Ashley Hunter walked away from investment banking to teach kids how to move. Fifteen years later, Fit Kids operates in 195 schools across 13 states and has reached roughly 500,000 children.
Joe De Sena sits down with Ashley to talk about why kids who already face hard lives every day benefit most from structured physical activity, how her program turns reluctant participants into kids who say burpees are their favorite exercise, and what any parent can do at home with zero equipment and zero money.
Things You Will Learn:
- Why low-income kids in under-resourced schools lose access to physical activity first, and what Fit Kids does to reverse it.
- The approach that turns kids who are afraid of exercise into kids who request burpees by name.
- What any parent can do at home with bodyweight exercises and zero budget to build physical confidence in their children.
Tools & Frameworks Covered:
- Make Fitness the Game: Embed burpees, lunges, and squats inside obstacle courses and relay races so kids associate effort with fun, not punishment.
- "You Can Do Hard Things. Period.": One sentence, no negotiation. Use it as a universal response when a child says something is too hard. End the conversation there.
- Free Bodyweight Protocol for Home" Push-ups, burpees, lunges, squats. No equipment. No cost. Available through fitkids.org for any parent who asks.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro: Ashley Hunter has reached 500,000 kids through fitness
1:29 Growing up in Wayzata, Minnesota, with three sisters and a dad who wanted a boy
02:21 From investment banking to teaching to founding Fit Kids
3:44 How Fit Kids started at one school and grew to 195
5:44 Jay Jackson: the Green Beret's son who trained in the dark and disarmed an attacker
7:40 Physical activity teaches kids how to persevere through hard lives
8:43 The hardest part of running Fit Kids: having to say no to schools that need it
10:34 Kids who start the year afraid of exercise and end it asking for more
12:53 What parents without a program can do at home for free
13:46 How Spartan and Fit Kids partner to get kids to races at Dodger Stadium
18:55 The biggest resistance
Ashley Hunter grew up in Wayzata, Minnesota, played sports year-round, and went into investment banking before realizing finance was not where she belonged. She taught school, then founded Circle of Friends (now Ambassadors) to connect young parents with Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Fifteen years ago, she walked onto a school playground and started teaching kids sports after school. That one-school experiment became Fit Kids, now operating in 195 schools across 13 states, serving roughly 30,000 kids per year and approximately 500,000 total. Fit Kids targets low-income children at under-resourced schools, delivering structured physical activity programs where PE budgets have been cut. She has four kids. One of them plays SEC football.
Connect to Ashley:
