Justin Harris - TEENLIFT & The Future of Physical Education

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over two years and running. It is 2021, and I am your host, Eric Malzone. I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Stop by futurofitness.co to subscribe and learn more. This episode of the Future of Fitness is presented to you by the Fit Tech Club, a business network run by the creators of the Fit Tech Summit, Europe's leading conference devoted to fitness and health technology. Look, friends, the fitness industry is changing faster than ever. The intersection of technology with fitness and health is growing bigger and more dynamic by the minute. Gyms are exploding figuratively, and their constituent parts are ending up at home, outdoors, on your wrist, or in entirely new places with brilliantly new concepts. Investors are pumping astronomical amounts of money into the market like we've never seen before. The FitTech Club believes that collaboration is the advantage to these times of change. That's why the club aims to bring thought leaders together to inspire them by making the right contacts at the right time and giving insights to the industry's most relevant and current trends. Here's what Melanie Lauer, CEO of Kettler and TriSports, says about the FitTech Club.

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Sure thing. Well, um, my name's Justin Harris. I'm an athletic director and PE teacher here in St. Louis, Missouri. I've been an educator now for 20 years. My beginning background was in third grade education elementary education and varsity baseball coaching down in New Orleans, Louisiana, Isidore Newman School. From there, my wife um grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. So that's where we are now raising our two girls. One is 14, she's a ninth grader, and I have a sixth grader here at my school at Forsyth now who's 11. And so through this whole journey of being a baseball coach, you know, we always wanted to get the optimal performance out of our athletes. And it was at that time that I learned about CrossFit and learned about how to train athletes that way. From coaching baseball in Louisiana, I came up to St. Louis still coaching varsity baseball. And I was given the task to come up with the first offseason program that our high school baseball team here in Clayton had ever done. So immediately jumped into the bag of kind of the world of CrossFit and baseball training that we had done down there. Um, and while this was going on, got asked to move to a new job as athletic director at Forsyth School. And by the way, you'll be a PE teacher. And so the first conversation I had with the head of school here was I've never been a PE teacher, so I'm not sure I have the right background knowledge I need to really help these kids in the right way. And also, by the way, what data are we collecting as PE teachers to make sure that these kids are actually growing? Um, data as an educator in third grade, you know, you teach kids how to read, you're you're constantly looking at data. And I knew that to be a good PE teacher, we had to find data to look at that way. So it led me to CrossFit Kids, which at the time Jeff and Mickey Martin were running. Um, started taking um my crosshair level one, ended up doing my first CrossFit Kids class with Jeff and Mickey's son, Keegan. And really it really started to develop my better understanding of physical education where we were 10, 20 years ago and where we were heading now. And from that, I developed a relationship through the brand X method as Jeff and Mickey Martin migrated over and started to really reshape how we train all of these elementary school kids. And originally when I first came to the school, it was a place where um and I'm not kidding you when I tell you this, there was a spinning wheel, and it was like run five laps or four laps or three laps or two laps, and you know, and then you might do some other things, but that's not a program. And so any, you know, that's an activity. That's an activity. And so, you know, I I worked with my colleague Shelly. She's she's been here for a long time and she's been phenomenal. She did all these trainings with me. She was right in the middle of it. And we developed this PE program. And now I'm proud to say um it's probably one of the top, at least in my opinion, of our independent school system here in St. Louis, probably one of the top, if not the top, physical education programs that we have around and definitely our county, possibly our state. And I would rival it with other places in terms of what we do for the whole child in the sense of the skills that we teach and the sports that they play, um, but really to the workouts we do and the way we teach them how to move from three years old all the way up to 12. Um, and so through all that, the conversation started to develop with Jeff and Mickey, and the relationship started to develop into how we were testing our athletes, how we were doing broad jump tests and vertical jump testing and all of these different types of data assessments and giving them to parents. And it led me to what I'm doing now on the um as well as teaching, which is I'm a founder of a company called Teen Lift. And it the teen, it is not T E A M, but is T-E-E-N, the age group, teens, and lift stands for Life Improvement Fitness Toolkit. And I developed that program.

And real quick, Justin. So it's teen-lift.com. So people want to learn.

That is correct. And we're also on social media, um, Facebook and Instagram. You can check us there. And we developed that program because I was also teaching classes at a CrossFit Gym in the evenings. And one of my partners there that we were working out with was a pediatric trauma surgeon with a um his specialty was um you know looking at obesity and looking at you know nutrition and all of these avenues. And through a late night conversation after a workout, he was telling me that they were doing these stomach operations on these obese teenagers. And my first reaction was, are you are you kidding me? Like, what are you doing? Like, why aren't you just teaching these kids how to how to exercise properly and and train and eat right? And and he explained to me very clearly, like, you don't understand. These are kids with a BMI well over 50. And if we don't do something now, their organs are gonna fail. That's why we're coming up with this, you know, this uh this new way we're trying to help these kids. And and it's a life-threatening situation. It's not like a guy just comes in, he's like, We want to lose weight, we're gonna do this surgery. It's not like that at all. So we sat on that for a few days and continued to work out together and talk. And about a week later, I said to him, What do you do with these kids before they go into surgery, pre-surgery, and post-surgery? And he calmly looked at me and said, Absolutely nothing. We don't do anything with them. And I said, Well, it seems to me like with a program like that you're doing, it would really help kids, especially these teens that you're working with, um, if you taught them how to lift and train properly and eat right. And then post-surgery, you kind of had like a post-op, you know, almost like a physical therapy would be, before you send them out on their own. And so two days went by. This is the funniest thing. 48 hours goes by. He calls me up. Hey, let's work out. 4:30 in the morning, let's meet at the gym. I want to talk to you. So we go to the gym. His name's Jose Greenspawn, by the way. And Jose and I are talking, and he says, I've researched every JAMA medical article I can find. Nobody does this. Nobody does this in anywhere that's that's researched it, that's produced it. And he's like, I think we need to create something that can really help a lot of kids. So we immediately started sitting down and writing out ideas and coming up with you know how we can do this. And and the research that we've done and that Jose spent a lot of time doing was to make sure that we could make the maximum impact in the shortest amount of time possible with these kids. So, but also be realistic, right? Like you can't say, okay, we're gonna throw these kids in an eight-week intensive class and all they're gonna do is work out and then we're gonna change their lives forever. We have to approach it in a systematic way that it gets these kids to really understand that first of all, we got to build on what they already do. Um they're strong, they're they're young, they can really make a change. So some of the latest research shows that if you can work with someone for 52 times, especially kids, that you can really create a habit. And so the first thing we did was we 52 lessons, 52 times we're gonna meet with these kids. And we do it three days a week over a four-month period. And as we started to get into how we were gonna train them, the first thing I said was, well, we need to talk, talk to Jeff and Mickey Martin. They're the people I know are the most knowledgeable with youth and fitness and training, and training kids without injuries. That was another big key because this group, they have very tough movement patterns. They're all their maladaptive movement patterns are such that you really have to be careful in how you train them. You can't just tell a kid to throw a barbell on his back when he weighs 400 pounds because the truth is he doesn't have the mobility to put his hands on top of a barbell. So we had to buy different barbells or use bands. Um, you know, you can't have a kid just do a lunge because you want him to do a lunge. They have to hold onto a rope or use a support with a box or a wall. So we really had to think about how we were gonna do this. And that is where Jeff and Mickey really came in to help us develop this. And so we all became partners. And as as we started to discuss the training side of things, we knew nutrition needed to be a huge component. Um, Jose and one of our um partners, Sierra Crowley, she's a she's a nurse at the same hospital with Jose, and she's one of our partners. They're both precision nutrition certified. We we've created what we call Lyft Nutrition that runs with our program where we give these kids, we give them meals, we teach them how what a portion looks like. Um an example of that would be we had trail mix one day. We gave a kid a small cup and we said this was a portion. They couldn't realize that that's actually a portion, first of all, some of these kids. But the funniest part of it was in the trail mix, one of the kids looks at us, he says, Man, like coach, this tastes just like peanut butter. You know, and like, well, yeah, where do you think? But he didn't have the knowledge to know where how peanut butter was made, you know, and and and and where that comes from. And a lot of these kids that we have are um living in food deserts. The closest thing where they go to get food is a convenience store. So we had to have a conversation with them and talk to them about if you're at the convenience store, what are some of the best options? And so there's a lot of education on that nutrition piece, but we still were missing something with Teen Lift. And Jeff and Mickey had the answer for that. And that was a friend of theirs named Norm Mulder. He owns a company called Topuku, and it stands for the only person you cheat is you. And he had already developed this program, and it's a habit transformation program. What it does is it teaches kids how to start with very small goals, like a uh making three things on a list that you're gonna do, and let's accomplish those to let's look down the road a month from now. How are we gonna set a different goal for ourselves? And let's set a long-term goal. Like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And Norm is the perfect person to run this program for Topuku because he went to Vietnam. He was, I think he said in the bottom two or three in his class, and he's from Cleveland, Ohio. And when he came back from Vietnam, he was a garbage man and he hated his job. He wanted to change his life and change his job. And so he got into finance and became a financial planner and ended up finding a way to become a financial planner for teachers and firefighters and police officers. And he built this billion-dollar company. And to um, I'm drawing a blank right now. I wish I had this on my on hand here. I can't think of the actual name. It's driving me crazy. It'll it'll come up. But um, but through this, he learned that it it was his understanding of goal setting that helped him to achieve the success that he had. So he's retired now, he just does things for topuku. So when he created Topuku, he immediately started helping incarcerated teens. And through that, he's trained over a hundred thousand incarcerated teens. And the recidivism rate has dropped tremendously on these kids not doing the same crime or getting back in these into um, you know, a juvie or or or in in jail in some instances. And so we've used this program and really the the mindfulness of this to help create teen lift. So it's kind of a three-prompt approach. Topuku with the behavioral side, the lift nutrition, and then of course the lifting through brand X method. And every lesson that we have through um Teen Lift has looked at every aspect of how we move from how to perform a squat without weight to with weight to deadlifting. Um and then the other part I haven't mentioned with that yet is by the way, we also learned that in order for this to really take hold with a kid, it has to be a whole family thing. So we've included for for no charge, we train the parents for free. And what we do is we allow parents to look at we have a workout booklet of different warm-ups, low-skill, no-skill movements, and then mobility work, which we were fortunate enough through Jeff and Mickey to have friends with Kelly Starrett at the Ready State, and he helped provide a lot of mobility work that we do. Everything we've done has come from them, from the arm care movements that we do to the barbell warmups that we do with Brand X method, and it's really pretty phenomenal. I mean, we were able to Yeah, that's that's one hell of a team. Right. I mean, and that and the funny thing about it is when Jose and I were first coming up with this, I I get really excited about stuff, and I'm like, okay, listen, we're gonna talk to Jeff and Mickey, and we're gonna do this. And then I guarantee we're gonna be able to reach out to Kelly Storrett. Um, they're gonna have just knowledge, they want to help kids, they have the same, you know, goals that we have with helping youth and fitness. And Kelly, right away, you know, he he actually had Jose on a podcast um two years ago they were doing with obesity and youth fitness. And immediately he starts doing our arm care spin-up on our upper body days. Um, and then he helps look at like what we do with our um you know, barbell smashes and different mobility work. And it's just it's pretty awesome when you see it all come together. Um, we've been able, we've done two cohorts, trained about 35 kids so far, and we've had zero injuries. And like I said, these are these are kids that range from almost 600 pounds to um you know 12-year-olds that are you know around 250 pounds. I mean, we've we've got 600 pounds? Yeah, we've had some kids that started off almost 600 pounds. Um and and we've also had we've also had kids not finish the program, right? Like part of all of this is getting a buy-in from a kid. Um we have this one girl, Gracie, she's a senior now, she's getting ready to graduate high school. Her first three to four sessions, she never walked in the door. She sat out in the parking lot in tears, didn't want to walk in. And she had some some some you know, some challenges mentally, this and and confidence issues. She didn't want to walk in there. And we had a coach just sit out there with her and talk the whole time. By the fourth, fifth class, she comes in. Before we finish month two, she's leading the barbell warm-up. I mean, the the um the things that you don't see, like everyone wants to do a program and they want to say, look how much weight this kid lost. But what they didn't understand was look at this girl in front of a crowd performing. Um, look at the confidence they have. We had a kid Al lose well over 150 pounds. Um there uh our pictures on our Instagram that show him like pre-pants and now. Um and and he was deadlifting at our, we do a powerlifting meet at the end of every session, and we bring all the families in and and friends of the program, and they watch these kids uh bench press, they watch them deadlift, they watch them squat. And it's hard for a kid that maybe has never felt comfortable in their own skin to walk up in front of a crowd of 50 to 60 people and say, I'm gonna deadlift. You know, to watch Al walk up there and pull 300 pounds after four months of training is a pretty amazing thing to see. And not only that, to watch him deadlift or to watch him squat over 225 pounds with good form. Like his knees aren't going valgus, he's bracing properly. Like these are monumental shifts, but more so for Al, he was a kid that he was eight, he was 18 years old when he started. We were not really sure if we were going to allow him to do the program because we were worried about, you know, just is he ready for this? Because he had just dropped out of high school. He lives in East St. Louis, Illinois. Just dropped out of high school and he didn't say much. He had a really he didn't talk, and it it took a while for me to understand why, but he he had a really bad stuttering challenge that he had to deal with. And he so he didn't want to speak. He had been made fun of for years, and that was part of the reason why he dropped out of school. Um through after he he finished one what he finished our program once and he said, I want to do it again. Can you let me do it again? And we said, We'll let you do it again, but you can't just be a normal student in our class. You have to be a mentor with the new kids that come in. So you're gonna be a leader, you're gonna come in, and when that kid is struggling, he doesn't want to do anything, you're gonna be the positive influence on him. And he's like, Okay. And to this day, he says, like, I still get messages from him. And he's like, Coach, when are you gonna hire me to be a team lift coach? You know, like that's what he like that's what he wants to do. But the reason why I would even look at Al to do that is because Al went back to school. He enrolled in a new school, he finished, and we have pictures of him. He made the honor roll. Like that's a phenomenal transformative change in his life that can give him confidence to now go get a job or maybe go to school, whatever he wants to do. He now has the tools to do it, and it's because of that combination of the nutrition, the lifting, and topuku to give him that confidence to move on. Um, which it which is a phenomenal story. Um, you know, and and those we have a story like that for every kid. One of the girls we had, Anna, she was born, um, her mother was addicted to crack cocaine. She was sexually abused as a child, and finally, one of the nurses at Cardinal Glenn adopted her and her brother and took her, took them into her home, and they put her in our teen lift program. And this was this was right before COVID. Anna uh did all the teen lift. She was one of those people that she didn't ever like anything. You could never get her to smile. And all of a sudden, by the end, she's smiling, she's talking to people, she's developing friendships within the gym and our community here. And she says to me, Coach, I want a job. And I and I at our school, I also look over the aftercare program we have here. And so I actually had a way I could I could hire her to do something, but I told her, Anna, I can't give you a job yet. You're not ready. And she said, Why? I said, Because your mom can't drive you to your job every day and you don't have your license. So until you go out and do what you need to do to learn how to drive and get your license, I'm not even gonna consider the possibility of making that happen. A month later, she comes in, shows me her license. When am I getting that interview? So I talked to our aftercare staff here. It was cool. Like, so I talked to our aftercare staff here and explained to them where she's coming from. And our one of our um our directors of Aftercare staff, Deborah, she's an African-American woman. A lot of our children that come in, all the teens are African Americans, and she said, I want to come in and I want to be a positive influence with them. So she would come in and work out with the parents, and she would see the kids, talk to them. So she knew who Anna was. She knew that she still had to help Anna along. You know, Anna was going to be in situations where she's leading children. She put her with the youngest, the squirreliest kids you could find, right off the bat from day one. She had these little three-year-olds that are running wild, and Anna's up on her feet, she's moving, she's got to be a commanding presence, she's got to be a leader. And she worked for us for a year until COVID hit, and we all went, you know, locked up in our homes. Um, but those stories that I share with you, I share with you because it's it changes their lives. It's not just a kid losing weight, it's someone who's losing weight and now wanting to get a job and wanting to better themselves and now setting goals for what they want to be in their lives. And that's because of Topuku, you know, setting those long-term goals. Who do you want to be? How do you want to get there? And really analyzing that data. Um, and so it's been a really amazing, it's a rewarding job, obviously. What we're all in these professions because we love kids. I mean, Jose being a pediatric trauma surgeon, Jeff and Mickey with Brand X, Norm at Topuku, me as a teacher here, and and all the coaches that we trained to work with us all had one thing in common, which is they wanted to help kids, which was really amazing. And on top of that, they had physical therapy backgrounds, um, you know, they they were gym coaches, they they all you know had a common goal. And that's really the key. I mean, one of the things we hope to do with Teen Lift is we want to roll it out to all brand X training centers. And we want them to get right into it right away. And the reason why we want to do that is because we know they know, first of all, the right way we train. They they know how to teach the squat properly, they know how to teach kids how to deadlift and oppress. Now we can help them with the nutrition and the um topuku side, which you're talking about technology. We initially used to teach every one of these lessons in person on the board, and we would give them homework. Well, what do you do with a kid who isn't motivated, doesn't like to do things, giving them homework. That's a great idea. It's not really a great idea. Um, when they would come in, they wouldn't have their homework done. And so we'd sit down and we're not gonna work out. You guys love working out. We're gonna sit down and we're gonna we're gonna do our homework. Um, but what COVID did with us is it really made us retrain our brains and how can we do a better job at this? Instead of having these brand X training centers who want to be team lift centers, instead of having to teach them and train each coach on how we teach nutrition or how we teach Topuku, we've just added all onto one platform through Topuku. So, what what's gonna happen now when when we get a brand a brand X training center or a team lift center running a teen lift program, these kids are gonna use our platform and we're still gonna teach them. We're gonna, they're gonna have our our nutrition videos, our topuku videos. Their lessons now are gonna be able to be done on their on their handheld devices, on an iPad, on a on a phone. And instead of, you know, you got to do this right now in the gym, they're gonna have reminders that get pushed to them to hey, like log in, how do you feel today? You know, attendance, you can you can check into class this way. And that makes it, I think, a little more um proactive and into what our kids are doing with technology, um, and and really make it a lot simpler and more streamlined for us at Teen Lift.

Wow, man, that was a lot of you know it was it's great. I I'm I'm yeah, I just I'm very impressed with what you guys are doing. And there's so many questions that kind of come to mind. And I guess first of all, obviously you guys are addressing the problem. Um, you know, it's it's it doesn't take much to see that we have a youth obesity issue here in the United States. You just walk around, right? And uh but what do you I mean there's so many theories and so many people um talk about it, but what do you think really does drive the problem? Like what are what are some of the factors that you're seeing? And and you know, one of the reasons that I'm thinking about this, I've been reading some books. I mean, coddling of the American mind is one that I read recently, and and take you know some things from it, some things with a you know, a grain of salt. And um, you know, also just talking to Jeff and Mickey this week, they had mentioned that you know, some areas of California, whether it be districts or counties, have ruled out running for physical education classes, kids shouldn't run because they're worried about kids getting hurt, right? Um now I know California is kind of its own thing, but you know, when when you start to when I hear stuff like, oh that's crazy it's so different. Like I was playing games like Butts Up when I was you know that age. And it was the game was like, if I got hurt, I got hurt, that was okay. Whatever, I was gonna be fine, or you know, you know, I'd heal and move on. So I mean it just it just seems like such a drastically different world than the youth I remember. And I'm wondering, you know, from your point of view, is like, how did we get here, man? Like what what happened?

Um it that is such an um that's the million dollar question, right? Because if because if we could just fix it, then we would change the world. Um but it it I see kids, my wife runs our early childhood program here at our school at Forsyth. And so she has two-year-olds that walk in the door. Um if you would have asked a parent that didn't have a child in our program, majority of them would be like, Well, the kids can't put on their shoes. I have to put on their shoes, I have to put on their jackets. Well, guess what? The first thing is when our kids walk in in my wife's two-year-old program, they do they take their shoes off at the door by themselves. And they learn. It takes time, right? But they learn right away that like this is what I do first. And then the second thing they do is help hang up their backpack and hang up their coat. And my point of sharing that is the parent education piece, I think, is one of the biggest pieces that's missing in our in our society now. Um and part of it, I believe, is because of technology. I mean, I mean, that's a fact. Um, parents are very they can't get away from work anymore. Work can be on their phone. Um, their their favorite game could be on their phone. I don't know, maybe they're playing Candy Crush. Um, but the the technology has has has hampered our society. When when when you and I are growing up, I'm 42 years old, my mom said, get home when the streetlights are on. And when I saw that streetlight come on, I was riding my bike home. Again, riding my bike home, which meant I wasn't just in my backyard. And and as parents nowadays, uh, I see a lot of parents. Um, like I said, I teach kids from three years old to 12 every day. And uh parents don't know enough about what it takes to be a great parent. I'm not saying they're bad parents, they want to be their parent, their child's best friend. And that's hard to do. It's really hard to be your child's best friend, but also tell them no. And we see it all the time. We see the kids that come in and they say, I don't want to do that. I don't want to. And I'm like, well, the good news for you is you're the student and I'm the teacher, and we're gonna do this today, you know. And I also have the support of the parents and the school to do that. A lot of a lot of people, um teachers in public schools don't have that support, and it makes it harder. But if we could learn how to educate parents at a younger age, we won't wrap these children in bubbles and realize it's gonna be okay. Um, I use this analogy a lot with with parents and educators when we talk, and people say things are gonna be too hard on kids. And I said, Well, when you when your child was a was really, really tiny and they started to pull themselves up on it on a table, did you immediately pick them up and hold them and say, Oh, no, no, do that? You didn't, because you knew that this was the first step to walking, right? And they're like, of course. I'm like, right. And then when your kid kept falling down, they would cry, you would say it was okay, because it was okay. And then eventually started walking, and guess what? They fell and they got hurt, and it was still okay. Like, we have to let kids make mistakes and to fail. And um, you know, I used to use this phrase in baseball all the time. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's a profound statement in my world because every day I tell kids in PE class every day, if you don't fail in my class every day, then you're not working hard enough. And some of the kids look at me and they I'm like, well, think about it for a second. If we are doing a workout for time, which happens occasionally, um, shouldn't you go as hard as you can? You know, you can only control two key two things in my class, I tell them your attitude and your effort. And so if you have the right attitude and you're giving it your all every day, you know, that's all we can ask for. That's all I can ask for in this class is is give me your best attitude and best effort. And you're going to fail if you do, because at some point you're not going to be able to go anymore. And it's okay. But under getting kids to understand at an early age and getting parents to understand at early age, failure is part of growth. I think it does a whole lot of good for kids. And and you know, having two girls of my own, you know, we my grandparents have a large farm in um in northern Kentucky, and we would go there all the time, and they'd be like, What can we do? And I'm like, don't go in the cat the pasture with the bulls. That's what you can't do. What you can do is anything else you want. And so they go hiking, they, you know, they they go skip rocks, they break sticks, they climb trees. That's being a kid, you know. Um, don't climb in the grain bin is another one that we have there because you could suffocate. We don't want them to do that. Yeah, that could be fatal. But but we you have to let kids get out and play. Um, you know, I um my wife, my family were Catholic, and a year or so ago, a priest was giving a sermon, and he said, let your kids go out and play. You don't have to watch every single thing they do. They're okay. Let them ride their bike to their friend's house. He's like, I'm not saying something bad couldn't happen, but where's our trust and faith that good things are gonna happen? And I think when it comes to like when you start looking at obesity, sometimes when you don't tell your kid no, and they grow up on a life of I'm gonna eat Cheetos and you know all the things that I like all the time, guess what's gonna happen as they get older? They're gonna keep eating Cheetos, and it's not gonna change. And you know, I one of the first things that Jeff and Mickey taught me about nutrition, and I use it still to this day with kids, is everyday foods, sometimes foods, and every once in a while. You never tell your kid you can't have that, but but it's okay to have an ice cream cone, but it's maybe not okay to have an ice cream cone every single day. You know, um, but you also have to understand like what are your daily vitamins? Like, I mean, I we have rules in my house, the kids make their own beds. My my kids, when we introduced them and let them have technology, um, that was a tough one for our family when we, you know, broke that down and let them have it, but they had to do their own laundry to to be able to have a phone. You know, like they're a citizen of our home and the community, and this is your part. Like, I'm not your I'm not your maid. And um and giving kids clear guidelines, telling them no, I think can do a lot of good for kids because when it actually happens, they accept it and they move on and they're fine. Um, you know, kids in our class will look at the workout um and they're like, okay, here we go. You know, and they and they and they do it because that's that's what we do. But when they go to middle school and their PE program isn't even as challenging as it was here, I get emails from parents and kids all the time, thank you. Thank you for doing this for me. Because now I know what good, what, what being in shape is, and I know how to keep myself in shape because I'm not doing the same things in my middle school and high school PE programs because they're all geared to their team sports. And so I get kids all the time, can you write up a workout for me? And my common response to them is, why don't you write what you think a good workout would be this week and send it to me and then let's talk. And it goes back to making sure they have those tools, you know, like, oh yeah, you did leg day four days in a row. How's your push-up? You know, and like maybe we shouldn't do that, you know, and getting them to understand volume and rest and recovery and all of these things. And that's what we do in our PE classes. That's what we do in Teen Lyft, that's what we do at Brand X. And um, you know, there's there's never going to be one little thing we can do to change obesity, but we can start by educating the parents and learning how to be better PE teachers and instructors in schools and building those communities up. And if we can do that first, then we can hopefully stop getting the Coca-Cola's and Pepsi's of the world, you know, driving home what they want as far as their products. You know, we could start teaching kids. I'm not telling them it's not okay or they should never have a Coke, even if I might believe that. Like, but if they had it every once in a while, it's gonna be better than having it every day.

Make sense? Totally. 100%, man. I uh so I guess I never, as we were talking, I never kind of got into the details of like the organization of teen lift and like is it are you guys um local? Are you guys um you know, kind of uh yeah, yeah, how's it starting to spread? Like, what does the growth pattern look like? How do people start to get involved? How are you guys organized? Give us some of those details.

So currently we're we're local. We um there's a company here in in St. Louis called Centeen that we had spoken with. They have a lot of their um a lot of their families, their their clients are underprivileged and they they are an insurance company that basically provides things for them. Our our first um interaction with them was we wanted to get a lot of data here so we could help the whole state of Missouri. Um, and that's kind of the goal, not necessarily right now with that company, but with the hospital. So we've met with Barnes Jewish Hospital, my friend Jose with Cardinal Glennon, and we're trying to get to those kids first because we want to make sure that when we start to branch out, what the the big pie in the sky goal is every every gym in America running a teen lift program. Because the truth is you can make it can be a lucrative job for that coach outside of their normal, you know, class schedule. But the bigger reason is because it's life-changing and and there's always time at a gym. I mean, most of these brand X gyms, CrossFit gyms, or whatnot, their last class is at six o'clock. Well, we had our first class at 7:30 every night. You know, we made sure that there were no no adults in the gym that were a part of the the we were at um 2-6 fitness was the name of the gym that we were working out of. And the woman there let us train for two years for no charge. It was phenomenal. Um, she just wanted to help these kids. And so that's the goal is starting here in St. Louis and branching out. But what we hope to do within the next year is branch out to brand X training centers first and to give them the first, you know, crack at how we do this. But we also are trying to finalize that partnership with the hospitals to make it easier for them to get the children because all of these hospitals see these kids all the time. And we're talking about kids BMI 30 and above, you know, like in some cases over 50. And what better place than to create those relationships with these Brand X training centers and to say, this is the place where you want to send these kids? Um Barnes Jewish Hospital, we did a we did a call over the summer with, I think it was 40 doctors on the call. And it was just a QA. We told them about what we did, and then we talked about things that you and I are talking about right now. And at the end of the day, at the end of the conversation, all of the doctors said we have to change the legislation in the state to provide more money for these kids. And that's truly at the root cause. That's where the the biggest problem is as far as getting into these kids to help them, the ones that are at risk now. The the biggest change is with education on the younger side, so they don't get there. But what do we do with these kids that are there? Because the likelihood of those kids changing the trajectory, the trajectory of their life at 19 if they're obese, it's just not gonna happen. Studies show it, the data shows it, it's not gonna happen. And that's why we chose Teen Lyft. We wanted to get the most at-risk group now at teens, so that we can hopefully help them as quickly as possible before they become adults. Um so St. Louis, Brand X training centers, and eventually we'd like to be all over, but we'd like to work through insurance companies and and and places that can fund it to get these kids directly in to the to the gyms, through the hospitals.

Awesome. Awesome. You know, uh I you know, I realize that this is most likely this is like a team effort globally, right? It's not just you guys are doing it locally, but so I guess, you know, I think the question is, you know, is there anybody else you know doing great work that you'd like to acknowledge as well throughout the United States or other areas of the world? Like any any other kind of shout outs you want to give to those people?

Um absolutely. Um Stephen Kinsella is I believe he's I believe it's Ireland, where he's running a FMS, FSM Bray. Um he's a brand X training center, he's doing amazing stuff there. And then Fitter Futures, I believe it's in Australia.

Yeah, Sam. Yeah, she was on the show.

Yeah. What they're doing.

Is that of uh Melbourne?

Yeah, Melbourne. Maybe? Yeah.

Yeah.

They're they're phenomenal. I mean, they are what they're doing, they're doing exactly what what we hope to do all over. What every coach, truly, that you can I I don't know of many coaches that say, yeah, I don't really want to help anybody. Like if you're a coach, you have uh like you want to help people, you want to make people better. You you you think you have a knack at doing that. And I think any coach wants to do that. But these coaches, as well as Dan Quisenberry, he's at Brandex Nashville. Those three coaches are people that I admire. Um, Dan and I talk all the time. I mean, we shoot text to each other at least once a week. Um, he'll send me a video um of his kids or whatever doing something. And we have kids around the same age, and I'll send them something of mine. And um he he's just for me, he's a great resource also because he's an amazing PE teacher. And we did a lot of the educators youth coaches course for Brand X. And so through that, um, he's just a he's just a great sounding board. I I think great educators typically steal ideas from other great educators, and so it's nice to have those people around that you can constantly talk to and be like, oh yeah, I like that. I'm gonna try that. Um, and so those are people that I think are doing awesome things that I encourage people that are listening to definitely follow because it's it's remarkable. And one of the things I'm hoping to do here soon at Forsyth, we have a new head of school and he's great guy is I want to make Forsyth School a brand X campus and really start to highlight what we're doing because we PE teaching needs to improve. And the way that like I mean, there are standards and way of ways of doing things, and it's great, but we also have to look at fitness. And uh, you know, I'm not saying we have to go back to the 1950s, but there is a place that we have to be exercising at least half of our class every day. We have to, because these kids are not getting it outside of the classroom. And I'm fortunate enough to have PE every single day with my kids for 30 minutes, and in some cases, in some classes, 35 minutes. And that's because of our cohorts. I used to have 45 minutes with some kids. We we have to get back to doing this because what we know because of technology and video games and our parents' schedules and programming of kids is that they're not getting outside and playing enough like you and I would. And so we have to fix that by getting it more into the classroom and and and focusing more on exercise and getting those heart rates up in the class.

Awesome, man. Um, last question I always ask is you know, what what is it specifically that you need right now? So today is recording date, September 30th, 2021. What is it that uh, you know, Justin and Teen Lyft and and the whole movement, what are what are uh what's important to you right now for your growth?

Um for for my growth is just for more people. I mean, for teen lift, first of all, like go to our social media pages, like them, follow them, send us a message. Um, if you're if you're really interested, send us a direct message and we'll reach out to you and connect. Um, one of the things I like to do is start running some pilots through some of these brand X training centers and other places of interest and really talking to these coaches. Um, that would help us at Team Lift personally. Um reaching out, reaching out to me, Jay Harris at ForsythSchool.org, um, and letting me know you're interested. We can talk to you about the Brand X program. Like I said, our educators youth course. If you're a PE teacher, if you just have an interest in youth fitness, you don't have to be a teacher, um, come talk to me. I'd like to talk to you. I think that the more communities we can build and grow, um we can start to help these kids and it can start to catch on. I mean, the one thing that brand X and our school and the way we've trained for my own selfish, selfish regions, my kids, I've been able to really grow this um brand here because people see my kids perform in sports and they're like, oh my gosh, like your daughter's so fast, or they're so good at this, or they're so strong. Like, what are you feeding them? And I'm like, well, we feed them fruits and vegetables and protein, but we train, like we lift weights, we have daily PE. And it's not we had daily PE, so you don't lift weights. No, daily PE is just a movement break. Like we lift all the time, we follow a program, and that's why they're successful. Um, and and and it, and then I have a family, um, they'll come up to me like, Do you have any openings? You know, and so my you know, so my summer consists of training about 30 kids three to four days a week. Um, but what I tell them is go follow the brand X method. Like, like you can educate yourself just as easily as as I can educate you. Um as parents, I think sometimes we think like we just have to pay someone to fix the problem. But the truth is, do it yourself. You know, like I'm I had a dad who has a son here at our school who's a hockey, hockey player, and he's like, Man, I want him to work out with you, but we just with ice time, we can't ever get, we're we're all over the place. We can't set up a good schedule. And I'm like, why don't you become a brand X coach? And he looked at me, he's like, Really? Why put him on a call with Jeff and Mickey? And you know, he's he's he's thinking about becoming a youth strength coach. And I'm like, Yeah, build your own gym. Like you can do this. And um, and it's given the parents that confidence. So the more people that are interested, they reach out. Um, that's I think the best way to grow for me. Um, because the more people that are involved in these same methodologies and training method um things, the more we can communicate and learn from one another. Because kids are gonna change and they're gonna evolve. And in education and training, we all have to evolve too. And if we don't start getting to that growth mindset where we're evolving with the time, um, you know, we're gonna we're gonna be stuck at this moment right now. We're like, what's happening to our kids? Well, we haven't, we didn't evolve, and we have to learn how to do that.

Awesome. Well said, Justin. I mean, I I obviously appreciate all the work you're doing. I think everybody who's listening uh will appreciate as well. And I encourage them to get involved, at least check it and consider it, and you know, maybe ask uh, well, why not me? Absolutely. Why can't I get involved? I think that's that's a critical question. Man, I wish I could reach to the screen and shake your hand right now. Uh, but that's uh, you know, our recording studio isn't quite capable of that yet. Um, but yeah, man, really appreciate all the work you're doing. And um, you know, once again, I think people go to teen-lift.com, and then you mentioned all the social media handles and your email and all that stuff. So um thanks for being so um I guess accessible to people as well. So it's it's great to see that. So yeah, man, um really appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen, Justin Harris. Thank you very much, Eric. I appreciate you having me on. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone, and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minute. If you did, I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it, iTunes, Spotify, Castbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it and we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more, get in touch with me, simply go to the futureoffitness.co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the future of fitness. Have a great day.