The Junior High Years…
My son Adrian started the 7th grade this year. The middle year of junior high, the year where you’re not the big kid on campus, but you don’t catch wedgies all day because you’re a foot shorter and three octaves higher than the biggest kids in the eighth grade. As all of us know, it can be a weird time for a kid for all kinds of reasons.
Adrian has been a pretty active kid. He’s played soccer since he was four, had a couple of seasons of basketball around six or seven, and has even played golf intermittently over the past two years. He’s also started playing in the band last year and is active again this year.
That said, I’ve noticed something in him over the past few years of soccer that I couldn’t ever really figure out. While he was pretty good, when he wanted to be, it was pretty evident that he wasn’t crazy about playing soccer. I think he did it because he knew that it was essential to his family that he did well, but you could tell that he was pretty much unsatisfied with the experience overall.
This year he begins the process of playing basketball for his school, and he seems to be really excited about it, which is great to see. As part of playing a sport for his school, he has to begin lifting weights with the football team as part of the weight room program at his school. Well, that’s where things get a little dicey for Adrian.
The Awkwardness of Preteens
Adrian does a lot of things really well, but lifting weights is not one of them. Now, a 12-year-old not being a prolific weightlifter is not exactly rare, but to Adrian, the idea of working out with the football and basketball teams in the weight room is terrifying. He sees those kids as giants.
The other part of this is Adrian is 5 ft. tall and weighs 75 lbs. after supper. He’s almost entirely legs, arms, and neck. I call him my baby deer because that’s what he looks like when we go running. Of course, I also tell him that I was the same way when I was his age and he’ll fill out over time. It usually sounds something like “There will come a day where you miss the concept of eating pizza and ice cream and not feeling like you’re carrying that meal with you for a month.”
That said, after he came to me and expressed his trepidation with working out in junior high for the first time, I knew what I needed to do to help. We needed to start working out.
I also knew exactly where I needed to take him to start working out. Now I’m not a professional trainer by any means, but I knew that me going to the sporting goods store to buy a bench and some weights for the garage gym was not going to cut it. Not just because I have a garage full of stuff and can’t fit my wife’s car in there as it is, but because that’s just not a good way, in my opinion, to start off with a kid that has never lifted a weight in his life.
Figuring Out What Works
After I ruled out the garage gym concept, I texted my friend Logan over at New Braunfels Crossfit about what I was trying to do with my son and about his experience with working out and it was not later than a week, and I had him signed up at NBCF.
We’ve now been going for a few weeks, and it’s been a great experience for me and an even better experience for Adrian. I love it because there’s nothing better than doing something you enjoy with your kids and it’s great to have him at a place where I spend a lot of time.
For him though, it’s a bit different. It’s not like he’s gone into New Braunfels Crossfit and started crushing out hanging power cleans and doing muscle ups. Nobody does that as a beginner. No, it’s been great because he’s gone in there, and he struggles to do everything. He has a hard time doing burpees because his lanky legs are hard to get back under him when jumping up. It’s hard for him to do thrusters with any weight. It’s hard for him to do everything.
It’s also hard for a young kid to do those things in a public arena and fail. Young kids are so self-conscious and it’s hard for them to do these things when they feel like everyone is watching. All I’ve focused on telling him is that we all sucked at doing this when we first started. When I first started Crossfit, I was 45 pounds heavier and couldn’t do 1 pull-up. I too was self-conscious about what I looked like working out.
The really cool thing about that was that was as we had that discussion at the gym, several people that I regularly work out with all chimed in and said the same thing. They all had been horrible at working out when they first started, but slowly they got better.
The Amazing Beauty of Improvement from Failure
As I continue on my journey of fatherhood, figuring it out as I go because I forgot to purchase the instruction manual that comes along with having children, I have had a pretty significant revelation here with Adrian working out with me.
There’s great power in pushing your kids to do things that you know they are going to struggle with and that you know will be hard on them. There’s a lot of value in doing things that you know that your children will fail at on the first try. I knew that the first time my kid tried to do any type of working out that he was going to have a heck of a time. I mean hell, the kid used to call a time-out in the middle of his soccer game so he could get some Gatorade. He still tries to do the same thing occasionally when he’s mowing the lawn.
All that said, we’ve been working out together at NBCF now for about three weeks. We go at least two days a week and do our program together. This past Saturday I noticed that those long, baby deer legs are beginning to have more strength. Or at least enough that he can do a lunge without falling over sideways. He’s now able to move those legs underneath him a little better when doing a burpee.
He’s also a little less worried about how he looks while working out and a little more focused on trying to be better. He’s still not exactly fired up to wake up early on Saturday to go workout in the morning, but he’s learning what is expected of him and how to be prepared to go do something active instead of playing video games or sleeping late.
The folks that we work out with at New Braunfels Crossfit have been awesome too. They all knew what I was going for with trying to get him acclimated to working out
The greatest thing to me is that he now knows how to fail and learn to get better at working out. To not worry so much about what you look like or what people think, but to focus on being better every time you go back. I think he’s uniquely fortunate to be able to learn how to work out in this type of an environment. I also believe that he’s going to be that much better off when he starts training for athletics at his school knowing that he’s done this type of work before and he knows how to fail and how to get better after failing.