Children pick up habits quickly, which could stay with them for a lifetime. Therefore, you must incorporate physical activity into their lives through their nurturing.
It is always good for them once they keep moving around to children. Research shows that children from age 6-17 need at least an hour of cardiovascular and aerobic activities each day and engage in exercises that strengthen the muscles at least three times a week.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), regular exercise can help children build fitness, strengthen bones and muscles, reduce anxiety, depression, or stress, reduce chances of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure in the future.
Children have a short attention span and can only make the most out of exercises when it is fun.
Exercising for a whole hour can seem daunting for younger children. However, it becomes easier when these activities include imagination and games.
Each child is different, but it is important to know your child’s interests and what they consider fun.
Once you do that, you can carve exercises around to help them easily enjoy the physical activity.
Here are five fun and easy workouts that your children can adopt into their daily routines.
Dancing
Dancing is therapeutic and appealing to a lot of children. It’s a creative form of cardiovascular exercise that trains their minds and builds muscle.
The music and community of other children make the environment conducive to staying focused.
At One Airport Square, Fitness One Gym has special classes for children. They offer ballet, yoga, afro dance, and others for children.
Dance exercises help improve children’s posture, balance, and coordination and can go a long way to helping them physically.
The best thing about dancing is that it is fun, and children will always look forward to it once you sign them up.
Children are amiable and will naturally bond with other children who attend dance classes. The opportunity to socialize also gives your child an emotional and psychological boost.
Some dances that your child can engage in:
- Ballet – This helps your child become more flexible as the dance requires your child to stretch out muscles. Coordination and balance are also improved during the ballet.
- Contemporary dance is a combination of modern-day dance that helps you express yourself. The dance moves are very fluid and allow children to connect their minds to their bodies.
- Afro dance is a very vigorous dance involving swift and continuous body movements. Sometimes fused with hip hop, this dance keeps your heart pumping and improves fitness. The variation in moves also allows children to improve their memory.
Running
Allowing your children to run at an early age can help them develop very well. It helps them have healthy lungs and hearts.
They develop incredible stamina that can be a helpful asset as they get used to running.
Running also improves the coordination of children.
Research by the University of California Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine shows that aerobic exercises such as running can improve children’s academic performances.
It keeps their cognitive memory sharp and ensures they are in the right mental state when they run.
Children have loads of energy and love to play.
The key is to shape the running exercises as a game, so they don’t get bored of just running.
You can organize games such as tag, hide and seek, etc. These games encourage the children to run after each other or after a goal.
You can even make the children more motivated to run by adding more incentives to the game.
Older children need more competition and will only enjoy games that will enable them to run if many strategies are applied.
Some examples of such games which will need strategy include relay racing, treasure hunt, capture the flag, etc.
Once children enjoy running, they will do it joyfully without complaining and always look forward to the next session.
You can also track the performance of your child by attaching sports watches.
Jumping
After 18 months, a child is expected to know how to jump. Jumping is also a great form of exercise for young ones.
It builds on your ability to bounce and extend your muscles.
Just like when you run, jumping helps improve the body’s coordination, balance, and muscles in effect.
Jumping tightens your core and allows you to have more flexible joints.
Compared to other exercises, jumping provides children with the most endurance and strength.
In 2018, a study was conducted on the impact of jumping and other exercises on children between ages 10-12.
While one group engaged in a training program that focused on jumping three times every week, the other just indulged in routine physical activity without any form of jumping.
After ten weeks, results showed that the group that involved jumping had developed more strength than the group that didn’t.
This shows how crucial jumping is in every exercise routine. Therefore, there is a need to include jumping in the exercising habits of children from a tender age, so it becomes part of them.
Of course, making your child jump will eventually bore them out. So there is a need to spice it up and make it more engaging for your children.
For younger children in love with cartoons, you can ask them to jump like their favorite character. Or you can also ask them to pretend to be a kangaroo or frog and hop.
You can also get creative and play a little game with your child where they keep jumping whenever music is being played and stops when the music stops, much like a remixed edition of musical chairs.
You can make them engage in competitive sports that require them to jump frequently for much older children.
You can get them involved in sack races where they have to jump in a sack from start to finish. Or you can let them practice jumping and shooting in basketball.
Another option is to get into mini volleyball, where they have to jump and spike in games.
Yoga
Yoga is the one exercise that is recommended to everyone, no matter your age group or strength category.
Children are encouraged to partake in yoga because of the varied health benefits.
According to research, yoga helps with breathing, reduces stress levels, makes you stronger, and is flexible.
A study in 2015 revealed that young people benefit from yoga largely as it reduces anxiety in children.
Younger children might be too young to do yoga by themselves, so we advise you can sit with them and do your yoga while you ask them to mimic you. This even promotes bonding between parents and children.
As the children grow, you can share resources on yoga, such as online videos and books, so they vastly improve their knowledge of the exercise. Other specific benefits of yoga include:
- Ability to focus more – Yoga is a form of mental training that improves your brain by making you focus more, have a better memory, and boosts your self-esteem.
- Less disruptive – Studies show that yoga children are calmer and less disruptive in school.
- Sharper IQ – Yoga helps improve children’s brain function and, in essence, makes them perform better in school.
Bear Crawls
The bear crawl is an exercise that involves using the full body to make you move from one place to the other. You bend and take the shape of a bear as you start to crawl.
This exercise increases your coordination and strength. In addition, bear crawls tone your lower and upper body muscles, keeping them in shape.
In order to make bear crawls more attractive to children, you can allow them to use their imaginations.
They can pretend to be bears in the forest trying to escape obstacles or hunt for food.
How to do the bear crawl:
Bend your body so your hands and feet can touch the ground.
Make sure to keep your arms wide enough and push your hips up into the air.
Move by stretching your right hand forward as your left leg does the same. Do vice versa to keep moving forward.
References
Jenco, Melissa, and News Content Editor. “Study: Physical Activity Has Cardiovascular Benefits for Young Children.” Publications.aap.org, publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/13972. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Best, John R. “Effects of Physical Activity on Children’s Executive Function: Contributions of Experimental Research on Aerobic Exercise.” Developmental review: DR vol. 30,4 (2010): 331-551. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2010.08.001
Best, John R. “Effects of Physical Activity on Children’s Executive Function: Contributions of Experimental Research on Aerobic Exercise.” Developmental review: DR vol. 30,4 (2010): 331-551. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2010.08.001
Rasberry, Catherine N et al. “The association between school-based physical activity, including physical education, and academic performance: a systematic review of the literature.” Preventive medicine vol. 52 Suppl 1 (2011): S10-20. doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2011.01.027
Hillman, C., Erickson, K. & Kramer, A. Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, 58–65 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2298