Kids are kids, of course, and they’re out flinging themselves around in these places. At Ninjas United, the Maple Grove gym I visited, the padding is everywhere and there are coaches and spotters all around.

“You’ll see we have some $800 mats called cloud mats and they’re phenomenal,” co-owner Chris Voigt said.

His wife, Jen, who runs the gym, said she notices teenagers are more prone to sprains or strains because they need to warm up. “But they still remember being a kid when they didn’t need to warm up,” she said. “So some are a little more relaxed in their warm-ups, when they should be a little more focused during that.”

This past week, several readers reacted to my column about the dramatic, ignominious end of Bremer Bank, the longtime St. Paul institution that sold to Indiana-based Old National, by noting that the bank’s beginning was just as dramatic.

Before starting the bank and the charitable foundation that owned it, Otto Bremer and his brother Adolf in 1911 took over the Schmidt Brewing Co. from its founder, Jacob Schmidt. They built it into one of the nation’s largest by 1920, when prohibition started. Through the 1920s, Otto started to purchase banks and, as the Depression started, “pledged every asset he owned” to keep them shored up.

That included his stocks in “eastern banks,” according to the Star Tribune’s obit of him in 1951. “The eastern stocks were lost by sale when additional margins in a declining market could not be furnished,” the obituary said.