Teenage boys today are physically weaker, less mobile and less aerobically fit than they were a generation ago. Additionally, they are sleeping less and continue to not eat breakfast. This isn’t good news from the CDC and definitely isn’t good news for parents of teenage boys. In my own experience, I’ve noticed that many of the teenage boys I initially meet to train as their strength coach lack basic general fitness; their grip strength gives out quick, their core cannot stabilize a simple...
17 days ago • 2 min read
It's a scene that plays out in gyms across the country every fall. A dad hears that the new guy running the weight room played Division I football, maybe he even went pro. He's strong, confident, and motivational. The dad shakes his hand, watches him move some serious weight, and thinks: "This is exactly who I want training my son." It's a completely understandable conclusion, but it's misguided. Not because he isn't a good person or a great role model, but because playing a sport at an elite...
24 days ago • 1 min read
It usually happens sometime in the fall of freshman or sophomore year. Maybe he recently got cut from his sport, or maybe he spent most of middle school on the couch. Either way, suddenly he has a new obsession. He's watching workout videos, asking about creatine, and by Thanksgiving, he's intensely training five or six days a week on a push-pull-legs bodybuilding split. He comes home exhausted, only to wake up and go right back the next day. After twenty years of working with teenage boys,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Early in my career as a high school strength coach, I worked with a teenage boy who wanted to put on muscle, but didn’t have the appetite or nutritional skills to do so. This kid taught me a lot about the reality of many teenage boys with small appetites and their eating habits, which was surprising to me. Although I’ve always been naturally thin, I always had a big appetite. Here is some background on my guy: he played baseball growing up but stopped playing after his freshman year. For two...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Last week, Meta announced Muse, a personal AI agent described as a tool that handles everyday tasks on your behalf. The tasks you don’t want to do, but have to do. And according to Axios, it will also fill out permission slips for school field trips. The two-minute task every middle schooler has been responsible for since they invented field trips. I have been teaching middle school boys for nearly twenty years and in that time I have watched the number of preteens and early teenagers who...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
The algorithm knows I have a pre-teen who plays sports. It also knows how I feel about it. Today my feed fed me this... ...and it got me thinking about the obsession over youth sports and the capitalistic overtaking of it. As I read it, I found myself saying "yup or duh" over and over again. As a middle school teacher, wellness & fitness professional, a dad of a pre-teen athlete, and an overall pretty knowledgable guy when it comes to sports, I have a lot of thoughts on this dilemma. So...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
It was the first week of school almost two decades ago. I was a new teacher settling down after a long day. Before I could sit down though, a 7th grader walked into my room crying hysterically. He was a big kid. Tall for his age, overweight, and clearly shy and sensitive about standing out. I walked with him, shoulder to shoulder, until he opened up and told me what happened: an adult in the building called him “big guy”. That’s it? That’s what got him so worked up? That’s what went through...
2 months ago • 1 min read
…or freshman soccer, cross-country, or golf. Something. He should do some type of athletic activity or sport the fall of his freshman year of a new school, even if he isn’t athletic at all. And it has nothing to do with the actual sport. Teenage boys are social creatures looking for connection and a sense of belonging, and in my opinion as an educator and coach, there is no more efficient and effective way of doing this than trying out for a fall sport freshman year. In August of 1998, I was...
2 months ago • 2 min read
A few years ago I had an 8th grader in my physical education class, we’ll call him Sam. He was a straight-A student who did Model UN and Chess Club and was always the first to raise his hand. He prided himself on being the smartest person in the room and had the grades to back it up. He was “academically gifted” in many ways. So I was genuinely surprised when he signed up for my Introduction to Strength Training elective that spring. The first session was hard to watch, mainly because Sam was...
3 months ago • 2 min read