 What's the best fitness approach for high school students? Watch this. Our next caller is Sarah from Connecticut. What's up Sarah, how can we help you? Hi, so I just want to start off by saying I am so grateful that you guys are letting me ask my question and I'm so excited to be asking it. I am a longtime fan. I've been around since Adam was competing. And you guys have truly been like the magic pill of like my health and fitness journey. And so I just want to say thank you. Awesome, thank you. Sal is a pill to work with too in case you're wondering. Yep. Yeah, so my question is I'm a high school biology teacher and I've been given the opportunity to pilot and create a biology of sports performance class at my school. Cool. So this is truly an opportunity for me to create a dream job. So I want to do it right and make sure it's as successful as possible. It's meant to be geared toward the high school athletes so they can learn how to maximize their performance in their sport through training, nutrition and recovery. Although the regular student will also be allowed entry into the class. I'm very excited to say that my principal cleared this for a year long science elective class and will be allowed to access the school's brand new weight room two days a week during class time. We will spend the other three days of the week in the classroom. The goal for students by the end of the year is to design and implement a five week program working towards a goal they identify to help them better perform at their sport. The biology portion of the class will be focusing on anatomy and physiology of relevant body systems and we'll be working on improving scientific literacy by unpacking and analyzing scientific studies some of which I plan to grab from what you guys have discussed on the show. So I need your help in planning the sequence of how to teach the fundamentals of training principles to students. There's the classroom portion of things like how to manage frequency, volume and intensity, movement patterns such as squat, hinge, press and pull, movement patterns and different planes of movement such as the saginal plane, the transverse plane and rotational movements, the difference in benefits of compound versus isolation movements, the difference in benefits of bilateral and unilateral movements and eventually how to possibly write an effective training program. Then there's the portion of teaching proper form and mechanics of lifts in the weight room. So I will also have access to bands and PVC pipes in the classroom for working on mobility, isometrics and things like trigger sessions. I wanna do my best to blend a theory with the science says and reality to give students a deep understanding of how they can be the best athletes they can be. So my question is how would you recommend to sequence teaching, training to kids both in the classroom and weight room simultaneously as theory and implementation don't always line up? This is awesome. Yeah, I wish I had you. Everything you just said is awesome. Yeah, and like Justin said, you obviously have been listening to the show for a long time. This is way cool. You know what, Justin, what do you think about sharing with her what you're doing right now with the football team, the high school football team? I think the way you laid that out with the Isometric Foundation and then you build upon that, if you want something with like a philosophy or a theory behind it on like how we would teach somebody those, I think what you're doing with them is pretty solid. I think what you're proposing is much more comprehensive. What I had to kind of do was scale back in terms of what I could establish pretty quickly without having to educate and explain too much. And that was like a big hurdle for me because I want to establish basically everything you just mentioned. It's amazing. Like I think this is a whole course that kids could go through and find a ton of value with. So for me, it was really just about like hitting, the biggest offenders as quickly as possible. And that's really just like body communication and stability and control of their body. And so that's where I found a lot of value in Isometrics and placing them in these positions and these split stance positions in positions where they have to build strength and generate force. So we've been going through like the first month, month and a half, we're gonna be doing Isometric Heavy and then doing a unilateral in conjunction with that to address a lot of those things right out of the gates. And then progressing them further into like more of our five by five type style with compound lifts. And so I mean, I have this whole thing is a potential full blown program for student athletes in the making, but that's something that, maybe we can communicate offline later and I can kind of show you the full sort of scope of it. Sarah, I'm gonna speak from a student perspective. So first off, I wish I could take this class. I wish I had you as a teacher in high school. It sounds super awesome. I know the challenge with teaching anything to anyone is can I get them excited about it? Because obviously an excited, interested student is gonna absorb way more information than one that's maybe not so excited and not so interested. So you've been listening to the show for a long time and so you already know that our formula is entertain and then also throw in information. And we did that on purpose because we learned as trainers that most of our clients were not fitness fanatics. And if I was talking to a fitness fanatic, I could get real deep in the weeds with the science and talk specifically about training and adaptation and they would love it. Like if I did that to my clients, I would have lost half of them three months in. So I had to really figure out how to communicate to them in effective ways. What I'm gonna recommend to you is to use a lot of analogies. Analogies are really cool. Like an example would be the analogy that we use about the central nervous system and muscles and the relationship. And I like to use the speaker versus the amplifier analogy. Another thing would be to talk about myths, right? So when you have your students in there, you could talk about some of the most common myths. Like lifting weights makes you bulky, right? That's a big myth and how to speed up your metabolism. Like I think that would get kids kind of excited. Like what do you mean faster metabolism? What does that look like? And I thought lifting weights did make me bulky. You may even wanna bring up contributions of different types of exercise or sports into kind of what you're talking about. So I would have a picture of Arnold. What have bodybuilders taught us about how the body adapts to exercise? Like what has power lifters taught us? And you can use celebrities so that the kids can be like, oh, I know Lance Armstrong. Like what did we learn from that kind of training? And how does that work? And how does that make my body perform even better? You might even put something up and say, why do we find attractive bodies attractive, right? So that's kind of a lore. Like what do you talk about? Why do we think men with broad shoulders and tight waist, like well that may show signs of better performance and higher testosterone levels and why do we find these types of things to look better than others? There's a biological component. I think those things would make people very interested in kind of what you're talking about. But honestly you ran down the list of the stuff you're gonna talk about. I can't think of anything else that I would add. Really aside from just trying to make it kind of to hook them, right? Yeah, hook them with the myths and maybe ask them like what's a better way to, if somebody's trying to get lean and lose weight, what's a better approach? And then you can put like running every single day, lifting weights or whatever. And then you can go in and kind of counter some of the myths because that gets people hooked right out the gates. I like the example of your different avatars. And you can make it very simple in terms of what typically their training protocol would look like as a difference. Just because of what you brought up with them trying to create their own program, it'd be cool to put those examples there just to give them some kind of baseline. Right, for every one of these adaptations that you went through, which I think are all the ones that we'd wanna cover in a foundational class like this, I would do exactly that. But before we get like too deep in the weeds, cause this literally, we could turn this into like a three hour conversation right here. I mean, that'd be great, I wouldn't mind it. Well, this is what I'm gonna do for you. So, and I think this is the best place for us to start. I think all of us are, when you were reading it off, you should see the looks on all of our faces. Everybody was like, oh, this is so cool. We would love to help you. So I think the next step for us to help you would be, it already sounds like you're on the right track. I think to start to lay out what the curriculum is gonna look like and then running it by Justin or one of us or all of us, you can email us personally. When we hang up, I'll have Jerry, cause you're in contact with her, give you our personal emails. And then what we can do is just kind of, as you're working through it and you put stuff together, we can give our feedback of, oh, I love that or maybe add this to it. I think that's probably where we'd be the most valuable versus giving you all these like vague random ideas. Yeah, you know what was really cool too? Totally. You know, just something else, Sarah, is that when you show, when you can show a student a change immediately in how their body's moving, it's really exciting. So I remember one time I took one of my first certifications and they were talking about how you could get a muscle to elongate easier. So what they did is they put us on the floor, they had us do a hamstring stretch. You could only go so far. And then they said, now I want you to push against the person who's stretching your hamstring and hold that for 30 seconds, which I did. And then relaxed and all of a sudden I got three more inches of flexibility immediately, right? So I was like, oh my gosh, this is so weird. You know, it's like almost like doing an experiment in class where you're showing, you know, the effect of something right away. Like that kind of stuff gets people so engaged and so interested in kind of what's going on. So I can't stress that enough. Like if I would, and I did, I did volunteer a few times and teach nutrition and exercise to students. And I'd really get them excited by doing stuff like that. Cause once I got them engaged, it was the rest was, you know. Well, I mean, I think we're throwing a bunch of things at Sarah that she's probably good at. She's a fucking teacher, right? So I think what you're looking from us is the expertise on how you program the curriculum. And I definitely think that we can help. And I would like to help you. So, and I think the place that we start is you begin laying out what is, you know, what is, you know, first month or week of the curriculum you're planning on it to look like. And then allow us to kind of put our two cents in and do that. And I think this is great because Justin is literally in this world right now. We were on the last, we were flying from Utah just last week, a week before. And we were all looking over what he was creating for these high school students right now. So this is kind of where we're at right now. And I think that maybe you guys could definitely help each other out. Yeah, that would be, that would be very much appreciated. Cause that is where I'm struggling. It's like, I know all these principles for myself and I know how to apply them to myself, but in terms of like how to teach it to kids. So it's understandable and digestible is where I'm struggling. So like the order of how to teach it to them. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. No, no, yeah, we'd love to get involved. So appreciate your questions, Aaron. Thank you so much for what you're doing. These kids are really lucky. Yep. Thank you. Yeah, how fun. Yeah. I wish I had that class. Yeah, I know, right? It's, you know, though, it's really exciting that we're seeing stuff like this. I mean, it's, I mean, God, when we all were in school, like, you know, PE was the extent of, you know, any sort of, you know, anatomy or physical education that you got. And it was so generic. I just think if you teach kids about their bodies and what's happening and here's why you feel this way and here's what happens when you do this and that. I think it's so valuable. This is like valuable life information because when I get them as adults, as a trainer and they hire me. We have to unpack so much nonsense. They just don't know anything about what's going on and how this works and why do I feel this way? And it's like, my God, we could have learned that. Well, I love, I really loved your idea of give these kids a, you know, a famous person or athlete. Oh, I know, I was picturing it. That's perfect, right? Like literally you could, you know, and that's how I think I would write this curriculum and let's, the way Justin programmed to give like a generic overview is like, you know, he did a lot of central nervous system training at the beginning, right? So isometric, right? So that's the foundation of it, right? So then I would pick like a sport or a person that you can connect that to and say, what did they teach us about that? I mean, like the benefits of isometrics and then break down all the science that supports that. And then so for this first month, kids, we are gonna be learning some of the best isometric moves and this is how we would apply it to your workout. This is why we're doing it. Here's where we learned it from. Or imagine you have a picture of like the rock, like how does, how do you guys think the rock works out? How he actually works out? What could we, what do you think he could do different? What can we learn from that? What about this particular celebrity, this person? Because it just gets the kids like, oh, I follow that person. I want to see what they're doing, you know? Just to get them engaged. Yeah, and it's trial and error too. So she doesn't have to put so much pressure on this to be perfect. Like honestly, that's the biggest thing I've learned is as I'm going through it, I'm writing notes even to the program that I had written down on paper. And this is just something we learned as trainers anyways, is that, you know, we iterate. We constantly iterate based off of the feedback. And so, you know, it's gonna find that it's obviously a different audience and they're gonna respond a little bit differently. And like you said, I think the celebrity angle, you're gonna find, you know, moments like that where it's more relatable, definitely lean into those moments. Totally. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here. 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