10.3.17// Kids 2// Movement
Weightlifting//
1 rep max Sumo Deadlift
special exercises// 2x 8 Glute Ham Raise + 25 Hip Extensions,
100 Banded Good morning
2x 100m sand bag hug carry
2x 20 Barbell Obliques
When you study a little about development, you learn that kids are pretty amazing. Really just the human body is amazing, but the younger a child is, the less we've done to interfere with their natural development. The methodologies behind CrossFit Kids, and CrossFit Teens are very intelligently designed to align with the needs and motivations of these kids. Basically we know what is really important for developing our kids through movement; furthermore, we know what motivates them, and we use those motivators to get them to do what is important!
The really important things kids need are impact loading and vestibular development. Amazingly toddlers and even into adolescence, they do a lot of this already, and they like it. Impact loading is just high impact jumping, landing, stomping. It's important because it is what develops bone density. Actually most of the bone density that we have for our lifetime is developed in childhood. Do kids care that they're preventing Osteoperosis 60 years from now, not in the slightest, but jumping and stomping as loud as possible is pretty darn fun! When your kid jumps and just lands on her knees on the kitchen floor without even flinching, that's impact loading and really healthy believe it or not. Kids also need to have their vestibular system stimulated.
The vestibular system is the inner ear fluid and it's responsible for way more than just balance. Just know that it's really important and needs to be stimulated and challenged. Babies get rocked, the car puts them to sleep, mom or dad bouncing on the sweedish ball, this all starts the vestibule development. On their own, kids will roll, twirl, dance, wiggle, wrestle. Again, not always convenient, but very important. Imagine your toddler, standing butt in the air, head between their ankles and shaking their head. They are doing their own vestibule massage. Toddlers and Pre-K kids just need to be left to roll, wiggle, dance, and wrestle which is just stimulating. As they get older, we can add complexity, rhythms, patterns etc. All of the gymnastics work we do with this group, rolling and anything inverted is vital. Still stimulating, but now also challenging. Again, a lot of our coordination, and balance for the rest of our lives is developed in early childhood.
We don't have a pre-k program as of yet. For them, CF kids just looks like play. CrossFit kids, we can add some structure, but the kids are ultimately motivated by fun. No matter how fun I think the workout is, inevitably the kids start asking, "what's the game?" towards the end of the workout. We use the game to motivate kids to move better, "show me just 5 more perfect squats and we'll get to the game."
There will be a point where the game is less important and kids become motivated by the amount of weight on the barbell, or basically doing what the big kids (teenagers/adults) are doing. This phase is when we should consider moving kids into teens class. Attention spans are longer, there's more time to experiment and experience more exercises and prove themselves as capable or more than their peers. We can make the kids move pretty darn well, but the teen phase is where we see the best improvement in form. 'Literally' the worst thing is when the kid next to you gets to add 20 lbs to the bar, but you have to use the same weight again. I I've never seen someone's squat go from a wobbly giraffe to picture perfect as when I let a boy's sister add 10# to the bar when I asked him to do another set with the same weight.
There are a lot of ways to get stronger and the mechanisms that make us adults stronger are different from what makes kids and teens stronger. As adults, our strength adaptation is mainly built by recruiting more and more of the muscle tissue we already have. We do still grow more muscle, but we often have a lot of muscle mass that isn't even being effectively used. Kids and teens though are growing. They adapt by recruiting a larger portion of their current muscle mass, but they're also primed to pack on the mass to be recruited. Resistance training is key to that process, and so for the teens, we lift heavy-near maximal twice a week rather than once like the adults.
Kids typically want to play the same sports as their peers, older siblings, or parents played. You can try to effect their choice, ultimately the sports kids choose depends on their own preferences and your approval though. I'm biased towards CrossFit Kids mainly because I'm the practitioner and I train the kids the way I want to, but I do think that developmentally, there is an optimal progression for introducing sport into a kid's life.
These are in chronological order.
1st- As soon as your kid knows their own name and can run a little, a gymnastics class can set them up for good movement for life. I recommend keeping them in gymnastics as long as you can afford it and as long as they're still interested! The teens and adults I've worked with who move their own body weight the best are the ones with even a small exposure to gymnastic coaching.
1.a Extreme sports. They're just called extreme sports. Surfing, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, biking. Put a helmet on them. They bounce if they're young enough. If you can condition a kid to keep up on a day of skiing without crying, they're ready for any sport.
2nd- The next sport I think is great exposure for kids are choreographed activities. Dance or traditional martial arts. I realize that getting your little boys into a tap dancing class is a hard sell for sons...and dads, equally awesome is martial arts or another combative (wrestling or juijitsu). Actually if your child isn't interested in the next step in the progression, this could be your ticket to getting your kids active. "You don't want to play basketball or soccer? How about being a ninja?"
3rd- Organized ball sports. Basketball, Soccer, Softball, Football Etc. You can do what you want with this one. I really do think that some choices are better than others developmentally, but the most important thing though is variety. Your kid will latch on to the sport they are best at. A word of advice though from a youth and high school coach for more than a decade. There is not an advantage you can give your kid more valuable than athleticism. If a coach tells you that if your kid doesn't commit to one certain sport, then they can't become special, coach is full of shit, find a new coach. In 10 years of coaching football at Ellensburg High School, never did I see my mentor coach check a kid's pop-warner attendance. "Well you can run a four-seven forty, and squat 400lbs, but you just didn't learn our terminology as a 2nd grader, so you're riding the pine." ??SHM??... If your kid is athletic and the coach is smart, they'll find a spot for your kid. If they can move their body well, there isn't a skill they can't pick up really quickly.
Tied for 3rd- Organized athletics or endurance sports. Track and Field, Cross Country, Swimming. The introduction to these also don't have to be as early as coaches might suggest. Athletic kids are athletic kids. The fastest and strongest kids get the spots. Variance is important. Over-use injury is becoming more prevalent in youth sports and not necessarily only in these sports where over-use injury is most prevalent in adults, but in kids who play only one sport year round.
All in all, I would not try to impose my own sport preferences on my kids, but what I would insist on, is that my kids play sports seasonally rather than year round, and that they learn and play new sports regularly. Movement and athleticism are always at the bottom of the pyramid (needing the most) with sport specific skill at the top (lastly important).