Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2277: The Five Best Sports for Kids

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Why there is more to sports than just contributing to physical health. (1:36) The importance of physical play for human beings. (4:59) The skill of knowing how to win and lose. (8:45) The value of learning when to lead and follow. (11:25) The nervous system needs stimulus! (15:38) The benefits of putting your child in multiple sports. (16:43) 5 Best Sports to Put Your Kids In. #1 - Swimming (before they can walk they can swim). (19:31) #2 - Gymnastics (for overall physical and motor development). (22:20) #3 - Wrestling (to build grit and toughness). (25:34) #4 - Track and field (we are made to run). (28:45) #5 - Soccer, basketball, or football (teamwork, eye-foot coordination). (31:49) Related Links/Products Mentioned Exclusively for Mind Pump Listeners, NASM is offering an extra $100 off select Certified Personal Trainer programs. ** Code MPM100 at checkout ** February Promotion: MAPS Performance | Extreme Fitness Bundle 50% off! ** Code FEB50 at checkout ** Mind Pump #952: Chad Wesley Smith Of Juggernaut Training Systems Infant Swimming: What Are the Benefits? - Healthline Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources People Mentioned Chad Wesley Smith (@chadwesleysmith) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about the five best sports

that you can put your kids in and why. By the way, this episode is brought to you by the best national certification in the world for personal trainers and coaches and ASM they've been around for a while. They do the best job They have multiple courses you can take the first certification course that the three hosts here of this show did back in the day We have tremendous respect for them and we got you guys a discount code. Check this out. If you go to mpnasm.com, you will get $100 off select certified personal trainer

programs, but you have to use the code MPM 100. So $100 off with the code MPM 100. We're also running a sale on some workout programs right now. Maps performance is half off. And then our extreme fitness bundle of workout programs is also half off. If you're interested in those, go to maps, fitness products.com and use the code FEB 50 for the discount. All right. Back to the show. One of the best things you could do as a parent for your children is to put them

in sports data shows. It not only improves their physical health, but it also improves their mental and psychological health. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the five best sports that you can put your kids in. You know, it's another stat to look up, Doug, is the, I forget, um, there's a correlation with their GPA and also getting in trouble, like discipline. Yes. And like, I forgot what the stat was, but it's significant. You know what's important about this episode of this topic is that there was a period,

it's changed now, it's reversing, but there was a period there where physical activity and sports was de-emphasized. In fact, they started cutting funding and reducing access to it because it was all about STEM, right? Science and math and, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, and they were switching out the time, like less time playing, less time playing sports, more time doing these other things that are quote unquote more

important. And what we're finding now is it was a big mistake. It was a major mistake because that and the arts. That's GPA Doug will show me also like crime and fighting and like like mispervading. Right. So GPA was what 2.7. Yeah, 2.7 was the average. And then with playing sports, it's over three. Yeah. So there's that. And by the way, that's not the sport. 2.0 is the minimum, which is interesting, right? So sports, most high school sports have a minimum of you to carry a 2.0. So, but their average is much higher. Their average is higher anyways, right?

So they're averaging over a 3.0 playing sports, but there, I've also seen more with like, like misbehaving and like crime and things like that too. Yeah. Well, the data is, um, what's interesting about the data is for a long time, we thought that sports for kids was really just about being active. So we connected physical activity, like, oh, they just got it. It's, it's exercise. That's all it is.

And regardless of what they play, doesn't make a big difference unless they become a professional athlete. And so they just started reducing, um, access to it and cutting funding towards it. But we're finding now is yes, of course, sports contribute to physical health. And that's quite clear now, especially with how inactive kids have become. I mean, when I first became a trainer, type two diabetes was called adult onset diabetes because only adults got it. You developed it through poor lifestyle habits, but so many kids started getting it, they changed the name. And that's where we're at now

So definitely there's definite physical benefits, but now we see in the data that there's tremendous psychological and mental and societal benefits to Children being in sports. So it's not just about moving the body and being physical. It's about, it's so much more than that. It's a crazy microcosm for so many different things, for social integration, for leadership, for, you know, being able to work with other people that are difficult, for having obstacles that you have to overcome. Like, there's so many, like, introductions of challenges and things at real time that these kids need to figure their way out of and be able to account for and also practice ahead of time for which leads to the work you see that translate into their actual competition. And so they learn a lot about not just their physical

abilities and their capabilities, but also to like it forms and shapes their ability to handle a lot of challenges in life. Oh yeah, hard, hard work, sacrifice, delay gratification, overcoming adversity. There's so many things that they're, they're getting, you know, and not to go off on a different tangent, but this, I was just asked by a soon to be dad, you know, like, uh, like different dad advice that I was given. And we were going and one of the things that caught him off guard that I had said was, and I'll don't let him wear shoes for like the first few years of his life. Right. And I just think it's, there's so many misconceptions around kids and kids health and sports and activity. And to me that this is connected, even though we're talking about sports today, just though we're so unaware of what we're doing to them

by as soon as they're born, slapping these, you know, two inch soles on their feet when you have all these nerve endings on their, are at the bottom of their feet, and you completely, it's like putting a cast on them and then expecting them to be grounded and connected to the ground. Yeah, well along those lines,

the brain develops through lots of input, part of the ways it develops and movement and skills that are required to throw a ball, catch a ball to run, jump, climb, turn, twist, not fall, fall, get back up, that kind of stuff. That develops the brain. It develops the brain. It brain very important. It's interesting because scientists for a long time now have identified that play is extremely important for the development of mammals. We see this in all animals, dogs and cats and monkeys and whatever, that when they're a certain age, them playing is not just fun, it's important for the development of the mammal. For some reason,

we've discredited that or taken that out of the human equation, which is insane. It's extremely important for developing skills, societal skills, and just your ability to navigate the world. And you mentioned it being a microcosm. It is, you can play an entire game and essentially in that game learn many lessons that may take years in life to learn that you have learned in just one game. That's the thing, it's like an incubator, you know, for a lot of testing, improving, you know,

the just any skill and concept about like what you're capable of doing. So for me, I just get really passionate about the sports in general because I think that people have abandoned sports for someone and I went back in and coached and I was just surprised at like how little participation was happening across the board. I know there's a lot of factors out there where there's lots of information about how the risks have increased for certain activities,

how, you know, what we're seeing with the discussions. Is that what you're blaming it on? Do you blame it more on that? I blame a little bit of that. I blame a little bit of, honestly, a lot of bubble taping and a lot of helicopter parenting and a lot of, you know, unwillingness to allow kids to struggle and parents getting over involved. I agree. See, that's interesting.

Cause I think I don't see it as much on the parent side as I see it as on the kids side of not even wanting to do it. I see more of that than I see a parent going like, oh, environment though. That's a good point too, because now we're competing with super games. Yeah. Super energy to do social media.

That's another, that's a huge, another piece. Like, like sports was such a huge outlet for me as a kid. Well, it was another option, stay at home and color. Right. Yeah. And even when, even when the introduction of video games came, they still were not as immersive as they are now. And we didn't have social media to interact. Like, so it wasn't like I could, like, I couldn't play with my friend

at his house while I was at my house. Right. It just didn't work that way. So, I see more kids opting to not play. So you have this combination of the helicopter parenting, the fear mongering around like things like football and concussions and that stuff. But I think it's it's even more so the kids like, well, aren't even asking or aren't even wanting to play. So we've seen this now for the last few decades at least.

Um, and this is just to kind of back up what Justin said, like one of the most important skills that you can, and we'll go through all the different skills, but one of the most important skills you learn from competition as a kid is both how to win and how to lose. It's very important to learn how to lose and how to win. Now, how to win, you need to learn how to be humble, how to be grateful, how to continue to be motivated because you can lose motivation. If you just, you know, you win and then, okay, now what do I do next type of deal?

How to treat others as if you beat them in competition, very important skill. A lot of people don't realize that learning how to win is important. Learning how to lose is very important as well, because in life you're going to probably lose more than you win. So when you lose, how do you deal with it? How do you process it? Do you beat yourself up and quit and never try again? Or do you try to improve yourself? What does this mean that I, that I lost this game and one of the things I can

look at within myself and parents oftentimes, and I've seen this last three decades have eliminated that extremely important skill by either an A, not letting kids keep track of the score, which is ridiculous cause they do anyway, or giving away prizes and awards to everybody just for showing up. And I know that, you know, we hear people talk about that all the time, like it's the worst thing in the world. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, but I do think a big part of this is not realizing the value in

But I do think a big part of this is not realizing the value in play and in sports. We just look at it and we take for granted why we've been doing it for millennia and we say, oh, it's just a physical activity. Well, they'll just get that anywhere else. It's like, no, no, no, just because we've stopped examining the value of it doesn't mean there's any value. And we're starting to realize now just how important it is that kids go and compete and and play and organize type games. Also the value of not winning and losing and not getting the award and like there's the best value. Yeah, so that's the thing that the trophy for everyone thing

really hurt us so bad as a society. It was that aspect. It's not so much that the kids all got some participation trophy is that there's such great lessons in life. We know when they're going to learn it, later when it means more. Right. Like I didn't get hired. Right. And so, you know, the ability to get back up that, you know, and even to like just the unfortunate part of the politics of sports

and it's unfair sometimes and the ref made a bad call and I lost cause it like, that's fucking life. Cause it doesn't like me even though I'm the best player. That's right. That's fucking life. You're going to, you're going to do, you're going to find yourself at a job one day and someone's going to get promoted and you deserve to get promoted. Yeah. Absolutely. And so what do you do? Do you just, do you go and quit because of that? Or do you find a way to pick yourself back up? And I just think that's the

part that we lost. Some other skills that are important to learn, uh, and this is just as a developing human is how to both lead and also how to follow. Those are both extremely important. Now, you know, when I say that, I think people think to themselves, although some leaders and there's people who are followers, almost everybody. Yes, people do fall into one of those categories, but everybody at some point is going to have to lead or follow. So this is just true for every human.

Now you're going to do more of one or the other, depending on the kind of person you are or whatever. But it's important because following is how you learn from other people. So unless you think you know everything right away, this is a skill you need. Now we all know that person who gets hired at the job, who does a terrible job learning from other people. Nobody wants to work with that person. Who doesn't know anything, but yet wants to come across like they're the boss.

And then there's the ability to lead, to be able to take charge and take responsibility. You learn this playing organized sports. You learn when you need to follow, when you need to lead, and also the value of both. One isn't necessarily better than the other because. It's the team that wins or the team that yeah it's it's mainly like being ready for either one of those roles and and acknowledging that you know it's my time now I need to do something with this ball and lead this team or I need to pass this off because this player. I need to pass this off because this player is going to have the best chance for success for us right now.

And it's really about the team itself as opposed to the individual. And that's another big, again, with team sports, and we'll get into like, there's value in individual sports as well. But I think from a team perspective, you learn quickly like what your role is, but also too, like that role can change and you just need to be ready to always adjust. No, the stuff you get, a lot of what you guys are talking about are the social and psychological pieces that it brings. But the point of me bringing up the whole barefoot thing was there's a physical element that is so important that I feel like we're losing that. important that I feel like we're losing that.

There's more to that, Adam, because, uh, just to back you up, there is a window of learning that you have as a child that you lose when you get older. So if you don't learn, for example, learning languages, this is always the example I use because people can get this one, right? If you learn four languages as a child, you'll speak all of them fluently with no accent. You can speak Spanish, Italian, you can speak, you know, Chinese, you'll speak all of them fluently with no accent. You can speak Spanish, Italian, you can speak, you know, Chinese, you can speak English. If you learn all of these as a child, all of them will sound without an accent.

They'll sound just like the way you learn them. Now you do this as an adult, you can learn all of them, but your primary language will be the one that doesn't have an accent. The rest are going to sound people, you'll go to speak Mandarin and they're going to know, oh, you speak English as your primary language. Your processes are much more hardwired. Yes. You're more pliable as you're growing up and developing. So this is a good opportunity.

That's right. So your example of the like not wearing shoes, like if you walk around barefoot as a child, you're the dexterity and the control and the connection you have with your feet. I mean, if you don't do that when you're a kid and you wait until you're an adult, you'll get some back. You're going to get all of it back. Right. So these skills that children develop, these motor skills and ability to move, this is brain development.

That's why you can't learn this later on like you could when you were a kid. That's why it's such a crucial time. We're also seeing something that's unique to our, our time period right now too, with child, uh, children's posture. We've never seen this before where you have, they're going to the doctor for back pain, low back pain in, in kids. Like that, that didn't exist just a couple of decades ago. And a lot of that is just how sedentary and how addicted to these

iPhones and computers and iPads that we've become. And so I don't know, I think more than ever, this is going to become that much. And video games and AR and VR is getting so cool. And it's, it's only becoming more immersive and it's drawing us through that direction. So I think the, the importance of the kids getting involved in sports become even more important. And not just for the social psychological points you guys are making, but also the physical ones that I'm telling you right now that may not be the top of mind conversation right now.

Give it five or 10 more years when we've seen this play out even more and watch how much more we're communicating, talking about the importance of this. And then there's a connection to just learning in general. We saw the GPA score. Some people say, oh, it's because so they could stay in the sport. No, no, no, you stay in the sport at 2.0. We saw a difference way above that. Taking a child and having them pay attention, things like attention deficit disorder, right? Uh, you see a significant improvement in symptoms when children are simply active. What's funny about this is

if you had a dog, let's say you had a lab and you kept them inside all day long and took them on one walk a day, one walk a day and then you're back inside all day and had them watch TV and stuff. And your dog was chewing up your furniture and peeing, everyone acting crazy. And you went to the vet and you said, why is my lab doing this? He'd be like, your dog needs to go outside, needs to move. Somehow we don't talk about our kids in the same way. Why is Timmy not able to pay attention?

He's not doing anything but sitting in a chair almost all day long. how we don't talk about our kids in the same way. Why is Timmy not able to pay attention? He's not doing anything but sitting in a chair almost all day long. He's either on an iPad, watch TV, or he's in a classroom. And instead of medicating them, let's have them. His nervous system needs the stimulus. That's right. You know, we have these sensors built in for a reason. Like we need to use our body and move. It's built into us.

So before we get into the, the five sports that we're going to get into, I also want to talk about the, the other end of the spectrum, which are the parents that are gung-ho about getting their kids in sports. Because this was something that I remember when we interviewed Chad Wesley, right? Chad Wesley Smith. Great interview. It was a long time ago.

Um, uh, brilliant coach and trainer. And I was, I was under the misconception that, you know, if I wanted my son to be great at basketball or great at baseball, it's like, the, the, as soon as you can get him into it and the more of that sport, right? It's like all you play is baseball. Hyper focus on it. Yeah. Hyper focus on it.

They're, they're, they're going to be that good. And this is not true because of the way a child develops and how important general play and all the different types of movement sports. So something for the parents that definitely agree with everything that we were saying for the first 10 minutes just now this part. They have like their favorite sport. But yeah, but then they're like, you know, Timmy is in, you know, baseball year round. And because I have family and friends like this, they've got young kids and they think that he's going to become the superstar baseball player. And so they have him in year round baseball nonstop.

And they don't realize this, but he, Timmy would actually benefit by playing. They're limiting their development by doing that. It's different than adults. So as an adult, if I wanted to get as good as I could at baseball, it would be best for me to just play baseball as much as I physically possibly could for children because they have that window of development where the brain is developing general motor skills and intelligence. It's better to put them in multiple sports for a long time.

And then far later, like around 17 or 18, having them specialized, by the way, the data supports this, by the way, for the same point as your language argument, that's right. And in early age like that, they will pick up the ability to move their body in all these unique ways. Right. And it will only add to their arsenal of them being great at those. The skill set increases, the likelihood that a variable gets thrown at them that they'll be able to overcome is higher than one that just specializes. And the data shows this, that the kids that are in college that perform better in a specialized sport were the ones that played multiple sports as kids, not the ones that played just that

sport. Which by the way, Jevity, he made the point of that, of he encouraged the kids play a minimum of two to four sports, pretty much all of their life until they get out of high school. That's right. So not even specializing down to one sport until after high school. So if you have the luxury to play more than one sport even in high school, it is more ideal for the kids.

And definitely when you're talking about middle school and before is they should be playing as many types of sports as they possibly can as they're developing. Now all sports of course, so long as they're performed appropriately and whatnot or as gonna have benefit, but we picked the five that we saw as having some of the most benefit, and we're going to highlight the specific benefits of each of these. The first one that we listed was swimming. Now,

the reason why we picked swimming as one of the first ones is because children can swim and learn how to swim before they can walk. Before they can even walk, they can get in water and learn how to keep themselves from drowning, how to move, how to propel themselves forward. So they're working on motor skills that they normally wouldn't be able to do because they can't even support their own body weight, but in the water they could. And you see this with like six-month-old, then eight-month-old children in the water learning how to hold their breath, how to swim to mom and her dad. So it's like, it's one of the earliest ways you can get them to be active and to kind of learn some of these skills and pick them up.

It's a really interesting one to see how quickly like a young kid can adapt to swimming. It's wild. It's bizarre. But then you see later on the longer you wait, how incredibly difficult it is to get them to go in and the fear sets in and it's like this huge struggle to get them to learn how to swim. We, this is what we went through. So it was so tough for me. I watched Brendan, who's his,

his daughter's two years younger than Max's. And Max, when we were trying to get him into swim lessons was right during all the COVID stuff. So we literally got our first COVID, our first, our first lesson and then COVID hits and then it gets all shut down. And that gap of him not doing that, now trying to encourage him to do it, he's so reluctant and he's like, oh, when I get bigger daddy, I'll learn how to swim.

That's what he always tries to tell me now. And seeing his daughter who was two years younger than Max swimming when she was months old was just, and if you never have Googled or got on YouTube and looked up baby swimming, it's the wildest thing you've ever seen. It's amazing. And not to mention there's just the practical value

of your kid knowing how to swim. It's one of the leading causes of death for children. So it's great to teach, by the way, kids do this in bathtubs. If you leave a bathtub without draining it, a kid can, so you just teach them how to swim, how to maneuver in water. It's also quite safe. But the exercise component and the motor skill component, they could just do more

in the water earlier than they can on land. Well, yeah, you're in it. It, what's great about swimming too, and this is, this is beyond, we're obviously talking about, you know, infants, young children and why it's such a great sport, but why this is such a great sport even into adulthood is like, you cover all the planes. Yeah. So your, your, your body is, and, and you're, you're having to move the entire body from fingertips down to your toes. Every movement is meeting resistance. Yes. Everything is meeting resistance.

Everything is engaged. So the, the neurological benefits to that. And also the safety of that, right? So it's like there's a very high reward, very low risk. Like the, the, in that sport, the hurting yourself or getting into right? So it's like there's a very high reward, very low risk. Like the, in that sport, the hurting yourself or getting into, not that it's impossible, like it's possible to get hurt in any sport that we do, anything you do explosive or hard, can you get hurt? But the likelihood of getting hurt or hurt and swimming is really, really low, yet it has a lot of, a lot of benefits that come with it. Totally. All right. The next one is gymnastics. Now gymnastics, probably one of the best things you could have your kid do to develop overall motor development, overall proprioceptive ability.

It's so dynamic. There's so many positions and movements and controlling your own body. I mean, I would see this as an adult when I was doing Brazilian jujitsu. If somebody did gymnastics as a kid, then you know jiu-jitsu, they move different. Yeah. They just moved. It's almost like they already knew jiu-jitsu a little bit because of the way that they move. Well, just the capacity to place them in a position,

they're going to be aware of it more likely than the other kid that hasn't done it. It's just, and to be able to move and jump and flip and, um, to be able to be spatially aware and then solid and be able to move and jump and flip and to be able to be spatially aware and then solid and be able to create tension to be grounded at the same time, like that's gonna just translate to any other pursuit physically that you're gonna do. That's why I think you guys have to explain

what proprioception means. Knowing where your body is in space. Yeah, and just that point alone, the carryover to anything you would, you would do later online. I wish I knew this, right? Cause I was the kid who, you know, I picked up sports like wakeboarding and snowboarding and I got into that stuff as I got older, like in high school. And it was such a hard learning curve for me to be comfortable with twisting and going upside down and doing all these, these moves that I wanted to do, because I had no experience with lat and that all that tumbling and flipping and

body control in space and in dynamic movements like that that you get from gymnastics. Boy, does that carry over into everything else. Speaking of brain development, like here's, this is a sport where when you're a kid, you learn it better than when you're an adult. Like you go try and do gymnastics and adult. Again, this is the fear component. There's fear. People really underestimate like, uh, that's because if, if you're doing it

now, later on in life, it's, there's all these reserves. Like I, you kind of know, uh, what's going to happen if I land a little bit wrong here or if like, uh, so they're able to do it where their body's a little bit more pliable and they're going to be more forgiving, uh, so they're able to do it where their bodies a little bit more pliable and they're going to be more forgiving when they, well, there's fear. There's also physics. When you're big, it's harder to do these moves anyway. That doesn't mean that, you know, and what that means is you get to learn them as a kid and then the brain is very plastic.

These are movements that if you don't instill in your brain, it will prune it out. Like there's, what, why do I need to know how to do a cartwheel or a flip or, you know, land in a particular position off of jumping. If I never did that before. And so your brain prunes it off, but gymnastics kind of solidifies it. And again, you talk to any coach who coaches traditional sports, ask them, what is your experience of people of kids that come and play the sport for the first time that also did gymnastics as kids?

And they'll all tell you they're on a different level. Well, also like swimming. This is another thing that you can start really early to early. Yeah, so you can get I mean we started mastering at two years old I think it was when they first started accepting kids in gymnastics and they teach them or tumbling is what they call it at that age Yeah, and so it's just organized play at that point But already getting them comfortable with climbing on things, hanging on things, rolling around, like again, that spatial awareness. So what a great sport to keep kids, keep kids in at an early age and how much it's going to carry over to any other pursuit.

Next is wrestling. Now wrestling is one of the best sports to teach your child grit, and tenacity and toughness. You are, first off, it's one on one. your child grit and tenacity and toughness. You are, first off, it's one-on-one, so you have to rely on just yourself and you're being held down or manipulated or maneuvered by somebody else. And that is hard to overcome

because it's just like fighting, right? Except it's not, it's wrestling, but you have to be tough and you have to get through that and you have to be able to get your butt kicked and bounce back. Wrestling does that. Now the other component of it is it's a sport with some self-defense carryover. Like your kid learns how to wrestle and they're going to be far better off. Uh, if something ever happens where they need to defend themselves, boy or girl.

So it's got that carryover confidence builder. Yeah. Yeah. When you have those type of skills And, you know, now it's it's interesting, because it would be like a great follow up from gymnastics, because of your spatial awareness, your explosivity, and like you're, you're able to kind of find where you are and be able to leverage that against your opponent. And so now there's a physical strength component there that's, you know, opposing a force as opposed to just like the gravity, for instance.

That's why I mean, I love pairing this with gymnastics because gymnastics first gives you that great foundation and then now wrestling, you now have that expression of that, right? And you have an opposing force that's challenging that. So it's great, you understand your body and space and awareness and you can tumble and flip and you do this. you understand your body and space and awareness and you can tumble and flip and you do this. Now, how do you do when someone's pressing on you or grabbing or pulling? Like you not only have to have that same body awareness and control, but also the strength and power to match that. A lot more conditioning and endurance. Well, it's also, this is a great way to train your ego.

It really is. Yeah. Like you could be in a difficult, challenging position, you know, swimming where you're tired and recycling where you're exhausted or, you know, playing on this board or maybe you're on a team and they're beating you. But to be physically held down or have someone physically beat you, it's an ego check. And this is an important one. A lot of people think, Oh, what do

you mean? You're getting beat up? No, no, this is an important one. There's a lot of tough guys out there, for example, that have never really gotten their, their butt kicked and that's good. You don't get your butt kicked out in the street, but on the wrestling, that it's, it's interesting. You meet people who wrestle for living and who, not for a living, but for a long time who are really good at it. They're humble. They're humble because their ego is checked constantly in practice. Um,

and then of course the skill and technique that you learn from it that there's also a confidence with that too. So you, you brought something up to, and not that we're encouraging anybody by any means to be fighting or anything, but I mean, I've never, I've never been in a fight in my life that didn't end up on the ground. Yeah. So having that skill set to be as far as defending yourself. Like everybody, you know, you see stuff on YouTube and clips of kids swinging on each other, but most all street fights or scuffles end up on the

ground and your ability, yeah. So your ability to wrestle somebody or gain control in a situation like that. I'll say for girls, this is a very important skill because, you know, if a young lady's assaulted, she's put on the ground. If she knows how to wrestle, she may know how to get up and escape, which is, you know, again, in that, in that particular scenario, very important. All right. Next up track and field.

Here's, here's something that's interesting just to kind of think about ponder there. There's a few things that humans evolved to do physically very well. We're not the strongest. We're not the fastest. Like you put us, you know, against most animals and, you know, we're not, we're not very good. Okay.

At things that are physical, we're very're very smart obviously but there's two things that we do exceptionally well in comparison to any other animal one is throw with accuracy the other one is run we're actually made to run not fast but long humans can out trek almost any animal in fact this is how hunter gatherers uh modern hunter gatherers and we we estimate you know ancient ones caught, and we, we estimate, you know, ancient ones caught their prey. We would, we wound it, we ran after it until it got tired, and then we would take it down. And if you look at the physiology of the human body with our big

glutes, our big knee joints, we have this, this foot that's covered in muscle and this ankle and these calves that are like, like, uh, you know, shock absorbers, we are literally made to run. Here's the problem. We stop running. Yeah, we suck at it. And we, we lost the skill forever. And then people place up their running shoes when they're 30 years old, they're getting better shape.

And now running has more injuries than any other sport. Uh, you can point back, if you look it up, people run hurt themselves all the time. So this is a skill that if you lose it, good luck trying to gain it back. So track and field for a kid is like, let's keep the skill of being able to run. No, I, most sports, especially team sports, when we get to that point, uh, require some set of running skills. In fact, high level of, of running skills, which is also why a lot of times you'll find a lot of your pro athletes, pro football players,

pro basketball, pro so, also have a track and field background. And that's because they've mastered the art of running and then they also love to play with this ball sport, you know, and so it carries over into those sports. And when you start to get to the highest level, right, when we're talking about professional sports, it comes down to like a fraction of a second difference of what sometimes gets you picked or gets you drafted. Right. Like when you run the call by and you are tracked on time or you're 40 and so with that, your ability to be able to sprint in that dash with great form and

technique makes a huge difference if you're getting picked up right now. One of the biggest attributes now in almost all sports is speed. And so, you know, in order to learn speed and how to move most effectively, mechanically, like this is going to be your best bet with learning, uh, you know, those traits through track and field. That's right. And then track and field, of course, also, I think to an extent teaches tenacity differently than wrestling, uh, but more so, like you're fighting against your own physical pain and elements and you're learning like,

okay, especially the long distance stuff. Like how do I persevere? Well, is there carryover to that in everyday life? You better believe it, right? There's something that's unique about every so that, you know, we, we're doing five of these, right? This is a four and everything that we've named so far is an individual sport. That's right. And, uh, and we obviously talked about all the value that that brings.

And I think that in a, in a perfect world where you're, you're you're cycling a kid through most all these are keeping them involved in most of these. But then the fifth one. Team sports. Yes. There's a lot of adult friends that I have that literally say to me, organize sports, football or basketball or baseball, save their life. That they didn't have a good home life or whatever, but it was the team sport and the coach and it was to give them a sense of belonging and family. This teaches you how to play by the rules, how to value not cheating, how to have pride in doing things with integrity, had to win, had to lose, how to sit back and step forward.

Team sports do this incredibly well in a very controlled, easy to observe manner. You know, life, it's, you know, you look at a CEO making tons of money and from the outside, you might be like, oh, he was just put in that position or whatever. Because we can't see everything he did for last, you know, or she did for last 15, 20 years, get there.

But you watch, you play a game and it's out there for people to see like how hard you worked, what you did, kind of care to you have. And team sports exemplifies that. Yeah, I think too, like what I like about it is your peers are really like, it's self-regulating. So yeah, your coach is there and wants order and wants to make sure everybody's, you know, going in the direction that, you know, the team needs to go.

But at the end of the day, when you're competing and you're out there together as a unit, you know, it's if, if you're being an asshole and you're the one that's like, you know, constantly taking the ball and not, you know, distributing it, not making the best play efforts to the person that you know is going to provide the most successful plan, they're going to just naturally stop getting the ball, you know, and it's just, it's a nice way of integrating with other kids and other people to be able to figure out, okay, yes, I want to leave, but also too, I need to kind of- I need to play with people. I need to play.

I need to be likable. I need to do things with grace. And so it's a really hard lesson, but it's the best to receive from your peers as opposed to an adult. Well, it resembles, of all the sports we're talking about, it resembles real life the most. Totally, because life isn't that solo, right? No, and that's right.

And you brought up a point, it's actually one of my biggest pet peeves when I get into it with people that love to critique CEOs on the outside. You know, oh, he's this and he's that. And it's just like, man, the ability to get. Tens or hundreds or thousands of people to move cohesively in the same direction is a massive skill, a massive skill, or to even have people underneath you that work for you, that do that for you is a massive skill to be able to do

that. It takes teamwork to be able to develop a skill like that. And so, and then you're going to get that with school. You're going to get that everywhere you go in life is you're going to have to learn. And what I love about sports too, Justin, you made the point of like the self regulating ego check. Eventually you will meet someone who is better than you. Yes.

Yes. You may be the shit in your hometown, but eventually you keep climbing the ranks. It will humble you. And you will eventually meet someone who is better than you. And there is something so humbling and such a good lesson in that. And when you're in team sports, you can have sometimes that kid who's like the superstar early on. And so maybe he gets a bit of an ego, he's cocky early on, cause he goes through the sport really easy, but eventually he'll climb the ladder to a point where he's playing with all the other cocky shits

that were just as good as he was in their hometown and then you get home really fast. Well, what's great about this is for your kids, they learn this in a game. If they don't learn this in a game, they're going to learn this when the stakes are really high. Like your kid acts like a jerk in a game, like what's the worst that could happen? Uh, you know, kicked off the team at the absolute worst, or probably the kids will say something coach will have to coach them and have to work them.

They'll sit out. So like that, right? They never learned this playing sports and they just go through life and then they get a job and then they go work in a place and then they act that way. Cause they never learned this through playing organized sports or team sports. Like you ain't working. Nobody likes you. You don't have any friends or whatever.

So these are lessons you can learn, a kid that develop you into a better human being. So there you have it. Look, if you love the show, head over to mind pump free.com and check out some of our free fitness guides. We have free fitness guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. Justin is on Instagram at mine pump Justin. I'm on Instagram at mine pump to Stef media. Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump Justin, I'm on Instagram at Mind Pump DeStefano, and Adam is on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam.

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