I remember this vividly. I was 17 and I was wrestling in high school. My brother (15) was also a wrestler and cousin(15) was a football starter. We challenged my dad and uncles to a 3 on 3 basketball game. I figured that they were all smokers and out of shape that this would be a cake walk.

I can still remember my grandfather cackling as they proceeded to beat our asses badly. I think that the final score was 40-2 or something like that. I don’t really remember the game itself other than they were way more physical that we were. Not in a fouling or nasty way but more like aggressiveness.

When getting the family settled into the beach house on Sunday, we play a couple of hours on the ping pong table. My sons recently started playing tennis. So, my younger son thought that he was going to school mom. No way Jose. Mom played several years when she worked at a youth residential treatment facility. It was closer than my loss in basketball, but my son was shocked. He proclaimed that he was going to beat her 10-0 in the next game.

I have noticed over the years that youth are not as strong as I think they should be. I don’t know if it is mind over matter or they are just not fully developed. I have had my nephew or kids help me move furniture around and they seem to not be able to move or lift things despite spending hours a week “working out”. Don’t get me wrong, I am out of shape and they can run circles around me. I am talking about practical fitness however.

I have spoken about wisdom in the past. Back to basketball, my guess is that we were in top physical shape, but they used wisdom to play to their strengths. Maybe if we were all basketball players instead of wrestlers the game would have ended more like the ping pong game. I just dont know but I have seen this enough times in various forms to know that it is more complicated that how much you can squat, bench press or deadlift.

Back when I was in high school, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Your character has both wisdom and intelligence. Intelligence is analogous to knowing pi is 3.14159 (plus a whole lot more) versus wisdom of using 3.14 when calculating the area of a circle. I can’t remember all the severely complicated math I learned to prove pi as a number but I certainly remember where to use it.

End Your Programming Routine: It very well may be that high schoolers competing against other high schoolers are at a roughly equal mental development. At that age, we don’t realize the influence that our mental ability has on the physical. We also don’t realize that we have not mentally peaked or that we don’t know what we don’t know. As I sat there watching that ping pong game, the great memory flashed back of my grandfather just howling as we got schooled.