Keeping Your Kids Fit!
Fitness for the Kids!
Getting the kids moving nowadays can be a struggle. With smartphones and other technological advances that have become integral parts of most of our lives sometimes extracting kids from the matrix is becoming an ever-harder task. However, it is essential children develop good fitness and health habits from an early age.
I work mainly with adults as a personal trainer but sometimes training kids can be much more fun!
Did you know that as adults we don’t actually gain more fat cells we just inflate (and deflate) the ones we currently have? However, children have the ability to actually undergo Hyperplasia – the ability to gain new fat cells that will stay with them through life. This is why it is essential to establish good training and eating habits at a young age or losing fat as an adult can be much harder to do. Below are 5 tips to get your young ones moving well and eating right!
Make it fun! One of the cardinal rules of getting kids exercising is that it has to be fun! If your child isn’t enjoying it, you aren’t instilling the love of exercise, you’re doing the exact opposite. Find an activity that your kid doesn’t even see as exercise this could be family cycling, jogging, circuit training, combat sports whatever but don’t fall into the trap of pushing them into your sport. You aren’t looking for a carbon cut out of yourself, it’s not cool, encourage individuality.
2. Don’t reward exercise with food. I’ve fallen into this trap before with daughter. Establishing a snack based reward system for exercise is a sure-fire way to get them to gain fat in the future. The snacks will nearly always outweigh the calories spent exercising and this can escalate as they get older. There’s nothing wrong with refuelling with some fruit but keep it healthy. If the exercise or activity is fun enough they shouldn’t even feel like they need rewarding.
3. Enter a Race! A great way to get kids engaged with exercise is to enter a fun run or similar activity. Get them fundraising for charity and they’ll start to associate positivity around exercise. Train with them and make it fun!
4. Train in front of your kids! Children don’t follow so much what we tell them they emulate our behaviour. They do what they see. Training should be seen as a daily natural part of life as much as eating or drinking. I often have personal training clients tell me they can’t train as they are with the kids at home. I’ve trained safely in my front room in front of my kid since she was born. It’s a daily normal part of life. Often she’ll just crack out 20 burpees in the front room simply as she knows training and movement is a normal part of life and being fit!
5. Don’t push them too hard. This goes back to point number one of keeping it fun. If you’re finding it frustrating they aren’t putting in enough effort then it’s something you are doing wrong, not them. Change the activity and keep it fresh. Gamification of exercise with children is the way to go. Often if running with my daughter we’d turn it into a game that we were escaping from a vicious dragon coming from it lair! Make bonus rounds end of level bosses use your imagination – basically get creative!
If you’d like to personally train with me in Brighton or personal and coaching online hit me up on my Contact page.