Listen to the full episode: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · Episode page
TL;DR: In the fall of 1992 I walked into the Fenwick weight room with nothing better to do, and a freshman fullback named Ray showed me 21 reps on the bench. Two days later I couldn't lift my arms, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since. Mighty Oak Athletic exists so every kid in the western suburbs gets that same moment: a real coach, a real barbell, and a place to get stronger away from screens.
Hernan Chousa had me on The Youth Sports Parenting Tribe this month, and he opened by asking me to go back to 1992. So here it is, because it's the reason your kid trains the way they train.
I was 13, a freshman at Fenwick, a little husky and short on confidence. Golf season had ended and winter sports hadn't started, so one afternoon I wandered into the weight room in the basement. It was a dungeon. Brick walls, old benches, nobody checking who belonged. I stood there not knowing what to do with my hands until a freshman fullback named Ray Molland looked up and said, come here, I'll show you some stuff.
He put me on the bench and ran me through 21s. Seven half reps from the chest, seven half reps from the top, seven full reps. I had never felt anything like it. The next morning I walked into gym class and told the teacher I physically could not raise my arms. She laughed and sat me out. And in that moment, sore and useless and a little embarrassed, I fell in love. For the first time in my life I had changed something about my own body with my own effort. I had agency. Everything since then, 30-plus years of coaching, studying and writing about health, traces back to that one afternoon.
Here's the part that still gets me. Ray grew up to be a school administrator. Teaching was in his nature at 14, and I was a kid who needed to be taught. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. My job at Mighty Oak is to be Ray for your kid. Wave them over, show them something simple, let them feel what it's like to move a weight and own the result, then watch them come back a little sore and a lot taller.
That's why we start kids at six, and why skill always comes before load. A six-year-old learning to hinge with a kettlebell is doing the same thing I did on that bench, just with better coaching and less soreness. Kids from 6 to 18 train with barbells, kettlebells and bodyweight every session, and the five movements we teach, squat, hinge, push, pull and carry, are the same ones they'll use at 45. Roughly half our kids are athletes in an off-season. The other half are on the math team, in the school play, at robotics. Life isn't happening in the basement on video games. It's happening out in the real world, and strength is how you show up for it.
Hernan and I also got into something I don't talk about enough: the parent who forgets themselves. I see it every week. A mom or dad who manages their kid's practice schedule, nutrition and recovery down to the minute while their own health quietly collapses. The warning signs aren't dramatic. Sleep goes first, then movement, then the diet slides to whatever's at the concession stand. The framework I lay out in Death Resistant is simple and the order matters: Recovery, then Movement, then Nutrition. Most people get it backwards and start with the diet. Death Resistant doesn't mean invincible. It means reducing the risk of the things that shorten a life, and your kid is watching how you do it.
That's the whole conversation, really. If you're raising an athlete, your example is part of the training. Four kids later, ages 15 to 21, I'm still learning that one. One of mine is coaching now, which tells me the thing Ray handed me in that basement is still being passed along.
The full episode is 36 minutes, which is about one drive to practice. If your kid has never had a Ray moment, their first session at Mighty Oak is free. Book it, and the whole plain-text rundown of who we are, hours and pricing is on our Facts page at mightyoakathletic.com/facts.
Be strong to be useful, Coach Mike
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · hernanchousa.com
Also this month: Coach Mike on The Ultimate Sports Parent with Lisa Cohn
