids, and certainly our kids' kids, live to 150, where 100 will be the new 60.
So people at age 100 are gonna start acting like they're at 60.
So there's a whole bunch of precision medicine and supplementations and surgeries and a lot of different Sciences that you can pull levers on to help you with that.
None of that is really available yet.
I mean, there's books and books and books upon this.
But when you peel it all back at the end, usually at the last chapter of these books, they go.
You know what?
We're not quite there yet.
So what you should do is move a lot train, make sure you take care of what you're eating eat sleep, make sure you have a positive mindset and make sure you establish really good relationships.
So they write these books 200, 300 pages, and the first 180 pages are about the science that's coming and they go and, by the way, the thing to focus on right now is this eat sleep train, think and connect.
So we've created a recipe.
We've created a prescription to really simplify that, because each one of those things has a few dozen things that we could be paying attention to, but it comes down to first principles.
Remember, simplify, simplify, simplify.
So what are those first principles?
What is the prescription?
It is train and this is for us, because I'm gonna talk about us for a second before we get to the kids.
Punchline to this whole thing.
But by the way, guys, I'm just gonna give it to you now.
If you want to influence your kids.
You guys already know the answer to this, because if you want to influence your kids, what's the best way to do that?
Model it yourself.
Like that's the whole deal.
That's We can talk about all the other things, the strategies, like what to screen time and how to deal with them wanting sweets.
And we can deal with all of, are we overbooking our kids with schedule?
We can talk about all those things, but those are going to be down here.
You modeling yourself is up here.
I can't hear what you're saying because your actions speak so loudly.
Kids will always do a great job of not listening but they can't not watch.
They're gonna see it and they're gonna model it.
It's just, it's not even human nature, it's everywhere in the animal kingdom.
This is how, offspring learn is they watch their parents do it.
How does a tiger learn to stalk and hunt?
It just watches.
That's how it happens.
So this is the punchline.
So we have to be able to take care of ourselves first.
So we have to understand this part first.
It is, the first principles are train five or six days a week.
Eat real food.
Sleep eight hours.
Be curious. not judgmental and surround yourselves with people that want to see you win.
Now the little dot, dot, dots on that last one is that's not just cheerlead.
Like you're the best.
Oh my gosh.
You know, it's not that.
They want to see you win.
People that coach you challenge you, call you on your crap.
But no gossip, no toxicity, no drama, just good vibes and growth.
So if we go through each of those principles, there's a lot that supports each of those things.
But understanding those at a really, really baseline fundamental, but like owning those things, owning those five,
Nothing else that we do for our kids is going to move the needle as much as modeling those five.
Saying it again, because this is the if you guys walk out of here with one thing, it's train five or six days a week.
We can talk about all of the subcategories, of how we define training.
Train five or six days a week, eat real food.
We can talk about the hierarchy of clean, semi-processed, processed and ultra-processed foods.
Sleep eight hours.
We can talk about the routines and the quality and the consistency of what it matters to be able to do the sleep eight hours.
Be curious, not judgmental.
We can talk about again the hierarchy of mindset, starting with a victim mindset, a pessimist, an optimist, a realist and a competitive mindset.
When you hear competitive, don't fall into the trap of what society deems as competitors.
That's not it.
They're missing it.
What we see as sore losers, we label as competitive.
That's not what competitive is.
Let me sit on that one for a second because the other ones are fairly obvious.
Train five or six days a week, just show up here.
Eat real food.
Eat fruits, vegetables, clean proteins.
Don't eat stuff that comes in a package or a bag or long shelf life.
No added sugars, no crappy oils, no refined flour.
Sleep eight hours.
Don't sleep five or six.
By the way, I'll share just one antidote with that one.
I share with my class a little bit because people gloss over that one fairly quickly.
Daylight savings just happened the day, the Monday after daylight savings.
When we lose an hour.
We just had it the Monday.
We just experienced heart attacks in countries that follow daylight savings.
Heart attacks on the following Monday go up by 24 on that singular day.
In the fall, when we gain an hour of sleep, heart attacks go down by 21% the following Monday.
Sleep matters.
That one hour difference, sleep matters.
The way we think matters hugely.
Most of the stress in our lives is not real.
It's manufactured.
And I'm not saying that's anyone's fault.
It's built into your DNA for survival mechanisms based on we're tribal beings.
So when we hear that the tribe is talking behind our backs, gossip.
Someone says something bad on social media.
You hear that your kid is being bullied.
Your boss says we got to talk on Monday.
Any of those things that where am I in social hierarchy?
That is based on the tribe doesn't like me, they're gonna kick me out of the tribe.
If that happens, way back then, that's a life or death situation.
If you don't have the tribe to protect you, you go out into the wilderness, you get exposed and you die.
That's not modern day society.
So when the boss says we need to talk first thing Monday morning, we feel like that's a life or death situation.
When your kid comes home saying I was bullied on the bus, we feel like that's a life or death situation.
The stress that we have is not real.
If we understand how to frame it through these different mindsets, it changes the ballgame.
The victim mindset goes Everything out is somebody else's is happening because of something else, somewhere else.
It's because of the politics.
It's about the economy.
It's about the other people.
It's about the competitors.
We feel like we don't have any control over it.
It's all just happening to us.
That's the victim.
The pessimist goes, this just sucks because this political party is there.
It sucks that we're in a pandemic.
It sucks that It's running and rowing today.
It sucks that dot, dot, dot.
The optimist goes, the future is brighter than the past.
Don't worry about it.
It'll work out.
And they actually don't take the necessary action to make change because everything's going to work out fine.
It's okay.
I will say that Most of the world tries to aspire to be an optimist.
To us, that's just not hurting.
That's just the middle.
What we wanna do is get above that and be a realist.
That's what we can all like, not, everything is sunshine and rainbows.
And part of being a human being has challenges.
And what we want to do is recognize that challenges are going to be here.
And when they show up, we don't get overwhelmed.
If we can stay centered, that's how you move from point A to point B the best.
It's so much nicer just to walk down the hallway than it is to smash in one wall.
Smash into the other wall.
That's being knocked off-centered.
And us not being able to deal with challenges is what knocks us off-center.
The realist has the opportunity to do that.
The competitor is not little Johnny after the little league game that loses and throws a tantrum.
That is not the competitive mindset.
That is not a competitor.
That is a sore loser.
The competitor is the one that wants to be challenged.
When they go up against a team that's an easy win, they go, that's not what I want.
I don't want the wins, I want the growth. and the growth happens when I'm challenged.
They want a worthy opponent because the worthy opponent brings out the best in themselves.
If we could all, ourselves, run households, with that realist or competitive mindset.
So when your kids come home with challenges, we go, yeah, this is part of being a parent.
This is the deal that I know I'm gonna have to deal with these situations.
Or even better, when your kids come home and there's a challenge, you go.
Yes, this is my chance to work on me being a parent.
This has the chance to rework on my character.
This has me chance to work on building a better family.
That's we seek those moments out.
So it's, I think, a great example of this and we're gonna get to the kid part in a second is you get on a flight.
And let's say we're flying to LA, so it's a six hour flight.
And you're all excited to either take a nap or bring out your laptop and do some work or read a book.
And you're going by yourself.
And there's two empty seats next to you.
And they're about to shut the doors.
And then the last person that gets on is a young mom with an infant.
And that they sit down right next to you.
And right when they sit down, the infant starts wailing and screaming.
What's going through your mind?
So much what?
That's awesome.
So empathy means that you're basically either an optimist or a realist.
That's basically what it means.
If it goes, and if it goes, this is what happens. of course this baby sits next to me.
Like, of course, like, damn it.
Like all pessimist, victim, whatever it is.
Like, we're trying to like, like, oh, like I want you to work.
I want it.
You have no control over that whatsoever.
So when those things, when something like that happens, it was like it's okay, the baby's gonna stop crying when we take off.
Like, that's the optimist.
People have been there.
The baby doesn't stop crying when you take off.
So, or is it babies?
I fly and there's a chance that a baby's gonna sit next to me and there's a chance that baby's gonna cry and that's a realist.
If it's something like, ooh, This is a chance for me to work on my patience.
This is a chance for me to work on my centeredness.
This is a chance for me to, we're getting into the competitive thing.
Yeah, we're getting there.
Or empathy, right?
I feel so bad for the, like, if you feel bad, you know how bad the mom feels.
Now, what we start to realize is that these opportunities are everywhere.
When you get in your car, you're excited to listen to a podcast and your phone's not connecting right.
What goes through your mind? course my phone doesn't work, right?
Or is it, this sucks.
I really want to listen to this.
Or is it, it's okay.
This is going to give me a, my phone will start working magic.
Like what?
Just start being aware of those things.
The thinking one wants to spend a little bit of time on that.
Because I actually believe if we're going to model something, that's the one we need to model.
And the next one is equally as important, which is the relationship thing.
I think the best thing that we can do as parents leading kids is do you?
Are you your spouse's biggest fan?
So don't look for it the other way.
The saying is surround yourselves with people that want to see you win.
It's not trying to seek out those people.
It's to be that person for the other person that you are leading.
You're the leadership team.
If you want your organization to model some behaviors, the leadership team needs to represent that.
So if You, if we can be the biggest fan and want nothing more than our spouse to succeed, that's the model.
And when they're not there and I know Heather does this for me.
I know how much because I've I've overheard it, how much she brags about me to our kids.
That is such a cool, amazing thing.
Like when you're bragging about your spouse when they're not there.
That's the jam.
That's the deal.
So the five factors are how we eat, sorry, how we train, eat, sleep, think, and connect.
And the framework leads into the prescription of Train five or six days a week.
Eat real food.
Sleep eight hours.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Optimists, pessimists, and victims are judgmental.
This is good.
This is bad.
Realist just accepts it for what it is. and surround yourselves with people who wanna see you win.
In this situation, be that person.
So I'm gonna pass it off to Heather and she'll kind of like frame this in the way that we frame it for the kids and then give you some opportunities, some examples of the way that we try to do this.
And just as a footnote, it's not, these aren't the, this isn't the big takeaway.
It's not.
We're just trying to give some concrete examples, knowing that we don't do this even close to perfect, probably not even excellent.
We're just being aware.
We're just trying to be aware.
But we want to have you guys walk away with some tangible things that we're trying to bring to life.
I came up with two things for basically two things for each of the five factors.
But I also came up with two general, like overarching themes that should be playing in the back of your head.
And Ben talked about one of them is leading by example.
And I don't need to go into that anymore. but so that's number one.
Number two and you kind of just actually just said it right now is The idea of just creating awareness.
Like that is really when I talk to a lot of your kids that come to our classes now and, for those of you who don't know, I run the kids program.
So I keep saying that.
And some of you don't even know what I'm talking about.
But so I run the kids program.
But one of the things I say to them all the time is like, it's just about creating awareness.
Like yesterday, we talked about eating and we looked at nutrition labels and I was like these are the three things that you really need to make sense of.
There's a lot of information on there, just look at these three.
But I was like guys and they were like well, I was like okay, we're not, it doesn't have to be like you said, like it doesn't have to be binary.
It doesn't have to be, this is good.
This is bad.
Like don't ever eat added sugar.
Don't like always eat real food.
It's like, it's never really like that.
And the more that you guys, as parents, can just take the pressure off yourself and, like your kids don't have to eat perfectly all the time and they don't have to know every single piece of information, the more that you like we say in here all the time is like, the more you drip drip, drip stuff, the more you're just creating awareness.
And that, at this stage, is really are like what is going to move the needle the most is just like the fact that they even know that there's nutrition labels on food that they're eating and that the fact that they know that there's something called added sugar versus sugar, that alone, like it doesn't even matter what you're eating.
Because one kid was like well, I know that we're only supposed to be eating 25 grams of added sugar a day.
So if I sometimes I get mixed up with the math and like dude, you need to chill, like Marcos, you have to calm down because you don't have to do the math, like just you knowing that you're like you ate something and that You're eating a piece of bread, and your awareness that they put six grams of added sugar into that bread.
Nobody knows that.
Our adults in our gym don't even know that. they add sugar to bread, you know?
So I think as you guys take the pressure off yourself of like, you know, am I killing my daughter?
It's like, no, you're not killing your daughter.
And just the fact that your daughter sees you come here and that you come home and you have conversations with her about stuff that we're talking in classes is like is 700 light years ahead of like where you would have been if you weren't doing that, know.
So, having said that, the kids prescription is very similar to the adults same five factors.
We do say we say eat train sleep, think and connect and we say eat real food for them.
Training they're not working out at the intensity you guys are.
They're not on like you know, barbell cycling programs and stuff.
So we're just like exercise every day.
Like they should be moving every day.
And the way I say it to them is like you should never get to the end of a day and feel like I can't remember if I got off the couch today, or like if I didn't take my pajamas off, like they should be doing something.
And that doesn't mean that they have to come to CrossFit New England kids classes and they don't have to go to three hours of gymnastics.
It's just, did you jump on a trampoline for a while with some friends?
Did you go for a walk with your dog?
Did you shoot hoops with your mom?
Like anything, as long as every day they're doing something, that's what we ask of them.
Sleeping for them is more like we average it out between, because it is very different from an infant to a teenager, but we average it out to say, 10.
We just, again, we simplify it and we just say, you guys should sleep 10 hours a day. or a night.
And then thinking we do the be curious, not judgmental.
And then our way of saying the connect one is just surround yourself with people that make you a better version of yourself.
And that, because if you bring the winning thing in, they're like, we need to beat that kid.
Then it's like, just...
Just you need to be a better version of yourself.
So that's that.
So, in terms of the things that you guys can take away, the training piece of it was, like I said, exercise every day.
And for us, a lot of times, I mean, we we bring our kids and we work out in here off hour.
So like we do a lot of that stuff, but really our fall back is kind of like to what happened in COVID, when everyone was like walking all the time.
And we just hung on to it.
Like we just even last night at 830.
Our older kids, Maya and Joan, are like at 830.
They're like can we go for a walk?
Can we just like go walk around the block?
And it's just a time when like, we're out in nature.
We're connecting with nature.
We're connecting with each other.
We're talking about stuff that we wouldn't talk about if we were at home, because people are on cell phones and I'm washing dishes, like whatever's happening.
But you're in this like, place where you're not having to exercise.
You're just like moving and you're sharing stuff with each other.
And it doesn't have to always have like some monumental, like educational takeaway factor.
It's just like, you're just talking.
So that's our, our train one, our eat one.
We have several, eat ones but, and we go through cycles of all of these, but the one that is the most constant for us is the idea that if it's not like if you control your environment right,
If you make sure that you don't go out and at the grocery store you're like oh, I should get chips for next weekend or I should have ice cream, because sometimes we like to have ice cream after.
If it's in the house, it's gonna be a fight over like well, if I eat my dinner, can I have ice cream?
And it's like, no, well you didn't eat, you didn't eat all of your dinner.
And it's just like this constant, like, if I do this, can I do this?
If you just don't have it, like it's not, it doesn't even come up.
But we eat, it's not like we don't eat ice cream.
Like it's just, if we want to eat ice cream, we all walk down to the Park Street.
Ice cream is where we go to, but like we go somewhere and it's like an outing.
It's an adventure and it creates a memory.
And so we do do it.
We just don't do it on a nightly basis where it's like well, we're just getting through dinner so that we can get to our ice cream.
The one thing we did we talked about the other day is that I do the idea of mindless eating.
For adults is kind of like you don't want to be mindlessly eating, but for kids, sometimes you can take advantage of them like that.
Like if they're just like not vegetable eaters like one of ours is just not.
He doesn't really like eating a lot of vegetables.
He's got one thing.
It's like cucumbers.
That's it.
And he's like, trying to live off cucumbers.
So when he's in the back seat and we're going skiing and it's four and a half hour drive and he's on an iPad, I just like don't eat.
He doesn't even realize.
I'm just like passing back like grape tomatoes and I'm passing back like carrot.
And he's just like, like, he's just like mindlessly eating.
So it doesn't hurt to take advantage of them like that.
Like when they have play dates, just leave out a bunch of like cut up fruit and vegetables and just like that's what they're eating.
Not like The temptation as a parent, and I get it, is to like get their favorites.
Like you want the kids that they're hosting be like.
Oh, I love coming to your house to eat chips and cookies.
And it's like, just put out, they don't even need to eat anything really.
You know, it's not about that.
So that's the eating thing.
Sleeping.
This is one that We have been in a really good place with sleeping lately for our family, but it's taken probably like six or seven years and different iterations of schedules and like all of it, to come to where we are right now.
And the way we figured it out is We actually start with what time do we need to leave the house in the morning?
And so if Bodhi leaves at seven o'clock in the morning, it's like okay, he needs about 45 minutes to get ready.
So he needs to wake up then at about 6.15.
So then if he's getting up at 6.15, how many hours of sleep does he need?
So we take that out of it and he needs to be in bed asleep by 8.15 or closing his eyes at 8.15.
If at 815 he needs to be in bed, lights out, that means that at 730 we need to start our bedtime process.
And if that needs to start at 730, then we need to start eating dinner at 630 at the latest, because there's also the cleanup time.
Somewhere between 6 and 6.30, dinner has to start.
And that's how we figure out our schedule.
So you kind of got to look further ahead down the road and then backtrack from there.
I get it.
Like our kids, like he doesn't even get home tonight until like 8.45.
So it's not always going to work out that way, but the rest of the family can keep the schedule going and he just kind of slides in at 845 and we do our best with that.
But that has worked, like leaving extra time and not forgetting like, okay, if we eat dinner at say it's like seven o'clock, then it's not like magically at 8.15, he's just gonna be able to like, he's gonna go upstairs, brush his teeth and go to bed.
Like we get, we know that it takes a long time, you know, for all of that stuff to happen.
So that's how we do the sleeping thing.
And then the other piece of it is just consistency, including the weekends, which is like, oh seriously, like Friday night, can't I just like like hand out pizza and like turn on a movie and go to bed at 10 o'clock?
It's like, it doesn't really work like that.
Yeah, it does.
It's just like you guys know you also have like sports stuff the next day and like getting everybody out of the house, for that is like creating stress.
And it's just like, just stick to your schedule every night.
So if we go to bed at eight 15 on Friday nights, we go to bed at eight 15, and he's not good at that either.
So I help him with that.
But he likes to on Friday, like it just takes two of you guys to like make sure stuff happens on a regular basis.
All right.
Then think is we kind of talked about a lot of the phases of the, you know, being like a competitor.
Is that what you called it?
Right.
And then like realist, optimist, all that.
The idea and this is one thing that I am not great at is, in the moment, in the heat of the moment, when Bodhi's being a victim, I'm like you're being a victim.
And that's when the whole thing just goes to hell.
So the idea is to have these conversations when everyone's in a good mood, when you're in the car and you're just like, what should we talk about?
It's relaxing, it's calm.
Not like he says something, he's like, why did you have to do this, ma'am?
I'm like I didn't do it, victim.
Like that's not when things get better.
Like when you say to somebody calm down.
Like never in the history of calm down did anyone ever calm down, right.
So try to take advantage of those times when you're sitting in the car and you're picking them up from school or you're going on these like crazy carpool rides.
It's like have conversations about what it means to be a victim mentality and pull in things like our favorite was Bruce Almighty, this old school Jim Carrey movie, but he is literally textbook victim.
Everything is like, oh, why was that puddle right there?
Oh, why did it start raining on my birthday?
When you see it like that, it's funny.
It's like hey, let's watch this movie and let's use that for content down the road on how to talk about what these different phases are when we're not in the heat of it.
And then finally the oh and the other thing about that.
I was actually just talking to Maya on the phone.
I was like, so what should we talk about with like the thing thing?
And she's like, what about Festivus?
And I'm like, oh, Festivus.
Do you guys remember Festivus with Seinfeld?
So if you are... too young.
Some of you are younger than us.
And Festivus was just this holiday that in Seinfeld they did a couple of days before Christmas.
It was the airing of your grievances.
And so you'd sit down at the table and you put an aluminum pole in the middle and you'd be like, go.
And so everyone just start like firing off, like well, you know, like you wake up so early and you start like banging pots around, and then somebody like you just kind of like so in a In a slightly more civilized way, we do this version of Festivus at our house and everyone I'm like, all right, Festivus is tonight.
And everyone like, okay, we're gonna do it.
So you just know going into it, like you're gonna go under fire.
But it's also.
It kind of lightens it a little bit like funny and you're like all right Bodhi, it's your turn.
And everyone just knows like, okay, he's going to pick me.
He's going to say something to me, but it's okay.
Cause, like everyone has things with each other, but the more that like we talk about them, the less it turns into this like why does dad come home late?
Like, why does he do that?
He's supposed to be home at six o'clock.
And so we talk about it.
And so the more that you talk about stuff, the more you can get into the mindset of like you're being curious, not judgmental.
It's like, dad just doesn't care.
He works as late as he wants to.
It's like, well, dad, like, why do you come home later on? like certain nights and then others.
And it's like, well, it's because, you know, this meeting happened or whatever, you know?
And so like, we talk about things a lot in our family and that is super helpful.
And it makes their for less room of like, assuming that people are just not caring about each other.
And then finally connect.
Connect is the one where we're trying to like work on our relationships, as well as connecting with nature and everything.
But like the relationship part is like when kids come to our house, like, screens go off.
Like it is not when we, the DeLanders are old friends of ours.
And when their kids finally come to our house, it's like, they all bring their iPads.
It's like Nope, we didn't spend six months not seeing each other so that we could sit next to each other and play video games.
Like go out on the trampoline, go like run around, go play in someone's bedroom.
But, um, So play dates are for playing, not for, playing on screens.
And then our screen thing is just it's.
We don't, we're not allowed to use screens during the week unless there's a game or something where we're all sitting in the same room watching, like the Celtics or the Patriots or something.
But like well, they would yeah, if it was a weekday, but but in terms of screens, like on on watches or iPads or computers, like they're just not allowed to use a screen during the week.
And that's never changed.
And so it's again.
It's not this constant, like well, what time can I go on and how long can I be on it?
And it's just.
They don't even ask anymore because they're not allowed to watch TV or use screens at all.
All right, we've got some questions from the crowd for Heather and Ben.
Let's get into it.
Yeah.
So we, our kids are, well, the older kids are on phones, but the younger kids do not have phones.
They have Apple watches and they're pretty good.
Like one of them is really good.
And the other one is like on it a little bit more because he's in middle school.
And like, for example, I don't think I've ever had to take his iPhone watch away, except yesterday was the first day.
We were driving home and I said like, Bodhi, we're not supposed to be on screens right now.
It's a weekday.
And he's like, okay.
And then like, I looked back and he was still on the screen.
So I took it away from him. but we just haven't gotten to that part yet with cell phones yet.
But I do remember when Jonah was younger and he was just, he was like not sleeping at night and we were like what's going on?
And in the doctor's office and his little interview with him he was like so what time do you go to sleep?
He's like I think like two or three, and i'm like, what are you doing until two or three at night?
And he's like, i'm just like on my phone.
I'm like, oh my god, so we at that point started to take his phone.
When he went to bed, we would just take his phone and put it in our bedroom, like literally right next to my nightstand, or else it would disappear in the middle of the night.
Next question we've got is one about how to deal with your kid getting upset and angry and being overly competitive in games or sports.
It's not going to be any one conversation.
It's not going to be any one tool or tactic.
And it's not going to happen if the conversations you're having are during war time.
I think this is what too many like coaches, this is parents are coaches.
Too many coaches choose to have the conversations in the heat of the battle.
And we're not going to get through in the heat of the battle.
Think of a military leader.
If you're doing it when everyone's firing shots and you're being attacked, you lay ground rules during peacetime.
And that's when you have it.
When it happens again, you kind of let it happen and diffuse and then you talk about it again afterwards because the point is not to change the behavior.
This is what to me, we're trying to change behavior.
So sore loser, kids after the... literally game all distraught after the Uno game, all distraught.
And you're like, it's about your effort.
It's not about whether you win or you lose.
They're not going to hear it because they're so emotional emotions.
I'll get to the, uh, Oh, should I give a quick little parable?
This is one of my faults is I can't give short answers.
There's two parts of your brain.
There's the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is the logical part of the brain.
That's where during peacetime, You can talk to the prefrontal cortex, especially with Ari.
She's super smart, right?
And you can make these rational conversations.
Once the amygdala comes in, which is our lizard brain, animalistic brain, it overrides everything.
The analogy is there's a rider on an elephant.
And if the elephant's calm, the rider can steer it.
Once the elephant gets spooked, the rider is all on for a ride.
And the rider is the prefrontal cortex and the elephant is the amygdala.
So if you're trying to have these conversations when the elephant is being all emotional scared distraught, feels that you can't do it.
So we're not. trying to change the behavior.
You're trying to do, as Heather said, the drip drip drip, build awareness awareness awareness, awareness.
And over time, we so underestimate We so overestimate what we can do in a year.
You're not going to change Ari in a year, but we so drastically underestimate what we can do in a decade.
So the goal is when Ari is 13, 14 and 15, is she still acting like that, not changing when she's three to four?
And all of a sudden you get this like I can just do this in the slow method and I don't need to overreact when she overreacts.
So it's a slow drip, not this like, you're doing it again.
Next question we've got is about nutrition, specifically about how to have the conversation about nutrition with your teenage daughter.
I mean I'll take this because I did have an eating disorder for a long time, probably from when I was like around 15 until I was like 24 or something.
It was like a long time and it, for me, got better.
I tried to get actual help for it, but that never worked for me.
What actually helped for me was when I started doing CrossFit honestly, because it started to.
You know, we talked about kind of the way we're talking about now and I started to understand it as like it's fuel for you know, like it's not.
This like emotional thing.
It's just like it's calories that your body's using because I loved exercising.
And and for me, that made a lot of sense there.
And this is how why I talk to the kids like this is like there's no good or bad.
We don't need to judge anything.
There is a place for everything.
But there is also a place for balance.
And so that when you can find balance in life and we say that a lot then that's where a lot of good stuff can happen.
And And that also then wraps back to just creating awareness.
We don't need to add up.
Marcos doesn't need to add up the numbers and how much added sugar he's had by 11 o'clock in the morning.
He just needs to be aware like oh yeah, I had candy at lunch, so maybe I shouldn't have ice cream later on.
That's all.
It's like, cool.
Like you can have candy.
Just don't. do it all day, you know?
And I weighed and measured food for oh my God, I don't even know probably like seven years, eight years, like every blueberry I put in my mouth.
Like I would take blueberries out of my dish because it wasn't fitting into my macros like, and I, I don't do that anymore.
And I just think about like I do in my head I'm like, Oh yeah, I had tortilla chips at lunch after like lunch.
And so I'm just not going to eat, you know, like whatever at night.
So it's just it, And I look basically the same as I did when I was weighing everything, but I'm much less stressed out now.
So I think that I don't know if I'm answering your question, but hopefully I don't also think that it's great to avoid conversations about things.
I think that modeling things like we said is really good.
And you just, you make the meals that you want, you make that you feel good about and like, and you just do your thing.
Eventually like Maya and Jonah were not great eaters.
And now they're in a good you know, and it wasn't 10 years of me bashing my head against their plate.
It was just like, we just kept doing our thing and we're still doing our thing.
And they love the food that we're eating now, but it takes a while.
So it kind of all wraps into the creating awareness and role modeling and not avoiding conversations, because then it becomes taboo.
And then when they do want to talk about something, like, well, mom doesn't talk about this.
So let's just keep this quiet, you know?
And so I I think just I mean that part you just have to read your kid and like figure out like what they're comfortable talking about and how to talk about stuff with them.
But it is tricky.
Yeah.
Girl stuff is tricky like that.
Cause you don't want to.
And even if something had happened with them, even if they did have a, it's not your fault.
You're like, I don't want to give them an eating disorder.
You're not going to give them an eating disorder.
But, you know.
It's not contagious.
It's not contagious.
I think that the key points which I just want to double down on are the drip drip, drip creating awareness, modeling.
And the other one that Heather started her whole conversation off with with the food thing was environment.
So in your house you have a method, you have a way that you think and execute the food nutrition thing.
And.
That's what you wanna have control over.
And outside of your house, you don't have that much.
And I wouldn't try to like.
I think that's where it gets.
Sketchy is like well, what did you have at Jill's house?
When you're over at Jill's?
That's where it gets to this level of I'm trying to control the whole thing where we're going to cook a good, healthy dinner.
I'm going to make sure you have a good, healthy breakfast.
And I'm going to send you off to school with a good, healthy lunch.
And Outside of that, I'm going to let go of it a little bit.
And when you're at the birthday party you have the cake.
When you're at your friend's house or you go out to dinner with the friends and you get the chicken nuggets and the French fries.
All of that is okay and I'm not going to question any of it.
It's just have the conversations, but don't... Obsess over them.
Don't obsess over them.
Another small thing that we've done is we try to tie things back for the kids.
Like everyone here that's eaten clean for a while, when you don't eat clean, you feel like crap.
Like that's a real thing.
So if you eat clean and you come off a nutrition challenge and all of a sudden you go and you have the nachos and the chicken fingers and the fries and the heavy stuff, you feel crappy.
When our kids feel crappy after eating crappy food, we tie that to them, so they start to associate.
I feel good when I do this and I don't feel because otherwise they don't connect those dots.
That is something that we, We being us, take for granted, but even normal adults don't draw those parallels.
Like I ate crappy last night.
I drank a little bit, woke up feeling a little foggy and that that's not a connection most people have.
So helping them create those connections can be helpful.
Next question from the group is about how to help your kid deal with and respond to mean kids, kids who are not treating them as they want to be treated.
Two parts to it.
The first one is surround yourselves with people that make you better.
Those people are not making her better.
So instead of trying to go in there and force function, something like it's all about creating the right environment.
That's not the right environment.
So yes, everyone should be able to play on the playground completely, but we can choose.
They have more power over who they're surrounding themselves with than not.
And saying like, it's powerful to understand who you should be spending the time with.
More importantly is the second piece of this, which is when something like that happens.
Where we tend to go is be curious, not judgmental, is we don't?
We don't know what those kids are dealing with?
Like they probably don't have the same loving, supportive family that you are used to, where you're welcoming to everybody.
And they probably have some other things going on or not.
And we don't know, but let's.
It's more about being the curious of like instead of like.
They're wrong for not let.
Kids are just parts of their environments.
And if kids are being mean, it's like, it's not because of you, Ari.
It's because they don't have the same, they weren't brought up with the same values that we have.
So it's kind of Using everything as an opportunity to double down on what your values are I think is really valuable.
I think another way that this surfaces in our house a lot is you know, it's the whole like Bodhi will do something to Harley that gets her really upset.
Then, like a day or two later she'll do the same thing or something similar to him, and not realize that she's doing the same thing.
You know, and this happens constantly back and forth, all the time.
And so it's just a lot of reminding them of, like you know, remember what it felt like when Bodhi wouldn't let you like have a piece of his candy or something.
And now.
Like, remember how that made you feel?
Like you were so mad.
You were like, oh, he's so selfish.
So remember, and now he's asking for a piece of your mango.
And you're not sharing.
So you don't have to.
And I say it all the time.
Like.
You don't have to, it's yours, but just remember how that is probably making him feel and know that the next time that you want something of his, he may do the same thing again, you know.
So it's just a lot of like those conversations again, like not in the moment, but like in this situation, cause they'll forget it.
Like sometimes like just shortly afterwards, but just connecting again things and reminding them that
You know, and it's like a lot of the stuff guys, that we deal with our kids like we're all dealing with as adults also, you know.
So then, like when I want to go on a girl's vacation, and I got like upset that he was like leaving for a long weekend to go skiing with his buddies or something it's like.
Well, now it's my turn.
I'm like, oh, can I do this?
And like, and you're not gonna get mad, right?
But it's like, but you got mad at me last time, you know?
So it's just like always remembering and remembering to give people the grace and the patience that they may have offered you or that you wish they had offered you.
Last question we've got from the group is all about boundaries helping you and your kids set them, manage them and maintain them.
I think that rewarding good examples of that is helpful.
Like we had a situation in kids class recently where like these two girls are very good friends.
We had like a three person team activity and they wouldn't let this one other girl in.
And I was like, well, you have a spot.
And they're like, well, We're doing this by ourselves.
So I was like okay, and I wasn't gonna force it, because then when you force it It's like this awkward, like they don't want her there.
She's like making her way in like in a pushy way So I was like, all right.
Well, let's just go and we'll find somebody else and then I
Later on I did this shout it's like we do these shout out things and I was like I just wanna like reward this person this for like letting this other girl into her group and last minute
And it was so nice because they weren't friends and everyone was like, that's really nice.
And all of a sudden it was like the cool thing to do was to like like, let other people in your group you know
And um, And then another similar but not so similar situation was like we had a time last week where Bodhi and Harley disappeared upstairs and we didn't hear their voices for like 12 minutes and I was like
I don't know what's going on up there, but I'm pretty sure a screen is involved and it's weekday.
So they're not supposed to be on it.
So we were like, they come downstairs and we're like, all right.
So Bodie, what were you guys doing up there?
He's like, Oh, nothing.
And I'm like, well, what were you doing for the last 15 minutes?
He's like, Oh, I was just reading.
I'm like, Okay.
And I'm like, what were you reading about?
He's like, Oh, um, you know, he was on this thing.
So finally Harley stand there.
She goes, Oh no, we were on Bodie's computer.
And we were like, thank you, Harley.
Like and we rewarded almost not rewarded her because they were not supposed to be on him, but we also didn't get her in trouble and we didn't get that.
No one got in trouble, but it was just like, thank you for being honest.
And it's this trust that you're building with them that, like you know, like we just don't want you to lie.
And you can trust that when we say that like, we're not going to get you in trouble because you were honest with us.
And it's just like I think the reward like bringing out, like pointing out the things that people are doing well helps to like pull things in the right direction sometimes, you know.
Okay.
To put a bow tie on it?
Yeah.
Leading by example.
Controlling the environment, setting it up the way that you want it to operate, is by far and away the most important thing.
We know that there are five driving behaviors that create health.
It's how you train, eat, sleep, think, and connect.
You guys have the first principles for each of those.
Train five or six days a week.
Yourselves, eat real food, control the environment, just don't have it in the house.
Honestly, to me, that's the biggest, biggest thing.
We just don't have to have the... You just don't have to have the conversations if it's not there.
Sleep eight hours.
Remember the way Heather did that is it doesn't just...
For kids, it's 10, which is crazy, but that's actually what they need.
The research shows that.
And that's from lights out to lights on, assuming that they're falling asleep.
And you have to backtrack.
And you have to backtrack all the way.
You start with what time do they need to leave in the morning and you backtrack to what time do they need to go to bed, to what time do we have to have dinner, and so on all the way through the being curious, not judgmental with the levels of mindset.
Make sure that we are not modeling victims, pessimists or even optimists, but realists and competitors.
And then finally, the way we connect and the way we model.
That is, by being your spouse's biggest fan and hoping and wanting them to see them win.
If we model it, all the other things that we kind of laid out as tools and tactics are so subservient to the big big thing of the role modeling thing.
And just for, like the making sure it's like.
Underlined, maybe highlighted, is we are not, we're doing this like we're just trying to do this with a level of awareness.
We're not doing this right or at a super high level.
We're just trying to do this with awareness.
And I really think that that is the thing to understand.
In order to have what we want a fulfilled life.
It really comes down to awareness of what do I believe a fulfilled life looks like.
Then intention, what is the structure, the systems?
What are the goals of that?
And then action, put them into action.
And the action.
Nothing happens without action, but you have to have the awareness first of what the whole thing looks like.
So if you walk out of here with the idea that it's about how I eat sleep train think, connect myself, modeling it with the first principles in place, we're gonna be, you know five six, seven steps down that path.
And that's all we're trying to do because they'll be in tow.
All right, so that is the foundation, the five factors.
Model it yourself, control the environment, be the person you want your kids to see.
In the essay, we talk about how your ceiling becomes their starting point.
It's actually the title.
Whatever you model as normal, becomes your child's baseline expectations for how adults behave.
And that conversation with Ben and Heather is where a lot of that thinking came from.
But knowing the framework, that's one thing.
Actually implementing it is of course another.
After the break, Ben breaks down seven specific training strategies.
Things like praising effort over talent, following through on your promises and being vulnerable without complaining.
It's going to be after the break.
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That's 4-0.
So the first one is one that I think is actually really interesting, and probably not many people sort of abide by it, which is spouse first, not the kids.
Yeah.
I can imagine that is almost controversial, but so I'm really curious what that means.
It was when I first heard it.
It was constantly, I didn't buy into it.
I always thought it was like, kids are everything.
They are your everything.
You run in front of traffic for them.
You do whatever you can.
And you and your spouse are a team to try to help them on this journey through life.
And it's actually was brought up to me first by a friend of mine who's really religious.
And he says that he told me that the Bible actually says the opposite way.
The Bible says, love your spouse first, your kids second.
I'm butchering.
It's definitely, I'm paraphrasing at best, right?
I'm paraphrasing what he paraphrased and I didn't read it.
But essentially it says that it's about your wife or it's about your spouse.
And here's the reason why.
And after I talked to my wife about this and after I've lived with it for a little bit, it is so true.
And the examples are everywhere.
We see it now.
The idea behind it is if you Love each other.
If you have such a strong relationship, if you guys are so invested in each other's happiness, your kids are just gonna be a byproduct of that.
Now the reverse of that is, You're trying to work so hard to make sure your kids like that.
Your spouse takes a second seat.
And now there's at worst resentment or there's a scorecard of who stayed up last night and who's doing the dishes and all that stuff.
If that happens, like.
No matter what you try to do to invest in the kids, your kids see right through that.
We see it all the time with some of the friends that we know through schools.
They're not happily married at all.
But the saying is that they're staying together for the kids.
Yeah.
Well, that's not for the kids.
Like they're not, they're not doing anybody a favor.
They're just trying to like, they're not investing in their own relationships.
So the saying is spouse first, then kids.
And the reason is if you love love, love and you show how much you love and you are invested in your marriage, your kids are just going to be a byproduct of that.
And the opposite is not true.
If you invest and do everything you can with your kids, it doesn't mean your relationships can be better.
If your relationship isn't better, your kids aren't better.
Right.
Cool.
Okay.
Second one, this one is not a surprise from you, but praise effort and character and not talent.
But specifically, and we've talked about that- With athletes and coaches and employees.
What does that look like with a totally different, much deeper relationship with a kid?
And it should be said, you've, your experience now parenting has been from, you know, Maya's 18.
I have an 18 year old, a 14 year old, a six year old and a four year old.
So I'm really curious how you've navigated that sort of that wide gamut of.
You know that that principle with Bodhi is a lot different now than it is with Maya.
Yeah, so this stems from, I always mix these two up.
It's either Angela Duckworth and grit, Or Carol Dweck and Mindset.
Yeah.
So it's all about having this growth mindset.
And they both reference or at least one of them references this really famous study where they took elementary school kids and had them take a test.
And When the kids got the test back, they got one of two notes written on the top of it.
It either said, nice job on this, you're really smart.
An equal number of kids got tests back that said, nice job on this, you worked really hard.
They had kids retake another test that was two or three grade levels above their education.
And the kids that got their feedback that said, you're really smart, did terrible on the test.
They gave up because they couldn't push through and struggle and face that saying was like I'm smart, this is hard.
I can't answer this.
What's the deal?
I'm out.
Whereas the kids that got the response that said, you worked really hard.
They gridded and they grinded through it and they pushed through it and they did phenomenal on the test.
Substantially, like astronomically better than the so-called smart kids.
And the theory behind that is the saying behind that is it's not about intrinsic traits or qualities talents,
It's not what you've been gifted with.
It's about the behaviors and what you put into it.
It's about the work ethic.
So if you reward the effort, not the results, you're going to get a much better long-term effect.
Now, how does that manifest itself?
What does that look like in parenting?
Kid comes home and says, I got, you know, I got an A minus on my test and say, nice job.
You aced it.
You say, Good job.
You worked really hard on that.
And similarly, if a kid is struggling, it's, well, you're not that good.
I mean, you're not that good at this.
It's, well, this is how we work hard.
The bottom line is don't ever say you are good.
Good at this.
If you say you are good at this, they believe everything is inherently Born into and they can't grow and develop.
Humans are adaptable, changeable learning machines.
That's why we are the dominant species on this planet, that and opposable thumbs.
But the biggest thing is how adaptable we are and how much we can learn.
If you're putting in a fixed mindset into your kids, you are doing them a major disservice.
I grew up with a fixed mindset in a lot of different areas and it's domain specific.
Meaning like I grew up with a fixed mindset in terms of school.
I thought that I was not smart.
I couldn't read very well.
I didn't do well in school at all.
So I thought that I wasn't smart.
And similarly in sports.
If I picked up a sport and did, well, wow, you're really good at skiing.
You're really good at water sports, windsurfing, whatever it is.
Oh, you're not as good at baseball or whatever it is.
As opposed to...
Wow, you're working really hard at baseball.
Good job.
Wow, you worked really hard.
You put a lot of practice into your skiing.
Changes the game drastically for people.
Is it, have you found it to be a challenge since most of the world seems to want to ascribe talent?
Or do you feel like you're battling, you know, the kids come home and you've got to sort of rewire?
No, I don't think so.
I kind of believe that my kids are in a bubble that I have ultimate influence over.
You know, that is like something that I...
I intrinsically take the ownership of, I am here to mold my kids.
This is a great story.
Harley, my youngest, a four-year-old, Harley wanted something.
She wanted to play with a Barbie doll or play with a My Little Pony.
And she's like, I want My Little Pony.
I want My Little Pony.
And we're like, Harley, what do you say?
Looking for her to say, obviously, please.
Harley, what do you say?
And she just threw out a saying.
She goes, suffer in silence.
Bodhi got hurt on the trampoline once.
And Bodhi... but buddy, it's okay.
It's okay.
Like buddy, it's okay.
What do you say?
Like when, when something hurts and he, he goes.
It's when I was in, like the Jocko stuff, he gets hurt.
And he goes, he's laying there.
He's like, good.
The brainwashing.
Yes.
Love it.
But if you take ownership of that, it's the same deal.
You have control.
Don't default to the teachers.
Don't default to their peer group.
Don't default to the media or society to raise your kids.
It's up to you.
It's as simple as saying a few things repetitively.
It takes seven times before they hear it.
So after the seventh or eighth time, you're not being a broken record.
That's when they're hearing it for the first time.
And they're sponges.
And if they don't feel like they're hearing it, They're hearing it.
But repetitive behaviors pay off big.
Repetitive sayings pay off big.
So consistency.
Yes.
This one we, I think we've talked about a little bit, but no junk in the house.
I assume we mean food.
Yeah.
People ask me all the time, what should I have my kids eat?
It's the same thing as adults should eat.
There's no reason to have a kid's menu at a restaurant.
They should eat the same thing we do.
Since I've heard you say that, I pay more attention to the children's menu.
It's like mac and cheese and hot dogs are... whatever mac and cheese chicken fingers pizza french fries hot dogs it's and then you go to the kids aisle and it's like crap crap crap with like fun colors and cartoons you know gogurts and cereals and it's just junk so Can you control what your kids eat 24 hours a day?
Absolutely not.
They're going to go to a birthday party.
There's going to be things at school.
But does that mean that you should like, default at home too?
That sounds ridiculous to me.
If they're going to eat at school, then we should have the Cheez-Its and the Doritos at home.
It's the exact opposite to me.
Other parents are like, well, aren't you afraid that they're going to binge it?
Well, yeah, actually, you're probably right.
We should probably have some Marlboro Lights at home too as well.
Because somebody will offer them a cigarette.
So we don't do, and there's no junk in our house.
So someone will be like, you know, I want ice cream.
It's like, okay, go for it.
If you can find it.
Go get it.
I want a cookie.
Okay.
There is no fights.
They don't ask for it.
It's literally, we never have a dessert and they never ask for it.
It's never, ever asked for in our house.
Now they might ask for, what we do have is tortilla chips.
Yep.
We do have a perfect food bar, something like that.
And they'll ask for things like that.
Okay, if those are the treats.
Yeah, if those are the treats, a handful of sweet potato chips, like we're doing okay.
Yeah, one of the things that I remember you saying is when you guys are out and maybe they do have a cake or ice cream or something, and then they sort of inevitably don't feel well, you sort of reinforce here's why you don't feel well.
And next time they are presented with that, maybe they remember that.
Oh yeah, the last time I had a huge piece of cake I did not feel so well.
It's just neuro association, right?
You associate, it's great if you can do this, like you're saying brainwashing type thing.
But if we let our kids, if we go out and we're within other families and they're having pizza, we let our kids have pizza. after the first or second slice, we say, we don't say don't have one.
We're like, do you really want another one?
I want you to get a bellyache.
And then they associate like too much pizza with bellyache.
And that's just like by itself.
You can have another piece, go for it.
But I just don't want you to get a bellyache.
So you're just putting those things together.
Yep.
And it's the same thing.
Like we go out and like we go out to, we were at a baby shower for one of our friends.
And obviously there's tons of junk there.
There was cookies and cakes and brownies or anything like that.
And our youngest Harley had a cookie.
And after the cookie, she's like, I want cake.
I was like, Harley, baby, you already had a cookie.
I don't want you to get a bellyache.
She said, no, I won't get a bellyache.
I said, all right, let's have a bite of it then.
We don't have a belly.
I'm on your side.
I'm doing this because I don't want you to get sick.
They do.
If they eat too much and if they do eat too much, what a great opportunity to reinforce.
This doesn't make you feel good.
Next one, follow through.
So this is like what I learned from Heather so incredibly well.
She's awesome at it.
The follow through thing is the same thing.
With any relationship you have, everything is built off of trust, right?
And the best way to create trust is to follow through, which means I do what I say and I say what I do.
To.
Heather's thing is like if there's ever a threat, if there's ever this looming punishment, if you don't do this, I'm going to.
Take away your blanket.
You're not going to go to your friend's house.
We're not going to go watch a movie.
We're not going to, whatever it is.
It's like a lot of parenting is just threatening.
It's like, it's crazy.
But that's like when you realize like you have to incentivize the right behaviors and Because you're trying to grow someone to become a civilized person in this society.
And a lot of it comes down to the appropriate bargaining chips.
So if Harley and Bodhi are not sharing, they're yelling and they're screaming.
If you don't share the My Little Ponies, there's going to be no TV on Saturday morning.
And if they don't do it, we fall through.
And there's no TV on Saturday morning.
And I assume you remind them on Saturday morning why.
Yeah.
Or that's probably not a good analogy, because it's well, let's say, let's say, it is Saturday morning.
Let's say it is Saturday morning.
They're crying and they're doing this.
It's, you know, it's, if you do that, guys, I'm turning the TV off.
And if they do it one little bit at all.
Because they're going to test.
That's what kids do, especially toddlers.
They test.
They're trying to figure out the boundaries.
And this is what causes bad behavior is parents say if you do that, I'm going to turn the TV off, and the kids inevitably, I guarantee they're gonna test.
They're gonna do it a little bit.
Let's say that they're literally like one person's got the neck and the other person's got the tail of the Milo pony and they're screaming.
And you say, you take it and you put it into one kid's hands and you say, this is Harley.
She got it for her birthday.
Bodie, you can't play with it.
If you do, I'm going to turn off the TV.
I promise you he's going to reach and he's going to touch it.
He's going to poke it just because I find the boundaries.
If you let that slide.
You can't be trusted because your word is gone.
If you turn the TV off right, then it's going to be an exponentially worse situation in the short run.
It's going to be harder at that 10 minutes.
There's going to be more emotions flaring up.
But in the long run, they believe what you say.
And now I know that there is a hard line.
It's black or white.
Dad and mom are not gray.
And if we test, it's going to go.
And it's.
And I slide sometimes.
I slide.
And I go into the gray area a lot.
And I'm staring at him.
He'll touch it.
I'm like, Bodhi, why would you?
I just said that.
What are you doing, buddy?
I don't want to punish you.
I want you to watch TV.
I want you to be able to do this.
It's so hard to do it.
But if you slide, and you slide, and you slide, but then and you realize I gotta get back to the hard line.
And once you get back to the hard line, it's amazing what happens in such a short period of time.
The thing that I think is really interesting, that is you, as the parent, have to be willing to say I'm going to enforce that, even though it's going to make the next half hour of my life way harder than before.
Here's the other thing is you don't want to, it's better to.
I can't think of the other word but threaten.
What's the word?
I don't know.
I mean, it's promised to a larger degree.
Yeah.
So it's better to make the promise in things that are not going to be intrinsically beneficial to them.
Experiences are really good for kids.
So it's better not to take away experiences.
So don't say you're not going to the birthday party.
Don't make threats you're not going to follow through on.
Don't say we're not going to the Cape this summer.
You're going to go to the Cape this summer.
So if he does it and you...
So do it on things that you can follow through with and say you're not going to get your applesauce.
You're not going to, I'm going to take away your blanket.
I'm going to, you're not going to watch TV, whatever it is, but don't say.
You can't play with your friends.
You can't go to the birthday party.
You can't go on the ski trip.
Like those things you're not going to fall through on anyway.
So don't make those threats and don't take away experiences.
Take away.
What Heather's great at is Bodhi.
We were just down the Cape and she got him this hundred piece of army set.
So whenever he does something bad, she's like, I'm taking one of your guys.
So now he has an army of 94.
And this was, she got him this two days ago.
And he's like, no.
But she goes home and she, in front of him, takes it.
And he's like, crap, man.
She's losing force.
Yes.
All right.
Next one is be open and vulnerable, but never complain.
This is the same type of thing as whether you're in management or you're a coach or any leadership position.
Vulnerability creates greater levels of trust.
Yep.
It also opens the people up underneath you to behave in really positive ways, because they're not afraid to expose weaknesses, which we all have, or expose truths or expose Areas of question.
So if you put yourself up on the pedestal and you're the all knowing, all being, you know utilitarian, God-like figure like you're unrelatable.
But if you are a parent and when you make mistakes, you should tell them like, that's my bad.
I'm sorry, I didn't.
I didn't realize whether it's like walking around and you step on your kid's toe and like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.
Like obviously that's an easy one.
So I didn't mean to, but if it's so easy to like not be vulnerable, to try to be bulletproof, but if you are open, honest and vulnerable, you will encourage really strong behaviors.
And this goes right through like corporate management or coaching an athletic team or whatever it is.
Be a human being and show them how human you are.
But because you're being vulnerable, because you're being open, because you're being honest, doesn't give you a license to complain, particularly about other people.
Never complain about other people in front of your kids.
Never complain about, especially other family members, your wife or your spouse.
Never complain about the teachers at school.
Never complain about the other kids who are their friends, because that's going to lead down a road that they then become this type of thing where
They are going to mirror your actions and they're going to look at everything.
Imagine the opposite.
Imagine if they never heard a bad word, you speak a bad word about anyone ever.
As opposed to you just having a conversation with your wife when you're driving the car and you're complaining about your kids' teachers in front of them.
Now, how are your kids going to act with your teachers then when they go back?
Because they're like...
Mom and dad said teacher doesn't know what they're doing, that they're not paying attention, that they are X Y, Z.
If you never make those comments, you don't open up that Pandora's box.
Sympathize.
I somehow stumbled into this by mistake.
And then I came across some research later on that supported it.
So toddlers, like two-year-olds are crazy to deal with.
You have a one and a half year old, right?
It's coming.
And they talk about the terrible twos.
I think the threes might be even like crazier.
You can't rationalize.
There's no rationalization.
So I got to this point where my toddler would be like, you know, whatever.
Like I'm using my little pony all the time.
How am I little?
I want my little pony.
And we took it away for some reason.
Instead of being like Harley, we took away your My Little Pony because you were fighting with Bodhi.
Do you remember doing that?
I want My Little Pony.
Harley, if you just listen to me, babe, you're going to get it back if you just stop crying.
If you stop crying, I will give you My Little Pony.
I want My Little Pony.
You cannot rationalize.
Instead, you sympathize.
And I came across this research which it's like the rational brain versus the lizard brain and the subconscious mind.
And the best book I've come across in this is a book called Never Split the Difference, written by a hostage FBI negotiator who's turned it into business negotiations.
And in business negotiation, we were told always humans are rational.
We are rational beings and we've tried to find the win-win scenario.
No, we are not rational.
And you win-win is probably win-lose.
It's irrational.
Instead, what you want to do is sympathize and just tell the person you understand where they're coming from.
And once a person feels like you understand them, then they will listen.
So I came across this like by mistake with Harley.
She's like, I want my little pony.
Instead of being like, if you stop crying, I'll give it to you.
It was, I want my little pony.
I was like, you want my little pony?
Yes, I want my little pony.
I know, Harley, you want my little pony.
I do.
You want my little pony, don't you?
You want my little pony back?
Uh-huh.
Okay, I know you want my little pony. and she's off playing with Barbie.
If you just go down that road of just literally telling them I understand you and the way they talk about this in the business negotiation is you repeat back, it's called mirroring.
You say things back to them and then you label emotions.
You actually tell them what they're feeling.
It seems like, you don't feel like my business can fall through on our promises.
It seems like you have some questions about our pricing.
It seems like you've experienced this type of situation before.
And when people are like, Yes, I have.
You understand me.
It seems like you're a man of great faith.
Yes, I am.
All of a sudden, now we're on level footing ground.
That stuff is a way.
This person understands me.
I don't even care what the deal is.
I feel like you're going to put my best interest in first.
It feels similar to something we've talked about before, which is sincere listening or active listening.
Very, very similar.
It's a lot of the same stuff.
So from body language to Even in tactful conflict resolution, your degree is very similar to that.
But that labeling, that sympathetic listening, like repeating back to people, telling them what they want, especially for toddlers who
You cannot, will not ever be able to rationalize with a toddler.
There's no logic.
So instead, repeat back their emotion to them.
You're upset because Have you had any experience with the older kids in a version of that?
That's a little necessarily probably needs to be a little more nuanced.
Yeah.
It's just not as exaggerated.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
So they're not crying about my little pony there.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, we're lucky enough that our, our, our, 18 and 14 year olds are studs.
Like not normal people.
They're like, Maya's working as my, assistant coach this year.
And she's one of the best coaches I've ever had on my staff at 18 years old.
Jonah is my 14 year old.
I have literally in 14 years, never seen him upset like crazy weird stuff besides being a toddler.
Yep.
Being a toddler, every toddler gets upset.
Next one is no quitting.
Okay.
So this is again, the grit, perseverance, fortitude, all that stuff.
But it also has to do with creating a passion.
And people are like, I just want my kids... I believe this.
If you can get your kids to be really good at one thing, there's so much benefit to that because there's so much self-confidence.
And then, if they're good at one thing, they learn what hard work looks like and how.
What age are you thinking is when you, As they're getting in through high school is where I believe.
But as young kids, it's important for them to try a bunch of things.
Because...
You might not like gymnastics and you might not like jujitsu, and you might not like ballet and you might not like swimming.
You might not like soccer.
But if you let people just start and stop, you're creating a quit mentality which, like once, anything gets hard.
I just am going to stop.
And what we is like, you can stop anything you want to do. but you got to see it through the season.
You committed to this.
You can't stop until the season's over.
If you signed up for T-ball, you're going to every T-ball practice.
I know you don't want to go today.
You made a commitment.
This is what we're going to do.
At the end of the season, if you don't want to do it, go for it.
There's a great... I'm forgetting her name.
This is bad.
But she's the most decorated US gymnast ever.
It's not Mary Lou Bratton.
It's much more... It's not Simone Biles.
It's... I can't remember her name.
Nadia something.
Anyway, she would come home from gymnastics practice and her dad was her coach and she would come back and she'd be like i just hate gymnastics, i hate it, i'm never going back.
Her mom would say you don't have to go back, you don't have to go back, you don't ever have to do gymnastics again, as long as you go back tomorrow.
And then she would go back and say it's always tomorrow.
And it was always smart.
You can quit as long as you go back tomorrow.
It's that kind of mentality.
And, like all of a sudden, you don't allow your kids to quit in the middle of something.
You create some skills and they start to get better at it.
And those skills can develop into a passion.
If it's a passion, it's something they can do and where they can blend.
And here's kind of the idea behind this is I feel like I've been lucky enough to create this blend where I have really good opportunities.
I have some skillset and some talents from the years of pounding on the craft.
And it's a passionate thing I love in terms of what I do.
If you create that for your kid, where they are in a Job that they go and go into in their early, late mid twenties, whatever it is, or even in their early thirties, they can find that where they can blend the line between work and play.
To me, that's like the ultimate success in life.
If work feels like play and you are psyched for Monday morning and you are like Friday and Thursday and Saturday, all feel the same like that's a great life.
Yep.
The way you do that is by getting ridiculously good at something that you can make a living doing.
Now, whether that's painting or violin or it's computer programming or it's soccer, whatever it is, get your kids to be really good at something, because I think there's so much value that goes into that work ethic and the confidence and what it means to have a passion.
Yeah.
And so when you when you see something resembling a passion in a younger kid, maybe early teens.
Do you talk to them about, let's try to focus on this thing that you seem really passionate about?
Or how open and honest about that process and the value of that process are you?
Or is it like you know?
You and Heather say you know he seems to be really, you know, into photography and let's make sure we keep giving him opportunities to do that.
Or is it both?
Or neither.
Yeah.
I mean, it's honestly, it's yes.
I think it's all those things.
Yeah.
It's probably something that, with our oldest Maya, we didn't have to do because she found it and she was so like from age eight she was the stud athlete, right.
She was the best on her, every team she did, she was the best.
So we didn't have to do that.
With Jonah, I think we kind of thought that that was gonna happen as well.
We knew it wasn't gonna be sports, but we thought it would happen with something else.
One of the reasons I'm kind of big into this right now is no quit is because we didn't do it with him.
And he started something, he stopped, he started something.
And once he got fairly good, and he's really talented.
Once he got fairly good at CrossFit, he stopped.
Once he got fairly good at Magic, he stopped.
Once he got fairly good at Piano, he stopped.
Once he got fairly good at writing music, he stopped.
We didn't allow him- That's the story of my life for a long time.
Yeah.
So we didn't push, we didn't pursue, we didn't look for the next opportunity, and now he's going into high school.
And now I think that's time to push into one thing that he's shown some interest in it.
Cause no one's, I don't say most of us are not born with a passion.
We find it.
And if you don't find it, you develop it.
And it's a matter of doubling down on your strengths.
We talk a lot in this about exposing weaknesses and working on your weaknesses, because it's inherent to what we do for our athletes.
In terms of being exceptional at something, it's about doubling down on your strengths.
And that's, I think is really important for kids.
Those seven strategies are things you can start using today.
That's why I love them.
But one domain where parents have a lot of questions is youth athletics and training.
How do you introduce weights?
What should kids focus on at different ages?
How do you balance sports with general fitness?
So after the break we're answering six questions about kids and training kind of practical stuff you can apply if you've got young athletes in your house.
It's gonna be after the break.
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We have listener questions, but listener questions focused on a particular area.
So we're going to focus on our move bucket or our train bucket.
And inside of that we've got a bunch of questions six, specifically six questions from parents about helping their kids with fitness slash sports, slash training.
This first one is from Tom.
He says my 11 year old son is starting his first year in the Swiss ski talent program.
Next season slalom and G5 or GS.
I think that's maybe GS.
It's GS.
Okay, cool.
Over the past two years, he's progressed from the top 20 to the top 10 and now to the podium, by working hard and learning from failures.
We've noticed that many ski families with generations of athletes engage in a lot of quote unquote, extra training.
However, we want our kids to participate in a variety of sports to avoid over-specialization.
Both our kids, 11 and eight, with ice hockey and ski mountaineering in winter and athletics and cycling in summer.
If we could add just one more activity per week to improve movement patterns and strength, what do you think it would be?
We don't have access to a CrossFit gym nearby.
So there's the question is one activity to add per week to improve movement, patterns, and strength.
What do you think it should be?
Yeah.
Plyometrics. jumping, bounding, explosive work.
It's at really, when you think of athleticism, most people refer to what is at its core plyometric.
It's speed, quickness, agility, power.
That's what plyometrics are.
For a ski racer.
The transferability would be incredible, because it's that really kind of sweet spot of being able to move your body quickly but powerfully.
And for a slalom racer, the quickness matters.
For a GS…
Racer, it's the combination of both.
And he's young.
He'll end up doing Super G and other stuff, which is more the strength side.
But for sure plyometrics.
What I mean by plyometrics is just different forms of bounding and jumping.
There's a lot of good...
Instagram handles that speak to this as sports coaches, but you could also just do it on your own and it's very low rep.
So under 10 for sure, but most plyometrics are done in like the one to three rep range.
So a quick little easy example of this would be, the simplest is a box jump, right?
Jump up on a box, you're trying to jump on higher and higher boxes.
One of the ones that I really like is a couple of lateral hops over a hurdle.
If you don't have a hurdle, get a broomstick and just have them jump over a broomstick.
You prop the broomstick off of a bench or a chair and have them jump over that.
And then one big forward bound.
So you go like over, over.
So right, left. left, jump forward.
And the more explosive an athlete is, essentially the better the athlete is, all else being equal.
It's an incredible tool and you can use it at any age.
They're kind of relatively crazy safe to do, as long as you don't over train them.
And as long as you stay in that one to really think like four five, six rep range, that's kind of the real sweet spot for plyometric work.
All right, cool.
That was from Tom.
Next question is from Matthias or Matthias.
He says, I've told him that you need to work harder to be picked.
No, it was the right choice.
I know that there's this big thing of like, try to get your kid on the best possible team.
If they're not traveling.
You know multiple states on every weekend to be able to compete against the highest levels of competition.
Then you're not one of the cool kids.
Could not disagree with that more.
You know, from Malcolm Gladwell to a whole bunch of different studies, it showed it's much, much more beneficial to be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse.
For everything from...
Not only self-esteem of like actually getting some time and actually being a feel like a valued member.
We're, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Like we want to have a sense of belonging.
And there's this hierarchy to we're hierarchical beings, and kids know where they stand on the totem pole of every team.
And it does not feel good to be somebody that is not contributing or not valued.
And that's a, That's just a surefire way for me to like burn out or something else.
You know, there's these kids that we talk about with our other parents that their kids will travel.
And it sounds like it's Matthias' kid.
Matthias' kid was one of these and credit to him.
There's these kids that will travel you know we're in Boston travel to Canada and Minnesota and all over the place for these hockey teams.
And they ride the bench.
And they're not getting any playing time.
They're not getting any games.
They practice with these great kids, but most of them are just being jam-packed with travel and games.
That's what the majority of these teams are now, because it's become a business and it's like we got to get the kids playing in these tournaments and winning.
And that's what the coach is rewarding for.
That is not, it's one of the big detriments of youth athletics, in my opinion, in America right now.
This doesn't happen in other countries.
In other countries, they value practice time and development.
Here, we value game time and winning.
Those are the exact polar opposites.
Instead of getting lots of touches in practice and learning how to play the game better, in games, they do the opposite.
They do lots and lots of games, not practice.
And if you're not winning The sidelines of these 10-year-old games and the parents freaking out when the team scores a goal and like being crushed when the other team scores a goal.
It's like, why does that matter at all?
Other than...
You've put a premium on winning, which has been disseminated to your kids and you don't want to have that really bad car ride home because your kid is going to be a mess.
This is Matthias' spot on.
It's so much more beneficial to be a big fish in a small pond, not only for self-esteem, not only for sense of belonging, but also your kid is going to get more touches.
If we're here for development, they're going to become better.
They just need touches and touches and touches.
It's one of the things that when you go and watch a soccer practice like I, would measure a soccer practice at that age certainly under the age of 10 just by how many times are they touching a soccer ball.
Like game theory strategy placing, spacing.
You know all these things that coaches put so much emphasis on.
They're going to learn how to play the game.
They're going to figure out how to play the game.
What they will not figure out is how to become better soccer players.
It's actually the exact opposite.
And this makes sense.
There's an incredible European soccer league coach who's like He's one of the best soccer coaches in the world.
He's like, my job is not to make better soccer players.
My job is to get them to work together as a team.
Well, it's the opposite at the youth age.
At the youth age, the goal is to develop soccer players, not to get people to win.
Like that's not what it's about.
So this is a really long answer to saying I completely agree with Matthias's standpoint that he should be pulling his kid out of that team and out of that league.
Yeah, I agree with you.
And I'll just say my oldest is seven and I can't even fathom him playing soccer basketball whatever, and being such a priority on winning that my kid wouldn't play.
To me, that seems so insane.
And I think for me again with a seven-year-old.
My priority for him playing is Are you enjoying it?
Not because life is all about enjoying things, but because if he ever does actually want to get good at soccer or basketball or whatever the sport is, it's only gonna come on the back of like he just he has fun with it.
He has fun with it, so he does more of it.
So he practices in the backyard.
So he looks forward to the next game.
So he looks forward to the next season.
And if I kill that At seven or eight, if I kill the fun because he's not winning or he's not playing enough or he's not developing at a certain speed, that other, that some sort of arbitrary measurement?
Well, when he's 10 and 11 and 12, he's just like he's going to look at it like I don't do, I want to do that anymore.
Nothing I've done so far has been particularly fun.
So am I really going to invest my energy or my effort into getting a little bit better at soccer or a little bit better at basketball?
And I just got to think, No, he's probably not going to.
Yeah, it's a measure what matters thing, right?
Like what you measure gets improved.
If the team and the organization, the coach, value winning above all else.
Yeah, you're not going to play the underdeveloped kid.
Like you're not going to.
But if it's about the development of the team, about the development of each individual, development of their character and their skills well, it's a totally different ballgame.
And the problem is that youth sports is a business now.
That's completely the difference.
So how do you measure what is a good successful organization?
What's the one that wins states and regionals and nationals?
Like that's how you do it.
And the team that wins the most is the best organization.
Unfortunately, that's not the case, because that's a transactional coaching experience where we need transformational coaches.
And transformational coaches are not going to, are going to be out of a job, if that's the metric for success.
Yep.
All right.
Thanks, Matthias, for the question.
Next one we've got is from Johans.
He says, my 10 year old son is a dedicated soccer player with the school year ending.
We will be on a five week summer trip to Europe.
I want to use this holiday as a quote unquote preseason training period to help him get stronger and better prepared for more physical matches.
He is on the lighter side for his age, with some peers being 10 to 15 kilos heavier.
How should I approach this preseason training?
Again, I think he said five weeks.
Yeah.
Okay, so...
Five-week summer training program.
They're going like, they say on vacation?
Is that what they're doing?
Yeah, five-week summer trip to Europe.
Awesome.
Okay.
And he's way undersized.
That's 12 to 30 pounds lighter than everybody else.
How can we use these five weeks to kind of bulk him up?
Get him ready for the physicality.
You can't.
And you shouldn't.
The goal is not going to be to get him beefier in those five weeks.
People develop at different speeds and different – so – what you can do is help him create a little bit of strength.
But the size thing at that age size is not going to Now.
Just to say, if you were talking about 18 and 19 year olds, we can talk about how to create more size.
Different.
But pre-puberty, you can't control size with training.
You're not going to do it.
So instead, what you want to do is get him stronger, which it sounds like I'm saying the same thing.
It's not.
Strength and size. are very well correlated, but they're not the same, particularly at that age.
So this is my son.
My son is undersized, Bodie.
He's a 12 year old soccer player.
And a lot of the kids on the team, you know, have 5, 10, 15, 20 pounds on him.
But he is one of the stronger kids.
And certainly pound for pound, he's probably the strongest kid on the team.
So you can get the kids stronger.
It's by doing really simple.
All you need to do is really simple body weight stuff.
It's by doing, you know, we already answered plyometrics.
That's going to get more explosive.
But it's crazy.
Like in soccer, go watch a higher level match.
How much upper body strength?
This is something I didn't appreciate until I started watching more soccer.
How much upper body strength is required in soccer?
It's like basketball in terms of the body positioning, the grabbing, the pushing.
It's a lot more physical than people give it credit for.
So you doing simple like pull up, push up, sit up, squat.
You just keep... doing that stuff.
If you want to give very light weights to him because you can travel with that.
You can travel with a couple pair of, you know, a pair of 10 pound dumbbells.
Awesome.
If you're going to do that, my suggestion would be do thrusters.
Do sets of thrusters.
Meaning hold the dumbbells in a hammer grip.
Meaning your palms are facing each other at your shoulders.
So one head, the dumbbells on the shoulders.
The other head is straight ahead of you and your palms are facing each other.
It's a front rack dumbbell position.
Squat down to full depth, stand and press them overhead.
Do sets of 10.
Three sets of 10, you're going to get so much stronger.
Now, here's the thing I would actually suggest that they work on these five weeks. is speed.
Strength is going to come over time.
Size is going to come over time.
It's not the biggest differentiator, particularly at this age.
Even with the kids 10 to 15 kilos heavier than they are, you're still not going to out-muscle those kids.
Make it so they can't catch them.
And the best way to do that is short duration training. moderate hill sprints.
So find a moderate hill, meaning not like a mountain, but something he can use his normal running mechanics on.
So it looks like he's normally running, not like he's running like he's running up a mountain.
A good example would be like running upstairs.
If you're running upstairs, it doesn't look like you're running.
But a little incline and do short sprints up an incline.
Something that lasts probably between three to...
Three to eight seconds.
They'll call it four to eight.
These are numbers.
Yeah, real short.
Four to eight seconds.
Just blast and burst.
Blast and burst.
That would be the number one thing I'd focus on with him.
And the second thing would be conditioning.
So you could build up some really speeds.
You're going to beat people to the ball.
That's the thing.
You're going to beat them to the ball so you don't have to play the game of the size.
Beat them to the ball and then conditioning so you can do that throughout the whole game.
Conditioning is a really simple program.
Four to eight second sprints.
Four to eight reps.
Lots of rest in between.
So this is full, full efforts.
Everything you have.
And then after that, just stretch it out a little bit and do like gassers.
And you're a soccer player, so you know what the gassers You run to the 18 and back half midfield and back.
And you do like... four to six of those with about 30 seconds rest in between.
All right.
We've got three more questions.
This one is from Ricky.
He says, my 10-year-old son is very active in sports like soccer and flag football.
A lot of soccer today.
I heard in one episode that Bodie was doing deadlifts, the aforementioned Bodie.
At what age should I start introducing weights to my son?
I'm active in CrossFit and played college football.
Sure, I don't introduce weights too early.
You can't introduce them too early.
They're already lifting.
They pick up their backpack, they help you pick up their groceries.
They're already lifting.
Now It's just what we kind of conflate with lifting, which is lifting heavy loads.
You can and should – it's the same question as like when should I start my kid skiing?
It's like you can –
You just want to, you can start them young.
It's normal anatomical, functional, daily movements that we do all the time.
So we want to get them to hone those really strong movement patterns.
So the first answer to that is now, or even younger, And the thing we want to do is to get them to learn how to do the movements, not try to get as strong as possible.
I think that.
You know, the Chinese weightlifting team does such a great job of this.
They put so much emphasis on technique at a young age that essentially when the athletes become late teens 17 18, 19 they technique is they don't have to do much technique work.
At that point it's strength because they move so well.
Think about a swimmer if you honed in the technique incredibly well when the the kid was four to 12 years old.
You know, those eight years, it was just like technique, technique, technique.
It's not how fast they get down the pool.
It's about can they swim with incredible proficiency and technique.
Well, then from 12 to 17, you just build fitness.
And it's just like, let's just go and hammer that.
And that's very much the mentality I take towards weightlifting is kids should not be lifting heavy.
They don't need to be lifting heavy and they certainly shouldn't be lifting heavy and fast.
So they should be controlled.
It should look really, really good.
And only I stole this from Coach B, Coach Bergner, who's sent his kids and other bunch of other people to the Olympics.
I think I went and visited his house with you.
You were there one time.
Yeah.
Years ago.
Yes, we did.
That was fun.
The idea was when he was working with his kids in Olympic lifting was like you're not allowed to add weight unless you're.
That rep before looked perfect.
If that rep looked perfect.
Meaning Coach B, who sends people to the Olympics he knows Olympic lifting says I don't know what else I would fix on that.
Then, yeah, add five pounds on each side.
But then until that rep looks perfect, we're not going to add weight.
So it's that.
We're taking those types of jumps.
To me, that is a very methodical approach to weightlifting.
So you start them off with a broomstick.
And you teach your kids how to deadlift with a broomstick and how to bench press with a broomstick and how to front and back squat with a broomstick.
And if the technique looks perfect to the point where you, in your coaching ability, you can't figure out a way to make it look better?
Well, then now it's time to increase intensity.
But before that, it's still the technique game.
We have to play the technique game.
So technique and intensity are at odds.
And we want to make sure that it's a technique game as long as it possibly can be.
So that's when I would introduce it and then not allow people to lift heavier.
And that's what we've done with Bodie and our kids program as well as we try to just keep it.
That looked really, really good next week at five pounds.
And nope, that didn't quite look like it.
We're going to stay there, but it's not like we're taking 30 pound jumps and it gets horrific.
You're taking what was horrific. really, really dialed.
And then we added five pounds.
There's a little deviation.
Let's hang out here.
This is a good threshold for us.
We're building this huge foundation underneath us so that when they become older, then they can start to make gains a lot faster.
Next question is from Eric.
My 11-year-old daughter recently attended her first CrossFit class and enjoyed it.
The class is for teens aged 14 to 17, so everyone is older than her.
What precautions should I take to protect her from injury given her young age and developing body?
For instance, should she avoid heavy weights or any specific exercises?
I know you both have kids in CrossFit, so how would you handle this?
Yeah, there's like a twofold question to this.
For somebody that's beginning, period, I would avoid certain movements.
By what you mean, adults or kids?
Yes, thank you for clarifying.
For anyone starting.
And that is like the full complexity of the olympic lifts when they're done to their full.
Now hang power clean.
We could teach a 14 year old to 17 year old or, i'm sorry, that's what the class was, did he?
Did eric say how old his daughter was?
She's 11, 11 class.
You're right, class is 14 to 17, but she's 11.
Yeah, if the class is doing squat snatches, squat cleans, split jerks, stuff like that again, that would be okay with a PVC pipe or a broomstick, because there's no intensity.
It's just we're having kids jump around a little bit.
There's no, to me, there's no concern for that.
It's when we start loading and, similar to an adult, it's when we start loading those movement patterns.
And those are fairly complex.
So a new athlete, adult or kid we could start to go with PVC pipe front squat, back squat deadlift, hang power, clean hang power squat.
I feel really good about that.
And then, depending on the road, we might be able to get that athlete up to working with an empty barbell.
I don't know if an 11-year-old needs to go past that.
And when I mean empty barbell for an 11-year-old, I mean a 15-pound training bar.
From there the other thing we'd want to do in terms of like Is there anything that they should be staying away from?
Yes, it's any high level loading at speed.
The way we structure our kids program, and when I say kids, I mean middle school and below.
Elementary and middle school.
Post-puberty teens is different.
It's a different ballgame.
But we don't have them race with weights.
Meaning, if there's a Metcon, the Metcon is body weight or running or machines.
So...
Our Metcons consist of things like box jumps burpees biking running, things that they can go quickly with.
Towards the end of the season, we get them to do things like goblet squats.
And that's about as far as we go with it is we'll have them hold one dumbbell and squat there.
But it's a little more controlled than just kind of like what we do with the adult classes.
Got it.
Last question we've got.
I don't have a name for it, but here it is.
I work with individual clients.
I'm about to take on a teenage client.
She's 14 and wants to take CrossFit more seriously.
I've worked with her in a class setting for a few months and strength is her biggest area of improvement or for improvement.
How should she lift at her age and what percentages?
And what percentage of her training should be strength-based versus conditioning running rowing Metcons, et cetera.
Yeah.
For a 14-year-old, the majority of their training should be strength.
Strength takes years, measured in years. decades.
If you want to get strong, it takes 10 years to get strong.
If you want to get fit, it takes months and in a year or two, you could be pretty darn fit.
So at age 14, we want to start strength.
Without going into percentages, it's easier to lay it out.
They should be strength training three times a week at age 14.
Very much like Mark Ripto's starting strength methodology focus on the slow lifts, squat dead and press.
And they can be doing all three of those lifts three days a week.
It's very different for athletes at that age.
It's very different than a that's considered a beginner athlete, very different than intermediate athletes, advanced or certainly an elite athlete.
We would not have them squatting three times a week.
The way that you want to progress as athlete is a little bit the way we've already talked about.
Let's talk about it in a little bit different terminology, which is you can have them lift TTF, which is one of our principles in CompTrain, which is two technical failure.
It's the again the Bergner methodology, which is they can lift, but the moment there is a deviation in technique they stop.
They don't fight through a rep.
They don't go for another one and try to make it look better.
Once the form breaks down, the bar goes to the ground.
Assuming we're doing something like a front squat or a deadlift.
If we're doing a bench press, obviously it goes to the rack.
But this would be the methodology, would be someone that has the focus of teenage years should be built on strength.
They're going to get plenty of their conditioning through other endeavors like playing sports.
This is the thing that they want to do.
And we can always do a quick peak for conditioning, meaning We're going to do eight months of strength building and then the little six to 10 week little ramp up before their season if they want to do that thing.
And we can also just do a lot more strength focused and do a quick little Metcon.
And what I mean?
I really mean that quick little Metcon of three to 10 minutes at the end of the conditioning pieces.
As long as we are doing that and not exceeding technical proficiency, we are working within the constraints of working with a 14-year-old new to CrossFit.
I can imagine there's an instinct that says well, I can't this kid us.
In general, can't get stronger unless the weights get heavier.
So how do you square the technical failure, or the two technical failure, with the knowledge that a lot of times that means we're not moving up in weight?
We're not adding 10 pounds.
We're not adding 15 pounds.
How do you square the, well, I still want them to get stronger.
And this is how Ben says that she needs to get stronger.
But she's been at this weight for three weeks, four weeks, because that's just where her technical failure is.
How do you square those two things?
How does she get stronger if the weight doesn't get heavier?
Yep.
There's three different. waves of adaptation that take place from training.
The first wave of adaptation is a neurological component.
It's actually she's not getting stronger, but just from the exposure to the movements, just her getting better at the movements, strength gains will happen.
And you need to focus on technique during this first wave.
So it will happen.
It doesn't need to happen the next session or the next week, but you focusing on technique in the beginning phases is the appropriate way to get those first wave adaptations, which are all neurological.
You're going to get stronger.
The other way to do that is to bypass technique and you work with machines and then you will.
Then it's, then You can do that, but that's not what the strength we're looking for.
To me, that is not what we want.
There is a second wave adaptation, a third wave adaptation, but this is what I'm saying is the athlete will get stronger when you combine the frequency of which they're going to see these exposures and the fact that they are just so full of they're about to go through their growth phase that the alternative isn't an option.
They can't not get stronger.
It's not like working with even, this is kind of weird.
They did a study with 70 year olds and 70 year olds that trained consistently.
This flies in the face of what we've been told increased not only strength, which we've been told can't happen after the age of 40.
It's just the old literature.
Look back at the old stuff.
There's reports out there from exercise physiologists that say females can't do pull-ups.
Like in our community, that's just like it's insanity.
It makes no sense because we know they can't.
Then the research said you can't get stronger and have better endurance at the same time.
Well, we know that to be the case.
Then they said you can't gain muscle mass and strength after the age of 45 because of the sacropenia and the aging process and all the stuff that takes place with that.
Yet there's studies showing that 70 year olds are gaining muscle mass.
You can do it at any age.
Now, this is the opposite of that.
Even without this athlete doing anything honestly, just the actual aging process you gain strength.
Meaning this athlete was, if this athlete never went to the gym, it just makes sense, right?
A six year old is not going to be able to lift untrained, is not going to be able to lift what a 16 year old could lift untrained.
You gain strength just through adolescence.
So Why do we need to artificially speed that up when we could just be focused on technique and allow ourselves that really awesome opportunity post-puberty?
All right.
Now let's talk about one of the harder truths of parenting.
You can't protect your kids from adversity.
And honestly, we shouldn't even try.
One of the themes in the essay, again linked in the show description, isn't something you teach through lectures.
It's something you model through daily responses to ordinary problems.
Your kids need to see you navigate challenges.
Simple as that.
They need to experience age-appropriate setbacks themselves, because that's how they learn that hard things will not break them.
In the next conversation, Ben and I dig into how you can help your kids deal with adversity without shielding them from it.
We talk about the difference between peacetime and wartime, when to teach and when to just get through the moment.
And we talk about conditioning how the experiences your kids have matter less than how they learn to interpret those experiences.
This one's short, but it's important when I get to it, right after the break brought to you by our friends at momentous.
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Here's the question.
This is from a listener.
On the show.
You talk about conditioning quite a bit and how it plays a large role in our lives, that our experiences create the lens from which we view the world and that we are often products of our environment.
Another frequent topic of discussion is adversity and how It most often has a positive reaction when it comes to personal growth and development.
Thank you.
Thank you. learned to deal with all sorts of adversities some of which I'd rather they didn't okay so let's before we go into like the specifics of the questions just lay out what we mean by this conditioning yeah and throughout our lives.
We experience things, and those experiences lay the foundation of a program that we then run for the rest of our lives.
So it's another word for the conditioning is programming.
You become hardwired, pre-programmed to respond to circumstances based off of the past experiences you've had.
Now, here's the thing that we have to address before we get into this question, which is it is actually not, and this is going to answer the question for the.
Did they say their name?
No, we don't have the name on this one.
It is not the experiences that create the conditioning or the programming.
It is the way that we interpret those experiences.
So as a parent, the thing that you want to do, you don't want to put them in a bubble.
That's the exact opposite way to do this.
Because then they're not going to get the exposure to these things.
And you're going to precondition that life is a bubble.
Stimulus is not the problem.
It's not the stimulus.
It's the way we respond to the stimulus.
So let's give an example of this.
Let's say...
I'm trying to come up with this in real time.
We have like... When we do the laundry, our... Is it normal?
Like when we do the dryer, like it buzzes when it's done?
Yeah.
Right?
Right?
Let's say for giggles...
Every time that buzzer goes off, both parents freak out in the house.
Right?
They're like, oh my God, the laundry's done.
The laundry, like, Jane, quick, upstairs, get the laundry done.
And she's like, oh my God, Bill.
Oh my God.
Like, okay.
There's an experience.
I apologize to everybody.
The volume just jacked up there, but okay.
There's, right?
It's an experience.
Yeah.
But it's the way that that experience was, oh my God, laundry is a really stressful thing.
I don't like it when the laundry, when you grow up and you're older, guess what's gonna happen?
Every time the laundry's done?
Yeah.
So it's not a matter of laundry done.
That's not the thing.
It's the way that we interpret and respond and react to those things.
Now, it's kind of a weird example.
You're like, okay, but that's not our reality.
Okay, let's say...
It's a good example.
Right.
What happens when.
I'll give you one because it happens every time we're 10 minutes from the bus showing up.
What happens in the house?
Love it.
Right.
Anybody with young kids knows what the last 10 minutes before the bus pick up.
I'm trying to think of something that will go into future life type things, right?
Like, okay, let's take one similar to that, which is every time we're trying to leave the house.
Sure, yeah, similar.
Every time we're trying to leave the house, the house becomes really stressful, really tense, a lot of conflict.
The kids could touch the tension with a knife.
They almost want to like get away and go into their rooms.
What they're going, the programming that they're going to run through life, is when we need to.
We need to get out the house to be on something that's a bad thing.
And what's gonna happen is, as a parent, when they are parents and the spouse doesn't have that thing, And one parent brings that to relationship and the other one doesn't like why are we always so late?
Like it's okay.
But it's not that the event is leaving the house, but it's the when I say the environment.
Environment is not.
Experiences can be.
But environment usually is the way that the whole ecosystem responds to the events.
That's the environment.
So if the question becomes, or the answer to the question then becomes, that we are not trying to control the events,
That's the difference.
We're not trying to keep our kids from as much as like it sounds weird, but like experiencing adversity.
Right.
And we kind of layer that as like, different things.
Someone laughs at them for bringing shrimp instead of a sandwich to lunch.
We're not trying to control that.
What we're trying to do is talk to our kids about the appropriate ways to navigate when somebody makes fun of them for bringing shrimp instead of.
I'm bringing real world examples here.
That's very specific.
That's oddly specific, Ben.
So the goal is not like... oh my gosh, that's terrible.
I can't believe... And like freak out about it at home too.
Like the kid felt bad about it at school.
They come home, bring that baggage home.
They go, mommy, like you're not going to believe this, but like, you know, I got like...
Everyone was pointing and laughing at me when I was eating shrimp at the lunch table.
And they go, that's terrible.
And I'm going to call the school and I'm going to talk to the parents and you shouldn't have to deal with it.
Now it's like, this is how we deal with things.
That's how we deal with it.
Yep, as opposed to maybe a more controlled, maybe a less emotional, maybe more productive conversation which puts you in control.
That's how what we're doing is we're creating opportunities for us to layer down productive programming.
That's the difference.
Now, the unfortunate truth is that not everyone grew up in an environment that people were aware of.
Not everyone's parents listened to Chasing Excellence.
Right.
Most of them were products of their own conditioning, which is parents that are just trying to get by.
They were working their ass off in the factory.
The boss yelled at them. have her having trouble paying the bills.
They're coming home exhausted.
And then the kids go, daddy, daddy, this is how it is.
And they're like, listen, just like, and they lay into them that way.
Like, so the cycle repeats.
Our jobs as parents is to be generation breakers.
We are not our past conditioning.
You are not pre-programmed.
You will be by default if you let it be by default.
But what that's called is being unconscious.
This is unconscious and conscious.
Conscious is, I'm aware that I have a choice of how to navigate this situation.
When the dryer buzzes, I don't need to freak out even though that's the way I was brought up.
It's people like you know.
All the credit in the world to him, because this is hard, like it's really hard to pop up out of the matrix, have a look around and go wait a minute.
This doesn't need to go this way.
I don't need to do it this way.
And the people that have the hardest, like substance, physical and verbal abuse.
Like this is the perpetual cycle.
Like I grew up this way.
This is the way we do things.
This is how we deal with situations.
So, when you get forward, this is how I do things, because this is the human programming I've been set up to run on.
The goal for all of us, as human beings, is to recognize what is the right way, what is the most advantageous way to me to navigate this and any situation.
Then, If we're able to do that, can we get our kids to recognize that?
The best time to lay this into them is as early as literally like when they come out of the womb.
Like I'm not exaggerating.
From day one, to me, this is the job.
Can you set your kids up to be able to deal with stress, challenges and adversity in as productive a way?
Because that's all life is.
And We know this through hormesis, which is the body's ability to adapt to stress in a positive way.
Well, you have this all over the place.
Like a hard conversation.
The boss says to the employee like we gotta talk, you're not meeting expectations.
If they respond to that the way that their parents responded to them, coming home with bad grades, going like freaking out, like they're going to freak out.
If you go wait a minute or better, yet You talk to your kids in a way that they have an understanding on a fundamental level.
It doesn't have to be a fundamental level when they're zero.
But as they get older, they go, hey, this is how we deal with this.
It's another way of just lowering barriers. bad stress.
It's another way of saying it.
We've talked about this a lot on the comp train side of things.
How much can you handle?
If you grew up programmed with a victim mindset, you can't handle much of anything.
Everything affects you.
You are a slave to your environment.
If you have a warrior mindset, not much can get at you because your mind, body, and soul is pure.
And no matter what happens outside, can't rattle you inside.
That's our jobs as parents.
That's what we're trying to do.
And the way to do it to me is not homeschool them.
Get them where they don't have any adversities and go see it's all working out just fine.
That's not what life is going to present.
Every living thing on planet Earth has daily adversities.
Now, sometimes you might get a day or two when you're in Jamaica sipping pina coladas that there isn't much.
But I'm going to guess, even when you're there.
Nothing is absolutely perfect.
You still might not get the sleep that you might wake up hungover.
The waiter might take too long to come to the table.
You might get served.
It might get sunburned.
It might be low tide when you want it to be high tide.
It's not going to be absolutely perfect no matter how perfect it is, even pina coladas in Jamaica.
So we...
The goal is how well do you navigate the challenges that we're all going to face?
And we start with the small ones.
We start with it's low tide, I wish it was high tide.
We start with, My pina coladas ice already melted.
We start with, I'm stuck at a red light that I didn't want.
I want to go through.
We start with it's raining out.
I wish it was sunny.
We start with the easy ones.
And then if we can work in kind of Grab ownership of that.
Those ones don't rattle me anymore.
Then we can, kind of like train, do the reps with the bigger ones, which is, like you know, your kids being bullied.
Someone said something bad about you on social media.
Boss says we need to talk.
Your spouse loses their job.
That might be a big, big one, right?
That's it.
We'll save that one.
Those are the ones you can train with.
You can work on those things.
I guess if your spouse loses a lot of jobs often, you could use it as training.
Right.
Or maybe it's a job they didn't like or whatever it is.
But then there's the big ones, right?
Kid gets sick, lose a loved one, you lose a job, you can't pay your bills.
My contention is like, survive those.
Don't worry about bringing the warrior mindset to your kid getting cancer.
Survive it, dude.
I just want you to get through this.
Just get through it.
But my take is if you've trained yourself on the little ones to where they're not even a thing anymore and you're really aware of those middle ones, when the big one hits it won't hit with the same intensity impact it would have otherwise.
And that's the objective and that's the goal of this whole pursuit.
It's interesting because there's a parallel to what we've talked about previously and recently, which is that you train in peacetime so that when wartime comes you not, you don't.
It's not that you thrive in wartime.
It's that you make it through it.
Yes.
And there's a degree to which I think that that's the same.
When we, when we have, when we work on our call, at mental fitness, in college peacetime, or in times when there are these little things, these little daily things, when the big things come again, it's not that we thrive.
You're going to get knocked yeah, you're going to get knocked like let's just call it what it is yes, but it might go.
It might be the difference between being genuinely knocked out and knock down for a little bit.
And that's the difference.
Love that.
So let's like put some like a concrete or hypothetical situation.
It's like really small thing, right?
Like it's your birthday or you had a camping trip planned and it's raining, right?
Okay.
You're bummed out, but maybe you're bummed out for a minute or two.
And you get past it.
Okay?
But if that bums you out for hours or days or even go back to it a month later, be like I can't believe it.
Freaking rained.
How unlucky am I?
Yeah.
We got some work to do.
But if you can...
Honestly, become aware of it.
Like oh, you want to go through that light and the person in front of you stops and you're like ah,
Once you get rid of the ah, you go like, all right, this is reality.
You don't have to stop the immediacy.
Your body's going to react.
That's totally cool.
That's normal.
It's a normal, like fine.
Expectations didn't meet reality.
Cool.
Little bump on the radar.
How small can we make that bump on the small things?
Then the bigger things, right?
Which is like you came in last place in the workout.
Your kid was bullied at school, whatever it is.
That's a bigger thing, right?
Boss says we gotta talk.
Okay, now I'm knocked down.
It's a bigger blip.
But is this thing that's going to affect me for a couple hours, maybe a day or two?
But like we're able to move past it.
The bigger things, like it's okay now.
If it takes us days, weeks, or even longer to get past these things.
You know, if we have that buffer because we have worked on our mental fitness so much, it won't put us in the dirt.
And that's the idea.
You know, you... you have a miscarriage.
It's okay to be bummed out for weeks or months.
That's okay.
I'm not saying warrior mindset.
Robotic mindset.
Right.
Yeah, like your kid's diagnosed with some horrific disease.
I'm not going warrior mindset there.
I'm going to do it to survive.
Like we got to just try to make it through this.
But if you've done the work before, I'm pretty confident you're going to be okay during this thing.
Not good. not thriving, you're gonna be okay.
And you're gonna have some really hard days, weeks.
It might even be a hard blip of your life, but we're gonna be okay.
Last thing on this, just to put a pin in it, talking about the stimulus, which I love, which is something else we've talked about, which is like this is what we do around here in your home.
Back to conditioning, back to stimulus and response.
Is that is actually something that we can decide?
We can decide that what we do around here, how we treat things, how we treat each other, how we respond to things,
That is something that is actually within our control.
I think that, to me, that's the big takeaway from this.
You don't have to accept... whatever, when the laundry goes off.
You don't have to accept that we freak out here, even if that was the only experience you ever had.
Yep.
These are choices that we make.
As hard as they are, there are choices that we can make and we can make a different choice.
I want to highlight the pronouns that you're using there, which are the really empowerful ones, which create a sense of belonging.
What you said is that's not the way we...
And that's how we react here.
That's so much more powerful when you're trying to teach people than you.
Like you don't need to react like that.
You don't need to do this.
It's like what you're doing is going like you over there.
I am over here or we are over here.
Instead, it's you're a part of it.
That's not the way we do things here.
We don't act like that.
We don't respond to things like that.
I love it.
One of the biggest challenges parents face today is... screens.
That's not a surprise.
Phones, iPads, video games, they are everywhere.
And if you're not intentional about it, they will quietly become the default activity in your house.
In the essay we wrote about how families are shaped by their systems, those invisible rules and incentives that determine which behaviors get reinforced and which ones get discouraged.
If the TV is the centerpiece of the living room and the dumbbells are buried in the basement, your system is incentivizing sitting on the couch.
If chips are on the counter and vegetables are hidden in the crisper drawer, your system is incentivizing junk food.
Environment matters and screens are one of the clearest examples of how environments shape behavior.
In this next conversation, Ben and I talk about environmental design how to create a home where healthy choices are easier than unhealthy ones.
We talk about screens, about house rules, and about the power of influence.
Because when your kids go to a friend's house where things operate differently, You need to know how to navigate that.
We're gonna get to that conversation right after the break.
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My friend.
We've got a question from Dora.
A bit of a long one, but I'm going to get through the whole thing.
She says we have incredibly kind neighbors who like to hang out with us outside while the kids are playing around us.
I really love these people.
So I have to emphasize that I don't judge them.
I just acknowledge that they have different habits, life and values.
As a result, their teenage children are already obese and their two year old is overweight.
A few days ago, they invited us over for the first time.
The TV was turned on in the playroom and they were immediately offering chips to the kids.
So the kids were mindlessly eating while the teenagers were also constantly checking their phones.
I then understood that this quote unquote mindless eating is the reason they keep gaining weight.
While the neighbor's children enjoy playing outside, they can't always keep up with my kids.
And in 20 to 30 minutes, I find them sitting on the bench playing on their phones instead.
This is something I would really love to avoid later on.
How do I raise them so they'll enjoy moving more than screens?
I think I'm doing okay on the mindful eating part, but my four year old is already asking when he can get a phone because his older friends love to play games and he also wants to try.
He has kindergarten friends who already have phones, although it's fortunately not the norm.
I've accepted the fact that he is going to use a phone in the future and see all kinds of things that he will not yet be mature to encounter.
But I just don't want him to then forget the values that I've taught him.
And I'm quite a bit anxious about this generation's future regarding technology.
So I've got some follow-ups, but I'd love your just kind of initial take from Dora's question.
I think there's two main things that the root of, or to address, to chat about.
The first is obviously what the question is.
How do we navigate the technology, the screens and the phones?
And the next is spending time with people that are living vastly different lifestyles and values that we have, especially with our kids, who are so easily influenced.
So let's take the latter first.
In terms of spending time with these people that you really like, you really enjoy spending time with.
We're not here to, as she said, to pass judgment.
But what we are here to do is to help where help is. is wanted.
And we might not know if help is wanted here in this case.
So I don't think it's our place to push this on them, meaning invite them over to your house for an at-home workout, right?
Like we might not get to that point.
I'm not I'm not saying don't do that, but to me that would be a big leap in the beginning.
She mentioned that she went over to their house for the first time.
So this is not a longstanding relationship.
She really enjoys spending time with them, but she just went to their house for the first time.
I would really encourage her, the parents and the kids to come over to your house.
The next three play dates... should be at your house.
And I know that when they're at your house, you probably spend most of the time outside.
It sounds like until the kids get tired and it's probably the end of it.
But have them at your house and then bring them inside.
And what do your kids do when they're inside?
And What do they snack on?
What do they eat?
And just share your lifestyle with them.
These people might be befriending you because they see how vibrant and energetic and healthy you seem, and they might be incredibly curious on how you do it.
And if we never bring them into our world, they will not have eyes on that and will still be in the dark and have very low levels of awareness of what it have.
The next three playdates or otherwise, be at your house and spend time inside and have them snack.
Then from there, I would have the next playdate be at a playground.
Or even better, go for a hike or something along that end, right?
Maybe, if it's summertime, you're going to a beach and you're swimming or doing water sports, but doing something active.
So you're showing...
This is our norm.
This is the way we operate.
And maybe they get even more curious, because then they become aware of the gap in terms of the capacities at which they could operate.
And then it becomes like, hey, wow, this is crazy.
You guys do us like...
The levels of curiosity about eat, sleep, train, think, and connect pop up.
And now you have those connections.
And, as we've always talked about, I think the first place to go is join me 10 o'clock on Saturday for a little workout in the garage and make it something that they can be successful with.
Like, Oh my gosh.
Like we.
This is always like.
If you're going to take your, if you want to teach your kids how to ski, make sure the first three times they go skiing it's warm, sunny and not icy.
101 of creating spark and interest.
Make it something that they enjoy.
Okay.
So that's like the first part of that conversation.
And we can double back on that.
The next part is the screens component.
And...
Yeah, it's really hard.
It's really hard because it's so prevalent.
And I think that we really quickly fall into the victim mindset here, most of us.
We go, gosh, it's so, and our kids are on.
But when I was a kid, and our generation has to deal with that.
In the 1940s, there was no TV.
By the 1970s, Every kid was watching Saturday morning cartoons in every household in America.
And those parents were probably having the same conversations we were about, I never did this stuff.
The best I did was listen to a – you know after dinner radio show where we sat down together but no one ever stared at a screen and no one got absorbed.
No one got into this tunnel vision, this absorption where they, we were all together as a family when we did.
This is not unique to us.
We are not special in terms of the struggles that we are facing.
This is the struggles of a parent.
And it's going to be the struggles of the next generation and the next generation, just like it was before us and before us.
Before the TV, it was the radio.
Before the radio, it was something else.
I'm not smart enough to know what that thing was.
But it's always going to be this thing where we wish our kids were doing something more proactive, more creative active, more in line with the visions and values of what we want them to grow up to be.
And probably has something to do with academics or athletics.
So that's the first place I would start is go, this is not your unique special struggle.
And what I mean by that is like your generation's unique special struggle.
This is just something that's always been the case for parents.
And then, yep, we have to figure out ways to navigate it.
It's not a hindrance.
It's not a burden that we need to overcome as parents.
It's just part of raising healthy kids.
So that's that high level aspect to this.
Now, how do we get into the actual tactics and strategies of how to navigate this thing?
That's always the more fun conversation, because it's really tactical and you can put them in place, but also recognize that these are all arbitrary and none of them are right.
It's just the way that different people – it's nutrition.
The same thing as nutrition.
We have to understand the principles, the high-level principles of nutrition.
But whether you do macros, ketos, zone, paleo, or anything else, those are all just tactics.
And they can all work different for different people.
So the tactics that I use for my kids is based off of the multifactorial environment of our family life.
It is not...
Something that could necessarily be picked up and moved and placed into Patrick's family.
And what Patrick does can't be picked up and moved into someone else's family, because you'd have to move everything.
Patrick works at home. in his backyard, in the man shed.
And they're, they're a couple of miles from the beach and his kids are this old and this old.
And Patrick was raised this way.
And his wife was raised this way.
And when they were younger, they did this.
It's, There's so many different factors.
So as we talk about the tactics, they're the sexy, cool, fun things.
But it's really not the thing.
The thing is the high-level principles and then the – understanding of how to apply those.
So having said all that, I think just being really clear is the biggest thing.
And that's a.
You know, I came across this thing and we've talked about this on the podcast before as parenting.
I think one of the The best piece of advice I could give to new parents is to follow through on your threats.
And that's a weird way of saying it.
You know, the other way of saying that is keep your promises.
Yeah, I was going to say you could also flip that and just say promises.
Yes.
Just keep your promises.
Meaning if the rules in the house, if you promised that kids have a couple hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Friday night, so basically it's the weekend.
Friday night, Saturday, Sunday morning, they have iPad time.
If friends are over after dinner on the weekends and everyone's doing their gaming thing because that's what kids like to do a lot, especially northeast in the winter, where they're probably not going and playing Kick the Can or Manhunt or any of those games that we played as kids then we'll do that as well.
But there is no screen time during the week unless we're on a long car ride.
Long car rides are the exception to that.
Now we have a mutual friend, Max Max is.
He has a young child and they've traveled in planes and she's never seen a screen.
She's never been put in front of the screen.
That's burly.
That's really hard because everyone knows how the screens are pacifiers.
So the suggestion is not no screens, not what we're doing, not what Patrick's doing, but the suggestion is very clear rules of engagement.
And then follow through on those.
Whatever the thing is like, if you don't go and brush your teeth right now, you're not getting the iPad on Saturday morning.
Whatever that threat is, that weird thing that parents you know say on if they don't brush their teeth or if you don't clean your room, then you don't get your iPad on Saturday morning.
If the kid doesn't clean his room, that can't fall as an empty threat.
You really need to follow through on those things.
And it is amazing the difference between when you do and you don't follow through on those things.
It's just crazy.
And you're really doing yourself a favor.
In the short term it's going to be harder because we know how much easier it is to have your kids on the iPad for two hours while you go and do your breath work, yoga and workout Saturday morning.
And if they're not doing that, they're coming and bugging you, or they're bickering with each other, or they're making forts in the living room that you need to pick up later on.
It's so much easier.
But you have to do the hard thing of that Saturday.
You don't, it's a punch.
You are going to end up being punished for it.
But in the long run, it pays off so much.
I love that.
And also shout out to Manhunt because that was fun.
May not when you were younger.
Shout out to everybody who did that.
The thing I would love to unpack a little bit more, because I think it reflects both on kind of each one of those angles that you just took, is just the power of influence and recognizing the power of influence, not only in our own lives but obviously with our kids as well.
Right,
So who is influencing who in that, in sort of your first answer, which I love, which is like take back the influencer, influencee scenario.
If you go to somebody's house and they're on their iPad and they're eating chips and they're doing.
The environment that we're in dictates what is influencing us, even as adults, and certainly when our kids are involved.
And so if this is what we do around here which is kind of a phrase, this idea that we've talked about a little bit here, what we do around here is incredibly powerful and influential.
And so recognizing that if we find ourselves in a position where, like I, don't like the rules here, It's because whatever the rules are here is influencing the behavior and the feelings and the vibe.
And if we want to change that or we don't like that, we need to put ourselves in a position where either those things are better or we are the one influencing, which is why I love your advices.
Bring them over to your house because then the power dynamic flips.
It then becomes they're entering into your environment.
They're entering into your definition of what we do around here.
And I guess at least in Dora's case, she clearly has a preference for one versus the other.
And so I like that.
And I think that's really powerful to remember that we are always being influenced.
And we always have the ability to influence others. either the environment or the people we're in.
Come on over, we're gonna do a workout.
That could be incredibly powerful.
Maybe this individual, this neighbor has never had anybody who's influenced them in that direction.
Maybe they grew up a certain way to your point about, All the context that goes around.
Maybe their family does this.
Maybe her parents taught her this and she hasn't ever had a friend say, come on over.
We're going to do this and we're going to do a workout, and then we're going to hang out and chat for 30 minutes.
Whatever, whatever it might be.
And so recognizing that.
We have the power to influence as much as we can fall victim to other people.
Influencing us is really, really powerful.
Yeah, it's so well said.
When we put together that 100 words of health, it started with create an environment in which it makes it easy to Eat sleep train think, connect well.
It's totally the environment.
And yes, when you're in somebody else's environment.
I don't think you're exaggerating it when you say you're giving up the power, because that's really what that is.
It goes back to the question we were talking about earlier in terms of when you're in a bureaucratic organization, you're giving up the power in terms of creating the rules of the organization.
It's not yours.
When you're an entrepreneur, you have the power to create this thing in the light of your vision.
And I think it's a really great call out that if you are struggling with your kids in other environments, keep them in control.
Keep them in your environment. there may be extenuating circumstances where it's not as easy.
Maybe they live next door to the school and you live 15 miles from school.
So it'd be really weird if, after school, if the kids came over to your house only for the parents to have to.
It would be.
You know, it's things like that happen that become really obvious when you have the kids in elementary school for as long as we have.
But as much as possible, I would really try to pull them into your environment and to your point where you started.
This is like Don't underestimate the power of influence, not only with environment.
You've talked about this a lot, but the power of a person, of a singular person.
I really like and appreciate, when you talk about this, the power of a singular person to change change the trajectory of your life.
And yes, this person may have never had a person in their lives that had health as a awareness points at all.
Because I think that's more common than for sure the people that listen to our podcast probably realize is the norm is not to be one of us.
We are not the norm.
The normal people do not spend hours a day thinking about how to optimize their vitality, life force, energy and fulfillment.
That's why...
It's so cool that we found this community that we can share this conversation with, because that is who we are.
But this is one of the things that when, during COVID, we had a couple of neighbors that we didn't know at all,
And when we met them during COVID, we created a little bubble with these two other families and they became some of our very very, very best friends.
When we met them, they did not do CrossFit.
They did not eat the way that We do.
They started coming over to our house.
Our house was the meeting point.
And now they are as dedicated members of our gym as anyone else that we've had.
It's a big part of their lives now.
And I think it's really for the simple fact that our house was the meeting point.
I think if somebody else's house was the meeting point, it would have been very different.
We're shaped by our environment.
Last question I've got, maybe a little bit closer to the tactic side of things, which is...
Do you your kids are a bit older than mine, so I haven't really needed to get to this point yet.
But do you have conversations with your kids you know Bodie and Harley specifically about screens, about why the rules are the way they are.
Or is it just like no, we don't do them in the week, but you do them on Friday and Saturday to Sunday and kind of leave it at that?
And the sort of the analogy or the comparison is how you talk about nutrition in the house as well.
Like, are they... comparable enough that it's worth talking about?
Or are they so different that they're not?
Heather hates the screens.
So this conversation is always prevalent.
She thinks of screens the way I think of sugar and processed foods.
Like I think sugar and processed foods have the potential to kill you.
She thinks the same thing about screens.
She's like, you are wasting your life.
It's not shy about the values that we placed on what they're doing.
And anyone that has spent time researching this or even watched lightly The Social Dilemma or anything close to that, I think, recognizes her perspective and how it's maybe not as extreme as it sounds, how dangerous it is screens can be, but yes, we do have those conversations.
They are very our kids are very aware of it.
It doesn't mean that they don't want it.
It's the same thing with sugar.
Like if we we have all the conversation we want about sugar when halloween comes, they're still eating the sugar.
Like when they go to birthday they still want the cake.
It's an incredibly alluring fun, pleasurable thing that taps into our hormonal system to where – it overrides a lot of the willpower that you might have.
So we do talk a lot about it.
And this is one of the things I think is why our approach of this we're not saying no, we're just saying In these buckets works fairly well because they can do it, just like they can have some sugar.
But we're putting it in context and in constraints.
It's not just, no, you can't do that without any context in terms of why not.
We talk about the why not.
And then it's not, you can't never do this.
It's in a certain constraints of when it can, you know, As EC would say, it's dose-dependent.
We're going to close out with a conversation that gets at something a little bit deeper what it actually feels like to try to stay healthy while raising kids.
How your priorities shift, how your training changes, how you redefine what excellence even means.
Because the truth is, parenting is humbling.
You used to measure progress in prs or body comp.
Now you get to measure it in whether everyone made it out the door with shoes on a victory.
But here's the thing.
This isn't a step backwards.
It's a step forward towards something much, much more profound.
Training for a PR affects only you.
Modeling health for your kids affects not only them. but generations after them.
The last conversation is about integrating all of it the framework, the tactics, the daily reality of being a parent who cares about health.
It's about accepting that the work is messier and more imperfect than anything you did before kids, and that it's also much, much more meaningful.
We've got one more break, and then we're going to get to that conversation.
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We're gonna answer a listener question today.
I'm excited about this from janik.
He's a member of our chase club.
Shout out to janik.
He says i'm a 33 year old man and a father with a.
With one one and a half year old boy.
I'm very active and try to live by the five factors of health as much as possible.
Parenting has really been challenging for me as it takes up a lot of my time, which means i often have to sacrifice my training at the gym together with other activities I used to enjoy, not to mention the impact it's having on my sleep.
I'm at the point where I'm doubting having more children because of these challenges.
The thought of starting over with an infant is very hard for me.
Hmm.
All right, Janet, shout out.
Yeah, Jank's very active.
I see him post a lot.
Okay.
So, first off, congrats on having a one-and-a-half-year-old and being a father.
You made life.
You created life.
I...
Have made life.
It's like Tom Hanks.
I have made fire.
Is that the one we cast away?
Yes, exactly.
No big deal from the 90s, everybody.
Is that from the 90s?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Oh, my God.
You're probably right.
That's wild.
But yeah, Janik.
Okay.
So first I mean before we answer the specifics of the question this idea that you know when you have one child.
And it's like you're doubting having another.
My experience was similar, but it wasn't stemmed from the – it didn't stem from this change in stress or lack of sleep.
Mine was like I –
I, this is really what I was like, I have never felt this level of unconditional love, right?
Which is like this love for this thing, no matter what this little baby does like.
I've never felt this.
And my self-doubt about having number two was like, I can't imagine.
It would be unfair for me not to love the second child that much.
And I don't know how that's possible.
It's just like, I don't know how I can do that because it's all here.
And what you know just to kind of maybe solve or solve but explore that issue with people is obviously love is not like pouring from a watering can.
It's infinite right.
There is no fixed amount that you have to divide up in any which way.
So this is my way of saying to Janik that different struggles but Man, I'm really glad that I had a second child.
So I know you're going through some changes and maybe some challenges and maybe some crap pun intended.
But the first kind of, realization is that life, business, whatever happens in seasons, right?
And there's times, seasons, there's times for growth.
There's times for work.
There's times for buckling down and enduring.
There's times for harvest.
There's times for rest.
There's life.
It's not a linear path.
It's going to come in these different waves.
And the one you're in right now is not the one you were in before.
You're in a different season.
So just kind of recognizing that and realizing that this doesn't last forever.
So part of this is just knowing I think of this in terms of business, even family.
I think of it, that idea that the call is coming.
Like the call in the middle of the night that something has happened and the proverbial call, right?
It's like in air quotes.
It doesn't have to be a call.
But you're going to have to go and do – you don't want it to happen.
But there's going to be a time – for all of us that's necessary for us to heed the call and rise to the challenge.
And whether that is your kid is sick and you need to, in the middle of the night, take them to the hospital, whether that's the fire alarm going off in your house and you have to get your kids out and you're not going to sleep very well.
These are all very, very short things, right?
They're going to affect you for one night.
But how you respond to that is big and it's coming.
It's going to happen to all of us.
All of us are going to experience that in different forms or fashion.
Sometimes it doesn't happen in one night.
The work thing is a great example where –
There might be two or three weeks stretches where you're crazy overwhelmed, where you're anxious, where you're stressed out, where you dread work and the work environment and the workload and what you're doing.
And you just, you want to do anything other than what you're doing.
Those things pass.
One is your experience for a day or a night.
The other expectancy is for weeks.
Sometimes it's longer than that.
It's truly a full season.
We had a down spell in our business.
Something like COVID happens or where Janik is.
You know, you're now 18 months into this and it's a long one.
But again, this realization that it's seasonal, it's not going to last forever.
You're going to come out on the other side and win.
When you stop fighting that, when you kind of surrender to the seasonality as a realist mindset of like hey, this is part of it, you stop feeling like you're losing is really what happens.
And instead, you're... you can start winning and you can win and you can win in different ways.
The way you were winning before was you're winning at training.
Now the energy, this kind of goes the opposite way.
I was just talking about with the watering can.
Now, instead of pouring as much as you did into training, some of that is now a requirement that you have to pour into your child and probably even more so into your relationship and your home life.
But that's still winning.
And if we reframe that understanding that this season requires this, it's very different than well, now I can't do this, so I'm losing.
That's not the case.
It is you as a holistic person.
Part of that is your training.
But it is far from the totality.
So step one is kind of this realization, as Oprah Winfrey says, like, you can have it all.
You just can't have it all at once.
Like you can. be really fit and train a lot.
You can have a great family life and a child.
You can have a second one, but we're not gonna be able to get everything at all times.
The other was saying that I've, and I'm realizing maybe I stole that from Oprah, but the other is like, I've always said like in life, in business, you can get what you want, but you can't get it without the bumps in the road.
It's going to be hard.
It's going to be probably painful, but you can get what you want.
But you can't get it without the bumps in the road and you can't get it on your timeline.
So what most people do is they experience a bunch of bumps and they give up.
Or they say hey, I want this, but I only wanna go through this child rearing time, and I man, I wish this was just like a six month period.
Like it's not up to, you don't choose the timeline.
You don't choose how big or small the bumps are.
So that really gets to kind of like.
My second point, which is the idea is in terms of training, is dial it down.
Don't drop out.
That's the that's what it ends up becoming.
It's not about what you were doing before and measuring yourself against that.
It's what can you keep doing?
And what you keep doing is instead of two-hour trainings, maybe it's 20-minute trainings.
Maybe instead of hour trainings, it becomes five-minute trainings.
And while you used to be able to dedicate a lot of time and a lot of energy to this, because you now have these sleepless nights?
It's just realizing doing what you can with where you are, with what you got.
What you got is 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes.
And if that is the case, I really recommend two things.
The first is...
What is the most efficient way to use that?
What can you get the most bang for your fitness buck for your time component?
Which is, I'll just kind of lay out an example.
Something that doesn't take any warmup, because A warmup is a primer to get you to the really meaningful thing.
So what can you do without a lot of warmup?
And what can you do that's going to kind of give you this big total body boost and power.
And the way I think of this is pick your favorite movements.
I, I like push up, pull up, sit up, squat, right?
Because you have upper body push, upper body pull, trunk flexion and a total lower body thing with the squat.
If you want to sell out lunges for squat, no big deal.
If you want to, Do leg lifts or sit-ups, got it.
If you want double a bench for push-up, get it.
So don't worry about the specifics, but choose your three four, five favorite movements and do five to 20 reps for five to 20 rounds, right.
So the low side of that might be, I'm gonna do five reps each of those for five rounds, right?
And cool, like that's, you're going to be able to do that in a couple minutes.
But maybe it's the bigger one, which is we're going to do 20 reps of those for five rounds, 100 reps of all those.
And the idea behind this is like, it's not you work up to 20 and 20.
That's not the goal. but you work towards one end of them.
If you were to try to get towards those hundreds, which would be five rounds of 20 each, that's 100.
Or you go 20 rounds of five each, that's 100.
And that's enough variance.
If you just kind of think about doing those movements you're going to, If you were to add in a run, maybe a one-minute run, after every round man, I'm telling you Yannick, you're going to feel okay.
The big thing is don't do things that take a lot of warm-up time.
Things like squats and jerks and snatches and even something like box jumps might take a lot.
Instead, just what can you get in and do them?
And then get your that kind of like threefold like muscular cardio, that neuroendocrine, like higher intensity thing done really quickly.
So that'd be the first one.
Dial it back.
So not big training sessions.
What do you not need a lot of warmup for?
And if you want to use dumbbells and stuff, just really light.
I love that as well.
And the second part is thinking about like exercise snacks, right?
So that might mean just while your kid is crawling around on the floor, you're banging out a set of 30 pushups.
And Those little things, while they don't feel like training sessions, they're kind of powerful.
I mean like you working on banging out a set of pushups close to failure, just kind of, if you were able to do that once or twice a day with a couple of different movements.
Put a pull-up bar in your kitchen between the doorway to the kitchen and the living room, and just bang out a set close to failure.
The muscle growth hypertrophy and also what happens with like glucose regulation, just from these little snacks is really powerful.
So if you were to do that thing, you only need five minutes of intense.
Really, I'm going to train five reps done for a bunch of different rounds, or 20 reps done for a few rounds, and the little bite-sized snacks throughout the day.
Keep a kettlebell in your living room, pound out a set, again a big, big set, something like 30 40, 50 kettlebell swings, which again will only take you, like one to two minutes.
But what that does is a lot.
And you have to kind of like stop measuring yourself against your past self, right?
It's not about you versus where you were.
It's about you trying to continue to do the right things.
That's it.
Like dial it back.
Don't drop out.
Don't compare yourself to who you once were.
I like that.
Dial it down, don't drop out.
I like that a lot.
One thing I was thinking about as you were going through that and to shift gears just a little.
I was thinking about the conversation we had with Chris Irwin about fear.
And I think I was thinking about that because I was exactly in the same boat that Janik was in.
After our first was born, I didn't even want to consider the conversation about having a second.
Large part of that was because my oldest wasn't a great sleeper.
And so it was months and months and years of, am I ever going to get enough sleep again?
And so it was a hard conversation, but like you for other reasons, but like you i'm more than happy that i was talked into it.
But i was thinking about the conversation with chris and i was thinking about myself in that, in that position, in that boat, in the very similar, if not exactly the same context as janik, And I guess I would just ask him what are you afraid of?
Because it seems like you're resisting something.
You're afraid of something.
You're afraid of something not happening, or you're afraid of something happening if we were to have another kid?
Because Janik knows, and you said this right at the top, How could I love anything?
Add another one and you will realize that you have an infinite wellspring of love in you.
And you know that already having one kid.
And so it's not a question of like I... gosh, I don't know if I want another kid because you will.
Because that's what they do.
They bring that much joy to our lives.
And so the question then would be like, well, what am I afraid of?
And I love everything you just laid out, because I think when I think back to myself, it's well, I'm never gonna get back to the gym consistently.
Well, I'm never gonna get enough sleep.
Well, I'm never gonna fill in the blank.
And when you can actually articulate this, and again, I wasn't able to.
I was sort of just in an 18-month confused state of fog.
Because I couldn't articulate this, because I didn't recognize.
Oh, what's happening is, I'm afraid of something?
What am I afraid of?
If you can articulate what you are afraid of, you can start to build countermeasures and strategies against that.
A perfect strategy is what you just laid out Ben, that sort of that training paradigm shift for Janik.
Whether it's movement snacks, whether it's here, pick your five favorite.
Whatever it is, That's a strategy against the fear of I'm never going to work out again or I'm not going to work out as consistently as I used to.
I'm never going to have muscle ups again, whatever the heck it might be.
When we give ourselves a strategy, that is, that stands in the face of or that recognizes the fear that we have, we begin to see past the fear and we begin to see how it's possible that we can do the thing.
And yeah, we're talking about a kidnapper.
This could be any number of things.
Once we're able to identify What am I scared of?
I can put something in place to say, OK, if I do that, it's not so scary.
And then suddenly the thing that is so scary isn't as scary.
I'm going to take a stab at. what he's scared of.
Because for most people, this is the scariest thing.
And it's the loss of identity.
Janik was a hard charger.
Janik was somebody that prioritized sleep training.
He ate really well.
He had lots of energy.
The fittest guy amongst his friends yep, had a bunch of activities he used to enjoy.
That's right, and when yeah, and now he's not that because It seems like the challenge is like time and tiredness, but it's not.
It's actually the challenge is a changing of identity.
We don't want to let... an old version of ourselves dictate whether we are winning or losing because we need to be, you know, that it's kind of weird dichotomy of like, I'm the type of person that fill in the blank is the most powerful statement we can make because as humans, we have this massive desire for self-confirmation to prove to ourselves that we are that type of person.
If you truly believe I am the type of person that that's what your actions are just going to follow.
And that works both positively and negatively.
I am the type of person that doesn't smoke cigarettes.
Guess what happens when you're around people that smoke cigarettes?
You're like, no way, man.
It's only because of that.
It's your identity.
I'm the type of person that people laugh at at parties.
Guess what?
You're going to be lighthearted and make jokes.
I'm the type of person that... gets up at 5.30 a.m. and goes to the gym for two hours.
Guess what you do?
I'm the type of person that can never get ahead in work and job.
Identity is a really powerful thing.
But if we're not flexible enough, it can really act as a self limiter.
Because when you say is just like we talked about the different seasons, You shouldn't be the same person.
You were at 35 as you were at 15.
We want to grow.
We want to be able to contribute to the world in more meaningful and powerful ways.
You being a very fit person. capable human being is awesome.
You being a pretty fit and pretty capable and amazing dad is way more awesome.
Way more awesome.
So we don't want to let your previous identity the way you are measuring up against that determine whether you're winning or losing on the scorecard, because the scorecard has changed.
You are now responsible for other things other than your own fitness.
And the truth is there is nothing more meaningful, impactful and important in the world than fatherhood.
This is for males, right?
I would say motherhood if you're a female.
It's the most important thing.
So if that means training takes a back step for a little while, that's more than okay.
That's good.
Now the second part of this is One of the big, important things of being a good father is modeling good behavior.
Good behavior in this sense is doing the hard but necessary things to stay fit.
You have a one and a half year old.
They're not going to absorb things right now, but you're trying to keep the habits of don't drop out, do what you can with what you got so that when they are two and a half, three and four, They see you as that capable dad.
They see you as the person that trains and exercises and eats well.
They see you as the type of person.
They're not going to do what you say, but they will never fail to model what you do.
I can't hear what you're saying because your actions speak so loudly.
So what we don't want to do is allow this previous self, this previous scorecard to determine whether we're doing the right things or not.
We want to be flexible, malleable enough to adapt to the new, more meaningful.
This is what you've been training for. more meaningful, more responsibility.
Do your very best with what you can, with what you got in terms of the training, in terms of the presence, in terms of the the patience, in terms of the humility, in terms of the compassion, in terms of the love that you can bring to your family.
Squeeze in the training where you can, because eventually, it's going to be the thing that you're going to want to model as well.
And if you drop off. completely off it's much harder to get back on that bandwagon just keep it going doing the hard but necessary work along the way it's kind of like i don't want to say it's like It's just kind of lowering the expectations.
Again, we talk about that a lot.
Lowering the expectations of yourself in terms of the training spot.
But without kind of like falling... It sounds... I'm not saying...
It's okay to lower the bar, is I guess what I'm saying.
Give yourself permission to lower the bar of I don't need two hours.
I don't need to be able to back squat 445.
I don't need to be able to run a 530 mile run.
I just need to be able to stay really fit and capable so I can model that.
Thank you so very much for hanging through this. on this one.
I know it was long, but it was helpful.
If you want to go deeper on these ideas, I really do encourage you read the full essay, chasingexcellence.email.
It's also in the show description.
It's called Your Ceiling, Becomes Their Starting Point, and it really does synthesize a lot of what we've been talking about for years all into one place.
And I'll see you next time. say that went along with it check it all out chasing excellence dot email we would love to have you ben and i will be back next week for a new episode of chasing excellence Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before we go.
The first.
If you want even more from this episode, I do recommend you check out the full listener guide, where we break down all the big ideas.
We ask reflection questions.
We give you steps to put these ideas into action.
The link is in the show notes.
And the second thing While you're there, check out the Chase Club.
It's our premium membership, where we include bonus content, ad-free episodes and the brand new Chase Tracker app.
Check it all out at chasingexcellence.email.
