Ep. 123 From Pressure to Being Fulfilled: Helping Youth Athletes Take Ownership of Their Journey

Welcome to the in-an-an-athlete podcast. I'm your host Trent and this is the show where we dive into all things youth athlete development, Trinity conditioning and the minds that needed to thrive on and off the field. Whether you're a parent looking to support your child's athletic journey, a coach seeking fresh insights from an athlete ready to take your game to the next level, you're in the right place. Before we jump in, make sure to hit that subscribe button to stay updated on our latest episodes. If you enjoyed the show, please give us a like, share it with your friends and help us reach even more people who can benefit from these insights. Together, we're going to power the next generation of athletes to perform at their best. Now, let's get into it. I think I like to use his as a made of mine. He told me about this story. He was in a class. I think and he was talking about chess masters. So, and he was saying like how many calories can you actually measure their metabolic output in the paint chess? Well, technically, he can and he was saying some of the grand masters can burn up to 8,000 calories in a day. That's just what's sitting on their ass for majority of time probably talking about 3000 steps, you know, just go to the bathroom and get a feed and all that. It's quite interesting because it's the cognitive load and a lot of people don't realize from a nutrition perspective like your brain is the size of two fists, right? It takes a minimum 20% of your calories. And then you add in the cognitive load from study, maybe you're doing film or something like that. And if you haven't got adequate fuel and board, of course, you're going to fall asleep. Right. You know, your body's going to conserve that energy. It's going to go into that survival mode. It's not going to go into that mode where you can actually start to learn what's being projected on the screen or what's out in front of you. So it's quite interesting when kids start to understand that the brain uses more calories, potentially more than the actual training sessions. And then just from physical output, then they start to understand is like, okay, cool. I actually need to start feeling a lot more. So they got to, I think that's what really needs to happen is when they start to learn, we start to teach them more, but more about themselves. But how obviously we have this general knowledge, but we need to apply it to the kids and how it affects them and how they're experiencing the world at that current moment or in the last week or so. And if they will actually want to change it, if you want to change it, this is the way that we would want to start changing it. And then they can start going to the parents have the conversations with them about what changes need to occur. Yeah, it's good. And I've got ram about this for ages as well. Drop off now drop off in terms of participation and, you know, continuing on with the strength conditioning program or they stop coming consistently and just on and off. What are some of the things that you see from that perspective from athletes that, you know, there might be sixes and sevens out of 10, but they're just like they're good for two months and something comes up or they've got a tournament. And, or, you know, they've got some sort of family thing going on and they excuse to start the compound of time. What do you see? Yeah, I mean, we see kind of everything across the board, right? We see, you know, you get to know your athletes, right? Like you see those kids that you're like, if a black cat crosses the street, they're not coming in, right? Like some things, anything that happens is going to like get in their way and cause them to not want to come in. And then you get people that you know, if they're like, Hey, man, I, I just, I have so much going on that in reality, they're probably right and you're almost supporting them in the fact of like, hey, wait a listen to your body and you need to take a break. And, you know, let's find a way to, you know, get makeup for this at another time and and reschedule you or find a time where you maybe you're, you have a little bit more recovery in between or something like that. You know, but I would say our biggest changes are just seasonal, right? Like, you know, we have these differences between our club sport schedules and then our school sport schedules where generally during like a club season, we can still get athletes in at a pretty good frequency. And we're just managing their practice and training schedules to make sure that obviously their fresh and well prepared for competition, but they're also able to maximize their training as much as possible during that time. And then during school seasons, I mean, if they're practicing five to six days a week, it's really hard to keep them in a normal training routine and flow. So usually that's where we'll see frequency drop off and then we have just our purely seasonal people who like sometimes you know you're only going to see these people over the summer. That's it like school schedule and having three kids is enough of a problem for them that you're going to get them over the summer and that's it, right? And then you have those athletes that train almost entirely year round and find a way to work it in and they're more frequent in their off seasons and they're less frequent in their in seasons. And you just manage those training cycles and periodization as a coach to help try to one maximize the training during those different seasons, but to keep them healthy and un-injured, right? Throughout the process as well. So you know, we kind of see all the different levels there, but one of the things that we've done recently is we switched from package up training options to membership options. And this was built in a way that helps to drive that at frequency and consistency because we know that the athletes or clients in general who are the most consistent will see the best results. So I probably pushed it off way longer than I should have. I mean, I've been thinking about doing it for years, but I finally was like whatever like we're just going to do it. And it was a little rocky at first, but they're choosing a membership based on the frequency that they're committing to, right? So if they're on a two time a week membership, they got to use those eight sessions in a month or they lose them and they feel that pressure, right? And they're like, oh, okay, like it gets rid of some of those people who are really good at making excuses, like anything comes up, then they miss. - That's really flaky. - Uh-huh. Yeah, they have, it's like, use it or lose it. Like it's on you now and they don't want to lose money. So, you know, that helps in that sense. And it helps other people who are pretty good, but maybe things come up, they're good at, better at rescheduling, then just like, well, we'll just kick that can down the road and make up for that later. So that's one of the ways we've tried to just naturally come, like organically almost combat the infrequency is it's built into their memberships now. But also, you know, having those conversations with kids and understanding what their demands are as a whole and making sure to the points that we were making earlier, we're balancing those in a way that's most effective for their development and putting them in the best positions to succeed. - Yeah, I think the biggest thing when it comes to the athletes dropping off the S8, because we've run a membership model as well, you know, 234 times week, obviously depends on the training season as well, is actually sitting down with them and actually understanding what their training schedule is going to be like for the next three to six months. - Yeah. - Is there a period where you're going to be away because you've got tournaments or whatever it may be, you're planning on taking a holiday or something like that. Okay, cool. We can actually start to forecast for that and plan ahead. And it just probably gives more, I guess, a surety in terms of obviously the consistency for the kid. If you're coming in, our expectation is you come in, you know, what you plan to do. Run, we'll hold you account, we'll follow up, make sure everything's gone right. And if things aren't going right, and then we'll have that, you know, that uncomfortable conversation. Make sure that, you know, the whole point of, you know, for you and your childhood is the training as soon as the time is to obviously improve over our criticism for X, Y and Z move forward. That's been one of the ways that we've done it. I think the other way that we've actually started looking to is actually do bring a friend promotions as well. And I think it's really cool. During the school holidays for us. So we have like two week periods scattered throughout the year. That, you know, we encourage like the teams that we have that we work directly with and even with our members, like bring a friend in, like actually just bring him in, you know, come and do this training session together. So it kind of improves that adherence effect that you know, you're put on a friend in now, I'm going to show up. Right, right. And there's no school on so you have no excuses as well. Right. So there's no excuses to bring your bringing friend in as well. So everyone's on school holidays. And it's good from a business perspective. It's also a good form, I guess, from an adherence perspective as well. That's a different element to it. But I think the other the other thing is that I've noticed is is from a training program perspective and you know, having these recaps and sit down with the athletes, you know, you know, for five to ten minutes to have a discussion. What is the plan for the off season or what is planned for in season, you know, or what representative programs you have coming up that we need to be aware of because it can start to get manic. Like for a march to tune in Australia is usually a pretty manic time. Now we're rolling to finals for a lot of winter sports as well. So it's going to start to ease off and then we're going to have more kids coming in training more times a week in order to improve just the just the GPPA general physicist fitness perspective. And then also just came and talking to the parents as well. I found that's a real good one. Just to make sure that the parents are actually holding the kids accountable. And then we were actually holding the parents accountable. That's not as well because they're part of the process. They're part of the child's development. They're the taxi driver, they're the cook. Sometimes they're pseudo therapists to some degree as well. They're the arm pies, they're the volunteers, they're part of the process. But we want to make sure that if they're on this journey, that they're also, I feel like they're a part of it as well. And they're not being neglected throughout the process. And of course, every parent wants to know how well the child's progressing. Who doesn't? And they want to know where the dolls are going as well. Sure. Sure. Is it actually going into the kid or if it's not, what's going on? Yeah, and that's something not to go completely off the rails. But that's something I was talking with my, one of my trainers about the other day was, you know, these parents who drop off and pick up that you don't really ever see. Including them in the process a little bit more, right? Because even with the athletes, like when we retest them and, and you know, show them their progress. I mean, they're, sometimes the parents aren't even seeing that, right? Like we don't always send home a progress report, but the kids know like, okay, this is what you got last time. This is what you got this time. This is how much you've improved. And, and yeah, sometimes we'll, you know, hit up the parents and be like, oh, this out. This is pretty sweet. But having a more systematic approach to keeping the parents in the loop through the process to help build that deeper client relationship, which I think is one of the biggest pieces of our industry that benefits the business side so much is building strong relationships with families. And I think sometimes it's, it's almost completely disconnected if they're just dropping the kids off and picking them up and only talking to us when it comes to schedule and renewing their membership. Right. So that's something that we're even working through that process now because I think you can get so caught up in the X's and O's of programming, scheduling, getting kids results. Building relationship with the kid that you almost, and maybe this is just us, but you can almost forget about the parents sometimes because you never really even see them. So that's, you know, just a conviction for me and something that I know we need to improve and get better at here as well. Yeah, I've, we actually encourage the parents actually like, obviously we don't want them to stick around for the whole session, but we encourage them to stick around for the first five minutes and just kind of view what's going on or the coming in the last five minutes. Have a chat with the coach and just, you know, have a bit more of a general conversation and develop that rapport from that side because obviously, you know, generally the kids should encourage coaches like business owners. We have to be networkers as well. Right. So we have to engage with the parents and, you know, and they and they might be on the board for a club that we don't know of. Right. So it's like, okay, that might give us a bit of a way in if we've been really successful with their child. So it's probably just, yeah, I think it really comes down to build relationships. Sometimes it's going to be formal more like those parents reports and sometimes it's going to be informal from just them dropping in having those conversations with you. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I feel like we've been talking about so much and it's gone so quickly, but once what's your advice of working with kids that are considered more like high risk or vulnerable now, I quickly define what I mean by that is what mean by that is their kids. And they're kind of like they're not particularly enjoying sports, but the kids, the parents keep dropping them off or telling them you got to commit for the rest of the season, you know, how do you go about working with those types of kids that come in or, you know, you've paid for six months or for the membership or whatever they be. How do you go about working with those individuals? And you know, some of this goes to the relationship side, some of it goes to like how how long have you had this athlete right because we've seen it where you know kids will train with us for a year or two. Because they're really trying to pursue a certain goal and a certain sport and then they start to transition out of wanting to really do that sport anymore, but they continue to train because of the environment because of the relationship with the coach because they're kind of being. And it's more than just, you know, the improvements in the specific sport and this kind of goes into our model here, which I talk a lot about is the importance of the impact we're able to have outside of just the physical components of sports performance right. And I'm not sure if you're able to be a mentor in these kids lives at a time that is by far the most confusing time in people's lives right it's like okay I have all these hormones that I don't know what to do with right I'm hitting puberty and this is whole new experience right. I'm trying to figure out if this girl likes me or if this boy likes me and it's like devastating my whole day and it's all I can think about I got all this homework I got my parents on me for cleaning my room doing all this stuff. And on top of that I need to know in the next few years what I want to do with the rest of my life. Oh, what are you going to go to university for what do you want to study what do you want to be when you grow up right like all these pressures so we're able to come alongside these kids in a time that they're experiencing all these different things and be a support for them right to be someone that is more than just a coach who's trying to get you faster. I want to get to know you more right like I want to figure out things about you that go beyond just sport because in those specific situations that you're talking about now it's deeper than just physical performance like oh okay so you're not as interested in this sport anymore or doing or accomplishing this how can we shift our focus to make you know maybe this is more of how you want to train for the rest of your life let's focus on maybe a different set of goals because at the end of the day. Everyone needs to exercise not just athletes right so let's start to figure out what you like to do how you might build a routine for just general everyday life or maybe you want to take up rock climbing now right which you weren't before oh let's let's start working on some things that are going to help you go explore something new right so as you build relationships you may not even know those things if you didn't care about learning more about the kid but you may be able to bring it up and be like hey I noticed you talked about wanting to be able to do that. So wanting to maybe try this or do something different and I think they find a lot of value in knowing like where someone that's going to push you and support you similar to like your parents but we're not your parents right so like you can come to us at times where you're uncertain and maybe like all right here's a good example and I know we're you know kind of pushing against the time here a little bit. I had an athlete who worked with me for I think from seventh grade until college and this is someone who had an opportunity to play soccer in college but kind of was at this crossroads of like I don't know if I really want to play soccer that badly what he really wanted to do was go to just a really big school like just a giant university that's well known and all these kids go there. Where instead of going to this small school where he could play soccer in college right and I remember talking to him and being like what is it about a big school that you think is going to impact the rest of your life like are you going to be upset someday because there wasn't 25,000 kids at your school and there was 10,000 right like are you going to look back and be like oh man I really missed out on that school with 25,000 students. Right or are you going to look back and be like man I had the opportunity to play college soccer and I didn't do it and you're never going to have that opportunity again and I told him I was like you can do whatever you want but I was able to play a sport in college and even though it wasn't at the highest level and I could have easily like walked away from it and then like I don't know if I want to put in that much time and effort for something that I don't know if I'm that you know passionate about anymore I'm really glad I did it and I never really wanted to do that. And I've never one day in my life and like man that was stupid like why did I even do that right and he ended up making the decision to go playing college and I've talked to him since then and and he was glad that he did right so this is an example of helping kids work through things and being a voice outside their parents because his dad talked to me he's like I want him to go play I want him to go play but he's not going to do it and I came along as like you're going to do what you want to do and at the end of the day it's fine. But you need to understand the fact that this is an opportunity that you'll never get back right and you need to ask yourself is there a possibility I can regret this down the road versus just going to some ginormous school for really no other reason then it's just huge right like and he came like you said kind of earlier on and getting them to kind of make the decision right not making it for them helping them see things from a different perspective so that they can make the best decision for themselves and it's just really cool to be able to be in that situation as a coach and be able to have that type of influence and you're always going to battle kids that their their aspirations change and their interests change and you always just want to be a support through that process and and it's case by case, right? And I don't know if you have some specific examples that have really worked out for you or ones that have kind of boggled your mind, but that's some of what we experience here for sure. - Yeah, the one thing that I do is, it kind of alludes to your point is perception versus perspective versus perception. So our perception is what we think of something. And everyone has their own perspective on everything, right? You name it, everyone's got their own perspective. You could be a thousand perspectives. - perception, sorry, perception. - Perception is to be able to look at it from a different viewpoint. All you did was get your athlete to look at it from a different viewpoint, right? And it's like, oh, and then I probably would regret it if I didn't take this opportunity because it is, it is once in a lifetime opportunity, what does it come with it? Form new relationships, great network opportunity, play sport that you particularly enjoy. It might be a partial scholarship or a full scholarship, or whatever it may be, right? It's going to be multiple things that you need to highlight, but you just kind of shifted these perception to somewhere else, to change the perspective or you can change the perspective and therefore change the perspective on the actual issue at hand. And then the father had a different view point, right? He obviously wanted his son to go play with different reasons as well. So all you did is help him understand his, for look from a different perspective in order to change his perception. And then he had a lot more clarity in terms of his decision moving forward. I think that's what I like to do. I kind of alluded to it without even saying it. I was thinking back my head, "What's the saying? It's perception of a perspective. It's like with the swimmer of getting a P.B. versus beating someone." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" - Right, right. - You've just changing the perception of how well they're performed, making it a bit more internalized. And when they have an internal locust of control, they're more driven as individuals to a chave. It is no longer about the things that they can't control, it's more about the things that's within their control. Then only thing that's really within their control is how they go about their business. - And then you can even allude to like, oh, it's funny 'cause when you told me your goals, you said you wanted to get faster. Not I wanna be faster than that person, right? Like you didn't give me this person's name when you told me your goals. You just said you wanna get faster and you are. So why are your goals changed? Are we only trying to get faster than that person? - Yeah, and I think, yeah. And I think the part of reason is, is because 10 ages, it's about, there's three different phases, a four to five phases in life. One is when you're zero to eight to 10, where we're lying on our parents to live and survive. As we transition puberty and adolescence, where more reliant on our peers, 'cause we value our peers point of view or than our parents point of view. That's where these kids are kinda stuck out at the moment. They value other people's points of view more than they value their own. As they get older, maturity comes into play. You know, the old saying, the brain is fully formed at the age of 25. That's when maturity comes in. We now, we can see things are our own perspective for what they are. And then later on down the track is, you can rely on me. So like our parents can rely on us, as they go an old rage, we can look after them as well. So we go through these four kind of like milestone changes. And a lot of times, these kids, they're kinda stuck in comparison. And obviously we're talking, comparison is a thing of joy. So joy comes when they achieve what they've set to achieve and they're clear on that and their focus is on that. But as soon as they say, I lost to this person, but still got PV, and Rob's of what that joy of the PV, when they initially said. So we changed their perspective through giving them a different perspective. Oh my gosh, I'm full of it. (laughing) We changed that perception by again, the look from a different perspective. Yeah. And this just came up the other day with a client, the mom had talked to me 'cause she's a client as well. And she said, Hey, if you're comfortable with it, could you talk to my son 'cause he's been taking zins, right? I don't know if you guys have the zin culture over there, but they're basically-- - It's not big, it's not big, you know that. - Yeah, nicotine patches, right? All the kids are doing it now. And especially in his specific sport, they're just running wild with it, right? And she asked me, she's like, if you're willing to, I don't want it to be uncomfortable, but I have a pretty good relationship with the kid. And I was like, I'll talk to him about it, like, I don't care, I'll talk to him. So the next time he was in, I started talking to him about it. And he was giving me the same kind of song and dance he was to his mom. And I told him, I'm like, listen, I'm not here to tell you, like you need to stop doing something or it's the end of the world or this is the worst, right? But he was saying something like, well, it could be worse. I could be smoking cigarettes or doing this other thing, right? And so to your point, trying to get into change's perspective is I was like, everyone can always say, I could be doing something worse, right? Like someone could be snorting cocaine and be like, oh, I could, well, I could be shooting heroin, so it could be worse. He was like, well, that's crazy. I'm like, no, that's exactly what you're saying, right? Like you're doing something that you've admitted isn't good for you, but it could be worse. Just a few. Yeah, so I give you an example of something that you think is, like that's crazy though, but it's exactly the same thing. So just getting him to shift his perspective now, that said, I don't know that he's changed his behavior at all, right? But I know that it was valuable to him and his mom reached out to me afterwards and said, hey, I really appreciate you talking to him. He talked to me afterwards and said that like he understood where you were coming from and like, you know, at least he was receptive to it. And I think that's important as coaches and it goes again into the training atmosphere, but even outside of the training atmosphere where we do have the power in this window of time, exactly like you're talking about where other people's opinions matter more to them than their parents, right? Because parents have just been an authority figure for so long that they don't want to deal with that, right? So having somebody outside of that that they know has their best interests in mind, but is not their parent, but is an adult that isn't gonna like feed into their adolescent nonsense is really healthy for them and something I really truly value in the positions that we have because I know that we're impacting these kids for life beyond sport, which is gonna be more of their life than in sport. So that for me is something that's just really, really huge and super important about what we're able to do as youth sports performance coaches. - No, it's so much more than just lifting weights. - Yeah. - Waken, we do have few North American listeners. Waken to North American listeners, von Ju. - Sure, sure, yeah. So our website is Soma, SOMAP is in Paul, f is in Frank.com, so somapf.com. I'm on Instagram at Coach_brandincrest. We also have a Soma sports performance page on Instagram and Facebook, so you guys can find us there, feel free to throw us a follow, we're always thrown up, stuff that's going on here at the gym and client results and all that type of fun stuff. And if you're ever in the Centennial Colorado area, reach out to us, we would love to have you come visit the facility and see what we got going on here. - Yeah, I love to do a trip of the US and get back to, especially Wisconsin. After the-- - Oh yeah. - That's an unbelievable facility and some of the coaches I worked with are still there to this day as well. I'm sorry, we'll be pumped to come back and as funny because as we mentioned a couple weeks ago, well, one of my soccer athletes, she actually, she just relocated to Prague recently. She's playing professional over there. Yeah, she went to the high school across the road from your facility, so it was such a small world. - Absolutely, I mean, we could throw a rock and hit that high school, that's how close we are. It's absolutely crazy that she went there. That's so good. - Yeah, that's a small world. But yeah, first of all, Brandon, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk shop with you. Yeah, if you're ever in the area in Colorado in North America, go visit this facility, follow North American listeners out there. We do have a few of them. Go check them out on social media. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. - Sweet, yeah, thanks for having me. It's been awesome. Which is, and I'll see you on the next one. - You have just listened to the in-apply podcast. Be sure to subscribe to stay up to date with the release of weekly episodes. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram to get great tips on all things youth athlete development and youth mentoring.