A General Primer on How to Perform the Exercises

Warming Up

You and your child’s bodies are kept at a fairly constant 98.6 degrees, so you do not need to warm up for this workout. The first few repetitions of each exercise will serve as the most perfect warm-up for the area that is being worked. So with Slow Burn training the warm-up is built right in!


Setting a Tempo

Before I describe each exercise for each program, here are the general guidelines for repetition speed, or tempo that apply to every exercise. Take 3 seconds for the first 1 inch of movement to keep from starting too fast. Starting too quickly, as most people do in typical gyms, causes sudden and excessive forces that can result in injury. Starting slowly also makes the muscles do all of the work all of the time rather than relying on momentum. Momentum is the enemy of quality muscle work when you’re exercising to develop your strength.

After the slow start, the lifting portion should be completed in roughly 7 seconds (could be a second or so longer or shorter depending on a person’s limb length or the stroke length of the exercise). Don’t get overly caught up in a perfect amount of seconds. Once the lift (the raising of the weight) is completed, you carefully reverse direction in approximately 3 seconds and continue (lower) in approximately 7 seconds.

What this means is that the entire repetition may take as long as 20 seconds (or longer) to complete. The length of time, however, is not a hard-and-fast rule as it depends on the exercise you are performing.
For example, your legs are longer than your arms (I hope!). Performing an exercise for your arms will take less time to complete since the distance is shorter. So when you do an arm exercise, the time it takes to complete a repetition will usually be less than a similar exercise for the legs.

The key is to start very slowly, taking 3 seconds to begin the exercise, which causes less force at the outset, and then moving slowly and steadily after that.

To make it a touch simpler for young kids, they can perform each exercise in a 5 second up, 5 second down count, or 10 total seconds per complete repetition. It’s a lot easier to remember and execute. Counting to five is a simple thing to do for any kid and the difference in outcome is negligible.

If your child is still young and is into action heroes, princesses, or superhero characters, you can be creative and count in different languages or use the names of their favorite characters to make it a lot more fun. Instead of counting numbers, you could say “Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Aquaman, and Daredevil!” When we train kids, we dont always use these characters. It’s something that you should investigate with your own child or children to use as a tool to make it fun and interesting to them.

So, it should take approximately 5 seconds to finish saying the names, or counting, then the child reverses direction, and you repeat the names or whatever you’re using again. It’s a little more fun like this for youngsters than just counting 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Finding Your Range of Motion

Each exercise should be performed throughout the greatest, pain-free range of motion as possible. That means you should never fully extend or lock out your joints. For example, if you are performing an exercise for the biceps (which is a hinge type of joint), the arms should start with the elbows slightly bent rather than completely straight. Completely straightening your arm can sometimes irritate a joint and cause some tenderness.

It’s better to start slightly bent and then move toward a fully bent (meaning contracted) position.

For joints that are the ball-and-socket type (e.g., shoulder and hip), you need to start from a position that is slightly less than what the child can naturally stretch into. So for each child, the range of motion will be slightly different. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the exercise, from start to finish, should be performed in a pain-free fashion.

Breathing

Always encourage your child to breathe freely. The rule with breathing is this: Breathe! Holding the breath should always be avoided because it causes blood pressure to rise unnecessarily.

The medical term for holding the breath is valsalva. To control valsalva, simply breathe more. Tell your child to huff and puff like a train or try to blow out a hundred candles on a birthday cake. Sometimes over breathing (hyperventilation) can cause a little dizziness but it isn’t harmful. I know that many of you have heard to breathe in on the lift and out on the lowering. Some experts suggest the opposite, in fact.

This recommendation does not take into account the speed or tempo that you are using to lift and lower weights. When lifting in a slow rep fashion, this would be a bit difficult to do—they’d be some pretty long breaths. The point is that you breathe freely at all times and not hold your breath. This is the most important takeaway concept.

Maintaining Posture

For each exercise I’ve described what posture or form the child should strive to keep. Do your best to follow the recommenda tions and photos in this book. Show your child the pictures of the kids in this book doing the exercise and get him or her to mimic the postures in the photographs as closely as possible.

It’s much easier for children of any age to understand what you want them to do when they can see a visual to guide them. Always stress good form to children rather than how much weight they lift. Praise them for keeping their bodies in the proper position more than for how many reps they’ve performed. This is very important for the younger tykes.

Wearing Proper Attire

When strength training, it’s best to wear clothes that allow for body heat to escape. Keeping cool is an important part of maximizing your child’s ability to work hard. A T-shirt and shorts is the best garb to train in, but whatever comfortable works is. Sneakers or other non-heeled, soft-soled shoes are the choice for footwear. I don’t suggest bare feet even when doing the home program. All it takes is for a weight to mistakenly fall on a toe. So keep the shoes on. But when you are doing the push-ups or the body weight squats, it’s okay to do them in bare feet.

Stomach Crunches – Child Fitness

Setup

Equipment: Two towels (or a mat and two towels)
Muscles Targeted: abdominal

Have your child lie on his back on the mat or floor. The knees should be bent at approximately 90 degrees and the feet flat on the mat or the ground, hip width apart. The arms should be held straight out, as if trying to fly like a superhero. The chin should be kept tucked to the chest, not bridged backward.

• Slowly and carefully he should begin to curl his torso upward and forward as if he is trying to touch his knees with his fingertips. The idea here is not to try and sit all the way up. Only the shoulder blades should roll up The Slow Speed Exercises Start/Finish Position and off the floor. The lower back should stay in contact with the towel roll.
• Once the fingertips touch the knees or when they’re as close as he can get them to the knees, he should pause, squeeze the stomach for a full second, and also breathe.
• He should try and really tighten up the stomach muscles as if a boxer was about to punch him in the gut. Tell him that!
• After the squeeze, he should ease down slowly, lowering the upper torso in 5 seconds until his shoulder blades touch the floor again. At this point, the temptation to rest will be strong but do not rest!
• Immediately reverse direction and begin to crunch up again.
• It’s a little bit harder to keep free and easy breathing in this exercise compared to others so encourage open and
• Strong Kids, Healthy Kids Halfway/Endpoint free breathing a little more often. Try not to allow any breath holding, clenching of the teeth, grunting, grimacing, jerking, and so on.
• Continue until success (muscle failure) is achieved.
• Record the reps and time on the progress chart.
• Remember to give words of praise! If he is really tuckered out, advise him to lie on the towel or mat for a while and breathe to relax.

Making the Exercise Easier

For a lot of kids straight crunches, if done properly, are very tough because the muscles of the abdomen are fairly small and weak. Some assist techniques might be necessary to perform the exercises properly.
Here are two ways to do it. First, tell your child to bring outstretched fingers a bit lower for the rising phase, so that he can touch his mid-thigh. As he crunches, he crawls up his thigh with his fingertips and lets his arms assist in the lift.

Pause and squeeze just as in the routine, then let the fingertips crawl back down to almost resting. If he still can’t do the crunch, have him move over to a door, open it, and straddle it with his legs. Take the jump rope and wrap it around both doorknobs and use it to gently assist in rising to the top position. Then after a pause, lower slowly while holding the rope but without using the strength of the arms to lower back down. Eventually he will be able to do the crunches without using the arms at all.

Making the Exercise Harder

If the crunches are too easy, place the child’s hands behind the head, arms relaxed, not pulling on the neck. Continue doing the crunches the same way as above until he reaches muscular success, then very quickly switch to the easier (arms to knees) method and continue to do more crunches until muscular success is achieved again. Using this method, have him hold the last crunch in the crunched position, replace his hands behind his head, and hold this position until he cannot stop his body from lowering down.

What You Should Know About Flexibility and Stretching

It’s a nice feeling to wake up in the morning and stretch your arms, back, and legs. It is so soothing and relaxing when we do this. I love to watch my kids wake up in the morning and see them go through their stretching routines. But let me ask you this: when we wake up and perform this almost instinctual ritual, are we really stretching? Not really. What we’re really doing when we wake up and pull our elbows and head back is contracting the muscles of the back and neck. This contraction sends blood into the muscles of the back and neck and causes a soothing and wonderful feeling. It is an active contraction of your muscles, not a passive stretching of the joints, which is what traditional stretching usually is.

We’ve all heard that stretching is good for us so often that it has become gospel. The fact is, however, that there is really no such thing as muscular flexibility. A bold and confusing statement, I realize, but let’s look at the facts.

Muscles are organs that are made up of groups of fibers that shorten and lengthen—or contract and uncontract—as the joint flexes and extends. Joints possess flexibility, while muscles possess contractility. Performing stretching exercises in order to make the muscles more flexible is like pulling on a door to make it open wider. If you pull hard enough all you’ll wind up doing is damaging the hinges (the joint of the door) and perhaps the door itself.

But why is it that when people stretch, after a time they can seemingly move their joints throughout a greater range of motion? Several different studies conducted by various researchers across the globe have come to similar conclusions. When people engage in stretching programs, the contractile properties of the muscle do not change, which means the muscles do not experience any direct benefit. Instead, the subjects in these studies became more tolerant to the discomfort of the stretching.

You can try this out for yourself. Sit on the floor and straighten your legs completely. Sit up as tall as possible and slowly, while keeping your back arched and rigid, try and touch your toes. As you stretch farther and farther, you’ll soon feel a deep discomfort in the back of your thighs—but don’t push past this point! If you did this stretch day in and day out for several weeks, you would eventually get used to the feeling and be able to stretch farther. This is called stretch tolerance and it is simply that—a tolerance of the stretch. You have not created longer or more pliable muscles (this is the little white lie Pilates practitioners tell us). All you have done is become accustomed to the feeling.

Now I know that a lot of coaches and trainers advocate stretching, especially for kids involved in sports, and I know we often use the term stretching in the wrong context.

To use the same example, a child wakes up in the morning and pulls his or her elbows back, thereby stretching the muscles of the chest. But is the child actually doing this? What happens is that by pulling the elbows back, the muscles of the back are contracting and thus the muscles of the chest stretch. What this child (or the adult for that matter) is doing is squeezing and contracting the muscles of the back. So rather than call this stretching, it should be called contracting! Powerfully contracting your muscles through strength training is the best way to increase muscular strength, which will enhance joint flexibility. Things are not always what they seem. It’s one of the reasons we should let exercise science—and not exercise tradition—guide our health and fitness endeavors. A joint should never be made more flexible without a concomitant (simultaneous) increase in the strength of the muscles that surround it. So the bottom line is that there is no need to stretch before or after a strength training program. Furthermore, the act of stretching to increase safety or to improve athletic performance should be heavily considered. Having said all this, I know that a lot of people still like to stretch and feel good when they do. If stretching is something that makes you feel good, then by all means do it—but carefully. Kids, however, do not need to stretch before or after athletic endeavors. it seems as if it is a good thing for kids to do, but there is no scientific evidence or any theoretical basis for stretching.

In fact, if you stretch too much, you can damage the ligaments that attach bones together. Ligaments have little blood flow and when lengthened, they are lengthened permanently. This may be necessary if you are a dancer or a martial artist, but it is not healthy. In fact, several studies have shown that athletes’ power output is decreased when they stretch as it can loosen ligaments and tendons to the point where less force can be developed, like an old and worn-out rubber band. So if your child is involved in a sport that requires explosive power (e.g., football, wrestling, sprinting, and so forth) stretching may very well be counterproductive.  When kids become stronger, they are better able to move a joint throughout a greater range of motion. They will be able to perform any joint motion better because the underlying muscles are better able to move the joint and better able to stabilize and protect the joint from injury. Many research papers on the subject bear this out. We know that strength training improves joint range of motion in adults. There is no reason to believe that it will not do the same (if necessary) for kids.