Andrew (00:02):
Our kids are in trouble. Schools are canceling gym classes and team sports are gone. The pandemic has parents desperate to get their kids moving. That’s where gym owners come in. It’s Two-Brain Radio. And Chris Cooper is here to talk with Brand X method founders Jeff and Mikki Martin about what’s best for kids and how you can provide it. Chris is here with the Martins right after this.
Chris (00:21):
Hi guys, Chris Cooper here. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Forever Fierce. Reach out to them to sell more apparel or retail items. Matt Albrizio and his team will save you time with templates. They’ll provide ideas and tell you what’s selling best. And they’ll supply marketing material and preorder sheets. If you want to get serious about apparel and retail, visit foreverfierce.com. Mikki and Jeff. Welcome to Two-Brain Radio.
Mikki (00:45):
Thanks for having us.
Chris (00:47):
It’s such a pleasure. I mean, we haven’t seen each other in person for a couple of years, but we’ve been friends for over a decade now. And I came all the way out to your place to take my CrossFit Kids cert, which you guys had developed.
Jeff (01:00):
I remember that very well. We were talking yesterday on the drive back and she was talking about the podcast and she said, what are we going to talk about, and I said, I don’t know. It seems like Chris and I start talking and then we’re going like, Oh, we never quite covered the ground that we all want to cover. We’ve enjoyed a lot of the same ideas about training and about training kids. And we’ve always enjoyed our relationship with you, so it’s good to be here.
Chris (01:29):
I’m lucky to have at least stable marginally in touch, but you know what happened after you guys left CrossFit Inc, to found Brand X?
Mikki (01:42):
You know, you mentioned 10 years or about 10 years, and I’m thinking 10 years should look like 10 years in the development of something. Right? So for us, it’s been about six years that Brand X has been Brand X on its own. And then prior, but we’ve been busy looking at what’s best for kids. That’s our mission. That’s what we’re always doing. So what’s best for kids and that is physically, but also psycho/socially. And then developmentally. And then are we hitting all the things we need to be hitting on? Of course, that’s, you know, that’s a giant nebulous problem, right? All of the things kids need. And, but that is what we’ve been doing. We’re looking at what do they need? What do we see in the community? What kind of support do people need most? What things do we see that make us cringe that we want to address as fast as possible?
Mikki (02:40):
So we’ve been spending those years creating content to address what we see. And sadly within in 10 years, things have changed drastically for kids and their—where they start, their starting point when they walk into a gym or a school yard and their movement capacity and movement potential, all those things are very different than when we started 20 years ago. And that’s a speed of change. I almost want to say it reminds me of what I keep hearing about climate change. The speed of change has picked up. And so it’s become more close to our hearts to make sure that we’re addressing what we’re seeing in the most—the easiest way to communicate to the community so that people can really stand tall.
Jeff (03:30):
Let’s kind of take a step back. You know, let’s go back to a decade, 2010, that idea of what is best for kids. You know, we started off with our kids, literally our kids, and then our kids’ friends and then the kids in our martial arts class. So we were always about learning what could we do better? And evaluating the things that we were being told. So, you know, going back to like 2010, we’ve had this great program, these are moving along really well. And we’re starting to question things, is increased work capacity the true measure of what we should be doing for kids. Like we’re focused on children. Not to talk about the adult side, but leave that over here, but is increased work capacity, really the gold standard for a child, a child fitness program, and kind of started coming to this idea that, you know, Chris, if I want you to decrease your 200 meter time.
Jeff (04:26):
What do you have to do, you have to put in work. Like if I want a eight year old to decrease that 200 m time, what do I have to do? I can put them in the corner, give him licorice and Coke for two years and they’ll come back at 10 years old, bigger and stronger cause biology takes care of increased work capacity. And so we start questioning this and start saying, you know, what is best for kids? Well, is it best for us to focus on that? Or should we be focused as a group, as a movement, on something that provides children, maybe an opportunity to be better athletes throughout for the rest of their life. And kind of, as we’ve kind of struggled with this question came up with the goal of the Brand X method was to increase physical literacy and the quality of the movement of children.
Jeff (05:11):
So we didn’t think parents brought their kids to the gym to be good at gymming. They bring their kids to the gym, so the kids can be good outside of the gym. And that’s really our, you know, our ability to introduce movements, have them, have them provide problems for them to solve, you know, movement wise and making movement patterns, fundamentally sound so that the kid can take those things and have them outside of the gym. So that also then starts to bring into question some of the things that we kind of hold as dear, like, you know, should their workouts be constantly varied and, you know, high intensity all the time. Well, children, you know, if you’re looking at a child and you’re saying, I want them to move well on, let me introduce you to the squat. And I’m going to bring that squat back three weeks later, that’s clearly not the best way to make a child move well.
Jeff (06:15):
And then, you know, how to teach a child to like, you know, draw the letter A and I’ll say, OK, here’s how you draw the letter A, three, two, one go draw as many as you can, as fast as you can. Well, it starts to make sense. That what we want to do is slow things down, focus on that good movement, teach them to interact with their environment spontaneously using those good movements. And, and what came out of that was the Brand X method, but also, you know, studying like, you know, kids who are going to walk onto a college campus, never having played a sport and try out for the sport and make the varsity team as a freshman, which is, you know, unheard of. And now we’re starting to see that happen. Not just that kind of success happen coming out of our training centers. People have been with us for five years or so. We’re starting to see kids go off to college and have success in athletics and maybe not so much this year, but
Mikki (07:21):
No going off to college.
Jeff (07:22):
But that really is the focus, you know, the focus of Brand X, you know, the separation allowed us to show what was happening inside of our gym, truly happening inside of our gym and then provide a pathway for other trainers to get involved and have happened in their gyms.
Chris (07:40):
Let’s start with something that I think Jeff said, which was physical literacy. You know, I see this in the education system now, even where they’re bringing this term up, what does that term mean to you?
Mikki (07:49):
Well, there’s a classic definition, the Margaret Whitehead definition, which I think I’m going to paraphrase it a little bit, but competence, confidence, and motivation to move throughout life basically. Physical literacy itself is a pretty huge and in-depth theory and what we do is try to take the elements that we can apply in our classes. So that means that we’re going to be trying to address things as simple as throwing, rolling, catching, mirroring movement, translating movement to language, kicking. But it also means so there’s sort of skills that we consider physical literacy skills. So you take the idea of jumping and you say, well, how many different types of jumping there are? There’s leaping, bounding, hopping. So each area has a myriad of other movements beside it, I feel like I’m talking in circles here, sorry.
Mikki (08:59):
It’s just a very in depth theory, physical literacy is, but the way that we’re applying it, is you can think of it as movement vocabulary, you want kids to have all the vocabulary. You want them to have all the words to put the sentences together. So we want to make sure they know how to do all the things that we want them to be able to jump n any fashion, a split jump or hurdle jump, pogo jump, bounding, leaping. We have to provide them opportunities to do those things. And then we want to be able to throw catch carry, as well as squat, press, lunge have a solid core and be able to stabilize. So we look at there’s functional movements, or we call the primal movement patterns that we’re addressing layered with all of these skills and opportunities to increase movement vocab.
Jeff (10:02):
When we were young and this kind of goes back to something Mikki was saying a little bit earlier about culture changing. We as a youth program, we feel very strongly that we have to continue to adapt. Like we have our goals, we want to turn out kids who are physically literate. But we have to react to what the world, what’s happening in the world. Around 2012, we started to see a decrease in what we would consider physical literacy. So, and I’ll give you an example. We would have kids come in to be an athlete. My kid plays baseball. He plays soccer, he swims. Awesome. Come into class. We’re all gonna do broad jumps as of, you know, in our warm-up. And that is this boom, jump.
Jeff (10:49):
And what we see is these kids coming in and they’re going like this? No, no. I want you to jump with two feet. OK. And they couldn’t jump with two feet. That’s a crazy thing. Stuff that we learned by playing outside and climbing trees and having our kids or our friends do pickup games and things like that are just not happening anymore. And what’s happening kind of going off of Mikki’s thing. You know, if you think of the human library of movement, that kids should be able to just simply, I need to shuffle sideways. Boom. I got that. And I go, well, here, they’ve lost their library card. They can’t get that book out. And so now we start talking about, I know you and I have talked about this several times about injury in sport. Well, you take a 13-year-old kid and you, he comes into high school.
Jeff (11:44):
He says, I want to play football, but he doesn’t have this library of human movement that’s normal and he doesn’t move well. So he shuffles sideways, and you wonder why there’s a discussion about this increase in injury in sport. Well, it’s because they’ve lost all of this. We have to learn as coaches to address that. I mean, when at 60 years old and down on the floor doing bear crawls, take your left hand, step here, take your right foot, do this because the children, can no longer mimic my movement, which is part of that mirroring that Mikki was talking about with physical literacy.
Chris (12:22):
So Mikki, this was happening before COVID. I mean, Jeff just said 2012, you started to notice it. Has COVID can have exacerbated the problem?
Mikki (12:33):
I don’t know that we know the answer to that, but I think we can all expect what it will be. It appears that being inside more often and having less opportunities for movement, which I would guess is the case for most youth right now, it’s going to make this problem far worse. And then the inability to personally interact with their peers, because that is a great support mechanism to their learning physicality in any way, right? Or just as youth, they want to be around peers. So that’s gonna increase their learning cause you’re going to see others and how others address a movement problem and how they solve it. So that’s going to be gone or is gone for at least this period of time, as well as potentially all movement itself. And we have come up with resources. We’ve got three months of PE at home in all the age groups and came up with certain social distancing games and workouts and so forth.
Jeff (13:41):
An awful lot of kids not moving there. They’re stuck behind a screen now, eight hours a day doing teaching. And one of the things we know is that kids learn by visually copying other children. So what I found in our gym was, you know, after a while I get kids coming out of Mikki’s class and they’re growing up, they’re 15, 16 years old and all squat and move beautifully and I have a new kid come in and I go, this is how you squat. And then they’d see the other kids doing it. And they squat beautifully. I go like, I’m just a great coach. That’s so untrue. The fact of the matter is all my kids are great coaches. They just move well and the kids see it. And then they go like, OK, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m mimicking that now. That’s what used to happen in play. It’s no longer happening. And now is no longer happening to an extent that I think we’re going to really, it’s going to be really problematic because kids are not able to get together and learn from each other.
Mikki (14:48):
And experiment. The whole idea within the play world of play, being part of this is to take those elements that really, really support the mission to help kids move and the opportunity to explore and experiment and improv with movement. So you think of kids who just have a pick-up game and they don’t really have the right tools. So instead of that, they use a stick instead of a regulation softball on a regulation field. They’re in a ruddy, muddy, slippery environment, all that requires that they adapt, right. And that whole adaptation piece and the ability to confidently address a new unknown situation, experience of constantly addressing new unknown situations. So they’ve gotta be doing that for that development. Not only physically, how do I respond to a ball that’s moving in an unexpected way, but emotionally, socially, mentally, they’ve got to learn how to address and be confident about this situation. So there’s ramifications that go well beyond on the physical realm that we’re going to be seeing, that what we can all do is provide more opportunities for them to live and to move alongside other humans, maybe six feet alongside but alongside.
Chris (16:15):
So, and, you know, as you said, like sports are also seeing rapidly decreasing participation, you know, mostly because of COVID and the six foot separation, kids aren’t moving in schools, a lot of schools are shutting back down. I think, you know, you mentioned that in Arizona and here in Ontario, too, it’s an amazing opportunity for microgyms to expand their kids program. So we’ve established that there’s this amazing need there. Where do people start? I mean, obviously you start by understanding that kids are not just little adults, but if I’m going to pick somebody to run this program, who should I be looking for?
Jeff (16:55):
Let’s just hit that first part real quickly, because I think there’s a misunderstanding a lot of times when people get adulut certification, they don’t want to work with kids. Kids differ by degree and kind from adutls. What a child needs is different than what adult means. And we need to honor that. And so when Mikki was talking about the biopsychosocial model of training a child, biologically what can a child express at a certain age, psychologically, socially, psychologically, what do they understand? Those are primers that a coach who wants to work with kids needs to understand. They need to be trained first to work with children and have the understanding of what that is, and be able to then address those needs because they understand what those needs are. When you want to hit those opportunities, if you want to, you saw there was a huge opportunity in your area to be a plumber. You wouldn’t just go buy a hammer and go, OK, I’m going to go out and be a plumber now. You’d get some training, and that will help you be successful. So understanding what children need, why they need it and how to deliver it to them is vitally important, especially now. Now if you’re asking, like, what are some of the opportunities are out there, somebody who’s trained and has this ability they can go to schoos to provide PE because that is, we’re seeing that constantly in our schools are shutting down and don’t really know what to do fpr PE.
Jeff (18:45):
And so they’re having a PE teacher come on and just Zoom the class. And there’s no engagement. In PE there’s opportunities, reaching out to parents who are just sitting there with my kid at home, you know, providing brain breaks. Some of what we’ve seen is providing short videos like this is what we’re going to do today. And then the parent can then purchase access to that and they get the video and down here and the child can watch it and then do it. They don’t have to be on the call with the coach. One of the things we saw with two of our gym coaches, which we thought was interesting was they would do something like this, where they provide five days of workouts for the kids. And once a week, they’d meet to discuss technique and how the kids were feeling about the workout. So they’d check in, you did the workouts, you sent them to the coach or teacher, and then you have that check in once a week to discuss what the workous were like, and it worked phenomenally well.
Mikki (19:52):
You have a little less of that Zoom exhaustion.
Jeff (19:52):
And you can also, in that kind of environment, you can’t say, well, you can’t go outside. Here’s what we’re going to do. Problematically with Zoom. It’s, we’re in a room and you’ve got 10 feet, and this is what we’re going to do. And that gets old for children as well as teenagers
Chris (20:16):
Back to the show in just a minute.
Chris (20:17):
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Chris (20:58):
I’m not sure how kids are supposed to be expected to sit and watch a class on Zoom. But I know the CIO at Two-Brain has a six-year-old daughter and she is sitting in front of Zoom all day, listening to lectures. I just can’t imagine. Obviously the person that’s delivering the program in person or online has to have the right personality. If I’m starting from scratch at my gym, how do I find the right person before I say, OK, here’s how we’re gonna get you trained?
Mikki (21:27):
We may answer this slightly differently, because we’re both sort of specialized in an age group. And I think it does matter. That does matter. I think the first thing is to see how they actually interact with kids naturally, you know, do they, and how more importantly, how kids respond to them, is this person somebody that kids light up when they come in the gym or are they kind of cringing or are they excited to show them what they did at school today? Do they want to interact with this person? Does the person maintain a high energy, bringing their whole world into their one hour class? Are they somebody who’s able to simplify constantly simplify and get the right message across? Are they somebody who’s able to repeat themselves over and over without getting tired of it? Somebody who is a planner and can stick to a longterm plan of what the goals are.
Mikki (22:28):
Somebody who can communicate well with parents, they’ve got to be a communicator. I do think, as I mentioned at the start of this, that person has to be a good fit for the age group they’re going to work with. And it is not necessarily the same. There are people who can work with preschoolers, middle school kids, or elementary kids and teenagers. Both of our sons have kind of run those classes at different times and done fine with that. I feel very committed to the elementary school age and Jeff to that middle high school age and for different reasons. So I think there’s a lot more to it than just somebody who’s energetic or really a great athlete that doesn’t necessarily translate at all to teaching capability or real potential good communication with your client, which is both the child and the parents.
Jeff (23:28):
We divide the kids up into three different groups, 3-8, 8-12, 12-18. So kind of as a rule of thumb, what you’ll find is a person they’re good with younger kids, three to eight, they can kind of 3-12 and then you’ll find kids, people who are like teen people like me, who kind of can go from eight to 18. That’s kind of like a good rule of thumb, but I would tell people know we’re really accessible, call us and, you know, talk about what you’re going to start with. You should start with an age group or an bio-psycho-social group. I am going to start with middle schoolers. Cool. Here’s what that middle school coach should look like. This is what he should be able to do. This is what he should be able to do. With the teen class, I know I have 30 teens in there and they’re talking whatever, and I’m writing on the board. And Mikki would go, like, how can you stand that? I go, I don’t even hear it. Like, I don’t even, I don’t even hear it. And she goes, that’d drive me nuts. And then with the younger kids, I’d be like,
Mikki (24:43):
What do I do, my friend’s bandaid is stuck to my elbow!
Jeff (24:49):
They’re gonna tie me up and light me on fire. I have no idea how to work with these kids. So it depends on what the age group is. It depends on that person. And then when we talk with people in our training center, what we say to them is, you know, call us, talk to us about what age group you want to work with, and we’ll talk to you about what that person should be like, well, at least the underlying qualities of that.
Chris (25:14):
So I think that’s great guys. And actually that’s a different perspective than I expected too. So really good to hear that. Once I’ve selected the right person to run or right people to run my kids program, how do I get them trained? I know you guys moved online years ago, even before it was called the PYCC. Right. Yeah.
Mikki (25:35):
2016, we put our first online content up. We had a basic class and an advanced class. Then we put up a clean module and in so doing realized during that period of time, that technology was changing so quickly that there were better platforms and better ways to be able to teach in a multimedia way. You know, we were putting up PDFs and tiny little videos on the system andalso continued learning and we need more. We need to, people need to know a little more about physiology and anatomy and system development and what is and isn’t finished in this age range, they’re working with. We just kept looking going, we need more, we can do this better. And luckily technology was changing such that really beautiful platforms became available to put things out onto. And then we also entered into a partnership with James Fitzgerald and OPEX where he was able to contribute some really great content on that side.
Mikki (26:40):
The anatomy, the physiology side that we thought very much necessary. So, we revamped what we had done in January of 2019 and that’s our professional youth coaching certification. And that’s kind of our premier product. Um, but we also also have a youth strength course. We have a youth competitor’s course and we give out a free course called the youth trainer toolkit to anybody who lets us know they want it. Info@thebrandxmethod and we send that out. and that’s an introduction. We also have Brand X essentials, which is another mini course, kind of an introductory course. We recently created an educator’s course and that got up just about another week before he makes some announcements about that.
Chris (27:35):
Oh, fantastic.
Jeff (27:35):
The PYCC. One of the things that we found was we wanted people to know more. If you’re training kids, you should be the best-educated trainers in the world as well. So weekend course, 16 hours at best, and then you leave and you forget half of it. And so the PYCC is 25 to 30 hours online. And it goes over the why behind the scientific principles and the why for training children and the bio-psycho-social model. You get done with education certificate, but you’re not done. You get access then to the PYCC probe, which is all about the hows. So you got all the principles, now how do you use those principles in the class? How do you set up a class? You have over 50 videos on teaching movement to kids and teens. We’re adding another hundred videos by middle of October on teaching physical literacy. So how do you catch the ball? How you teach catching a ball, how do you teach throwing the ball? Well, those steps and tiers. So there’s tier one, tier two is this, they should be doing this. To walk people through how do we teach these skills, these necessary skills.
Mikki (28:49):
Also that PYCC probe product, it’s always being added to, ever-growing. So there’s a blog that comes out that we want to point to we put on there, Research articles that come out from major organizations goes on there because we want people to stay very current on what is happening. And obviously with the pandemic, people have realized how important it is to look at exactly what’s happening now, right? Instead of, well, I learned this 10 years ago, same, same old, but it’s not. So we want that current information on there. And so that’s a real key part of our education system is that people stay current.
Jeff (29:30):
And all of it’s designed that you can go back to it. So for, you know, for the coach on the ground, in the class for your teen coach, I’m going to teach back squat today, there’s back squat. That’s how they teach. That’s the points of performance that they’re looking at. Here’s the video. Again, I can even bring it in show it on TV in class to the teen athletes. So here’s the video of it what we’re looking for. So we’re really trying to give coaches, multi tools to, not just continue to grow, but also to refer back to what they learn. What is this energy systems I need to go back and talk about energy systems with kids.
Mikki (30:08):
Infographics, to speak directly to the client, having a hard time explaining this, the client, you know, I learned it here, but I can’t put it into words when a parent comes in, what do I do? OK. Here’s a this infograph. Create those two for the coaches, teachers to be able to explain what our goals are and how we’re going about it.
Chris (30:33):
That’s really interesting. And I think that could maybe open some more doors too. If you knocked on a school’s door and said, here’s what I’m doing with an infographic or a coach of a hockey team, for example, I like that, you’re always adding to the courses. When I attended in person, I went away saying, you need to take this course from Jeff and Mikki and you’ll coach adults better.
Chris (30:58):
Would you say that like delivering this online is additive to the experience, like, are there things that you can do online that you really can’t do in person besides resources?
Jeff (31:10):
They’re different animals. You know, people come to a live course, right? And they’re excited. We want to pay this money. I’m on my way, going to this location, I get to meet these people. We’ve tried to have some additive stuff in the PYCC to kind of manage that. So when somebody signs up for the PYCC, they get our emails, they get our phone numbers, they get our Calendly links, they can sign up and we can have a face to face Zoom call to discuss the parts of the course that they’re interested in that. But I think, you know, from my point of view, as a teen trainer, somebody who was interested in having teens move really well and apply that to sport the ability to continually go back and go, like, what am I trying to accomplish here? Here it is on, you know, on video here. Here is the science behind that, that I could continue to go back to. That had been really important to me. We said earlier on is what we’re seeing is a standardization of outcomes coming out of our training center. So five years ago, if you looked at Brand X’s Instagram, it was all Brand X, our gym and the kids there moved quite a bit differently than most kids on other on other Instagram pages. Now I can go to any number of our training centers and the kids are all squatting the same way. They’re all picking stuff up the same way. They’re all running the same way.
Mikki (32:45):
So I think that is due somewhat to the ability to deliver a consistent product. So I think that the online platform allows for everybody sees the exact same content. There’s no variability in what the presentation or the presener the weather during the presentation or any of those distractions that might happen in a live environment. That can be also great, but it works in our favor as far as consistency. And we’re also able to test. So there is a test within our certification that you’re listening attention and actually went through all the material.
Chris (33:32):
Hey, so what are some of your training centers doing now post COVID? Like, are they expanding their program offerings to accommodate kids who might not have been interested before? Are they working with more sports teams? Has there been any change that the lockdown has created?
Mikki (33:52):
You were mentioning a queue in teh YMCA.
Jeff (33:55):
A few of them used the lockdown to reach new audiences, which I thought was amazing. And then when they opened, they got wait lists, they can’t fit more kids in. So one of our training centers provided boys and girls club, a free class once a week. And guess what kids were interested. They reached out to sports teams that can’t, you know, they can’t necessarily train in their sport right now, but they can come to the gym. One huge thing that we talked about early on, was for them to get on their local Facebook groups and provide brain breaks for their local groups. And we’re seeing, you know, some people that we’ve had great success when they reopened.
Mikki (34:59):
And there are a lot of parents that are honestly tapped out by this experience of now I’m at home, I’m organizing three kids at three different levels at home, and they’re all sitting there all day. And could you just get up and move? Right? So they’re looking for a break. They’re looking for somebody who can take that on. So it is a huge opportunity for a professional to say, I can provide you a youth program at the local park, and we’re going to keep everybody apart as necessary or as directed by our government or whatever the rules are, but we’re going to keep moving. We’re going to keep them engaged.
Jeff (35:38):
Because there’ll be a peer group. I think it’s just a matter of really being flexible and being able to pivot and adapt and just look at what is the opportunity presented in that is there are a lot of kids that can no longer participate in whatever formal movement process they had. And then there are those that maybe never were moving. And now the parents are very well aware of it cause they’re watching and they’re like, well, my kid doesn’t move all day. I need to do something, you know, and I can say go outside and climb trees, but there’s a better answer than constant unmonitored or unstructured play. I think you can provide some, some of both really to address all the things. I think the places to look for places that kids congregated before. So boys and girls club is awesome.
Jeff (36:32):
You know, they’re a sports team. So, you know, there are the 50 States all have different 50 different rules, 50 different counties within States all have different rules. Some places you’re not allowed to play soccer. They’re not allowed to play, but they have a team. So you reach. So be an entrepreneur, a person who goes out and says, Hey, coaches, you’re not allowed to practice soccer on the field, but my gym is open. Bring your team. You still have the team feel, we’ll do some strength and conditioning. We’ll make it applicable to your sport. And, you know, kids will come, you know, the coaches will bring the kids in. PE like contact your local elementary schools. Like I said, get on the Facebook groups, you know, this is why I’m doing it. You know, I’ll do it two or three times a week. I’m gonna do the Zoom class for 15 minutes for free for the kids just to reach out to, you know, you don’t want to do too many loss leaders, but you do want to show people that you’re there and you want to provide them a solution. And, and that’s really the whole idea behind entrepreneurs. What is the problem? How do I solve that problem? Well, the problem is profound right now. And people are looking for opportunities to get their kids moving. Coaches are looking for opportunities to have their team get to you.
Chris (37:54):
Yeah. And you know, with us where space limits a combination, you know, we’ve just dumped three quarters of all the hockey players in our city, out of the sport for at least the next year. And the meeting that I had right before I called you guys was can we cancel some of our adult classes to fit all these kids in the gym? So there’s definitely a massive opportunity out there guys. I think that part of this is can you get the right people? And then can you get those people properly trained? And for me having an online course, like PYCC was just such a blessing because all of my assistant kid coaches are college students. Right. I can’t bring them to Arizona with me right now. That’s been really helpful for us.
Mikki (38:41):
We do still have live courses. We’re looking at changing that—not at the moment—but we still do offer a live a live course and we still have a lot of people, even during this pandemic, we’ve had people reach out saying, can we still do that? Not exactly right now, but we do do live courses.
Jeff (39:04):
But we don’t teach the basic PYCC anywhere but online.
Mikki (39:04):
It’s more of a masterclass.
Chris (39:12):
I see. That makes a lot of sense, guys, any final thoughts that you want to share with, you know, there’s 18,000 gym owners listening right now. And even more coaches.
Mikki (39:22):
Just reach out to us. We’d love to talk to people. We love to hear what they’re doing. We want to learn. And we learn as much from the people we talk to as hopefully they’re learning from us.
Mikki (39:33):
Just reach out. We have a lot of resources that we give out just to help our mission is to help do what’s best for kids. So, anything we can do in that vein where we’re excited to do.
Chris (39:47):
I love it when the opportunity to help kids is also an amazing business opportunity at the same time. And I really think it is right now. So, you know, Jeff and Mikki, thanks a lot for coming on again. And, you know, we’ll share links to some of the resources in the show notes and also a place for people to contact you.
Andrew (40:16):
For more on developing the kids’ program, click the link to Chris Cooper’s blog in the show notes. He’ll tell you exactly how to generate revenue for your business while you help children get moving and learn to love fitness. That’s the blog at twobrainbusiness.com. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe to Two-Brain Radio for more episodes.
