so there's a myth that kids first of all it's getting dispelled directly that kids can't get stronger until they go through puberty because they don't have testosterone but there are so many things that have to do with muscle strength and bone density and athleticism that has nothing to do with your androgens and yes you know and so so forever they thought that a kid could not see progress I have seen it firsthand that that's just not true I didn't know that that that was a a thing that children that they don't think children can get
stronger or see progress oh I mean yeah they just don't think that it's they think it's pointless I think it's dangerous to have kids left weights and this point this because they can't gain muscle without testosterone well women don't have testosterone with very little and they can still gain muscle yeah it's and it's it's a lot of it is independent of hormones insulin sensitivity insulin's the most anabolic thing in your body like keep your kid insulin sensitive and just just you know a reaction to strenuous activity and it's not just about muscle size and then
the strength is a hard thing to measure because the kids's limbs are getting longer so even if their muscles are producing more strength you might not be able to move more weight because it's just on a longer limb for right now like adults don't grow limb length so we can predictably see if a muscle get stronger by how much weight they can use but if a kid's muscle gets stronger but that lever gets longer they can't move more weight doesn't mean the muscle is not stronger you know so sometimes a kid will get slower in
adolescence because their limbs get longer and it takes a while to catch back up to that so they can't turn their Li their levers over as fast so there's just so many variables there um but it's just it's extraordinarily important that kids are resistance training at a young age do you think that is there an age where we have to begin to think about um um this many days a week so for adults for example if you were to to say a 30 to 40 yearold okay we'll well these are kind of different ages right
because 30 you're still pretty robust but let's say for a 40-year-old 40 50y Old you would design a program that would be what to start 3 days a week hyper three to four days a week but as little as one day a week does have benefit but ideally three days a week minimum yeah but for a child who has not been through adolescence and then we'll get to adolesence or even in adolescence is there is it almost um they should be lifting weights every day so here's this is isn't it what people think it's actually
opposite okay the more advanced you are the less frequency you need or can handle wait say that again the more advanced you are in training age and the older you are the less frequency of intense training you need or can handle I would totally agree with that so kids can literally max out if you were going to have them do this on a squat every single day and it would not they would be able to recover from it it would not affect their central nervous system because their central nervous system literally cannot produce that much
of a charge yet whereas once you go through puberty then they're more likely to get hurt their central nervous system starts putting out a huge Vault right basically huge charge and they can actually start to hurt themselves and they can actually start to overtrain you literally almost cannot overtrain a child I mean that's fascinating when you think about the central nervous system is there a way that we would have a measure by proxy How would we be able to tell if the nervous system is being stressed so it it's one of these things that's very
highly contentious right now because when they directly measure central nervous system recovery it shows that the central nervous system recovers very quickly but we know that not to be true based on what we see in our field so they don't they know it has something to do with like glutamate and you know cortisol doesn't go down and like you have so much dopamine and and release that your serotonin then can't get up and adrenaline so they don't know if it's the actual Central the neurons themselves or the byy products that have resulted that are that
need time to clear so I want to caveat that first cuz some people listen to this that may be study Geeks are like well Studies have shown this central nervous system recovers very quickly and and I understand that but we know as Professionals in our field that if you're going to max out on a Sprint or a jump and your athlete is overtrained you with the high-intensity stuff it's going to take 7 to 14 days before they can peek again wow um whereas muscle tissue you can crush a muscle 4 days later that thing's probably
ready to go and there are variables to person muscle group to muscle group but to get back to your question very simple ways um to test it uh you know the carbon dioxide tolerance is CO2 tolerance very cheap easy way um and just buy a grip strength tester very simple also more subtle ways more qualitative ways like quality of sleep are you waking up do you go to sleep really fast but then you wake up in the middle of the night that suggests your cortisol stays level throughout the night and it keeps waking you up
now if you're just tired and you crash and you don't want to get get out of bed in the morning that's probably more peripheral you're just very tired but if you fall asleep easily and you keep waking up or you can't feel like you relax or you can't get your heart rate down or your brain fog those are all signs of your central nervous system needs a break and do you think that um and it would be very and what I'm hearing you say is that it would be very difficult to get a five or
six or seveny old to that point right physically emotionally right no because emotionally if you're emotionally pushing and abusing your child they will become overtrained in a hurry but if they're having a time and they're just doing it on their own a literally a kid can squat you know the Bulgarian system for adults where they squat the max every day like it's a known thing they have to go through that's called a dark period where it's a year and a half of overtraining your central nervous system where you're miserable to get to the other side
God be more effective at that that's just yeah so very that's why very few people do a it's just it's not necessary whereas kids can literally max out a kid can go and Sprint like on the playground they'll have a period where they race each other and they will literally race full speed every single day for 2 months or until they move on to something else and the kid doesn't come home and be like I can't focus it just doesn't happen where if it's an adult did that with the fourth or fifth day straight of
doing one even One Max effort Sprint they would be completely fried neurologically their their reflexes won't be as good their grip strength would be down their broad jump would be down quantitative measures and and the first thing an athlete does is after they're prepped I'll have them do a grip strength test or a broad jump and if it's more than 10% off their Norm it's like well you need to back off today I don't care how you feel your performance is telling me you need a back off day and that would that be for more
of the I mean listen we live in Texas and Texas takes their Sports very seriously I'm like what state am I in uh you're laughing you know it's true they' got the training programs for these six year old or whatever to go into the I mean it's just crazy um is there an age that so is there an age that that kind of starts looking at um CO2 tolerance would it be six too young I mean where where do we think about I wouldn't worry about measuring the central nervous system until they get to puberty
to puberty it seems that as when puberty happens Everything Changes the thing that I would start at a younger age is is and this is crazy that people think you can't do this is teaching your child to regulate their central nervous system teaching them breathing methods to bring themselves up the neural toning breathing methods to bring their neural tone up and prepare them breathing methods to bring their neural tone down and help them relax and recover both in between workouts and in between sets wow so there's ways to breathe in between sets I call it
intro workout breathing to where you can really bring your nervous system tone down and help you recover and then extend the duration that you're able to be intense during that workout we can teach children this I I really feel like weightlifting belts should be everywhere and hear me out here because you can put them on very Loosely to where it's not tight and you can teach your your child to breath brace breathing to where they try to put pressure on that weight belt um all around and teach them how to brace while breathing teach them
how to like diaphragmatic breathe and and we can teach our children breathing we can teach our children gate we can teach our children to hold their tongue on the roof of their mouth and and nasal breathe we can teach them all these things that will extend to the time when they get to adolescence and the central nervous system becomes an issue they're already prepared to help themselves recover my kids are real bummed you came on this podcast cuz guess what is going into the Amazon cart today [Music]
