Parents and kids know that health and wellness are an important combination for a long, happy life. Staying physically active is an essential part of healthy living, and for most families, physical activity is an integral part of the family’s schedule. Children are encouraged to play outside sports, participate in activities and and events to promote healthy living, or even things as simple as playing outside.
All to infrequently, however, do we carve out time to participate in activities for the family. It’s even more of a challenge when the weather begins to change, or isn’t conducive to us heading outdoors for some type of exercise.
Another factor we need to keep in mind is that frankly, it can sometimes be a challenge to convince kids to participate in fitness activities when there are distractions like video games, cell phones and the TV. Most of us are well aware that for most people (both young and older), TikTok is the priority over most other things!
Benefits to Exercising Together
While there are many activities in which the family might participate together, like game night or movie night, it’s fairly rare that we have a family “exercise” night. There are many benefits to the family exercising together.
Family Bonding
Exercising together is a great way for families to bond and build stronger relationships. The enjoyment from the family participating in activities together can create life-long memories for both parents and children. Even though activities like movie night are great for families to do something together, they may not necessarily promote engagement with each other or allow for encouragement.
Opportunities for Encouragement
Parents are great motivators and encouragers when it comes to sports and education. Participating in family exercise is a great way to extend that encouragement beyond external activities or when it involves others outside the family.
Increases Communication
When families are laughing, jumping, crawling and generally moving and encouraging each other together, it’s an opportunity to improve communication and familial intimacy. These will be great times to chat about what’s going on and to connect in an informal, fun way.
It’s Fun!
The most obvious benefit of exercising together as a family is that it’s just fun! Think of it as the same as family game night, but with an even better physical fitness benefit. The bonus is that it encourages good habits, and helps to develop solid health practices.
Finding the Right Activities
While it’s important to select activities that will stimulate both physical and mental health, it’s also important that the family engages in activities that everyone will enjoy and look forward to. This can be a challenge with young people sometimes. So here are some creative activities (let’s not call them “exercises”…for the sake of being embraced more) that are fun and that promote physical fitness.
Indoor Games
The Commercial Challenge
This is a great one when everyone is watching TV together. It might be convenient, too, because that’s where you’ll find the young ones quite often. You don’t really need anything to play this game, although if you want to add some light dumbbells, exercise balls, resistance bands…anything you have that could be used to enhance the game, that’s totally fine. Just don’t make it too difficult. How to Play!
- On a sheet of paper (or phone or tablet), write down the different types of commercials that typically come on during a television show.
- As a group, everyone decide on an exercise (or task) the group must do whenever a specific type of commercial comes on.
Some examples:
Whenever a car commercial comes on, everyone must do jumping jacks until the end of the commercial.
Or for any food or restaurant commercial, everyone must do a plank until the end of the commercial, or for a certain number of seconds.
Anytime a beverage commercial airs, everyone has to drink a glass of water.
These are just some examples, but you get the idea. Make it your own. If you want to incorporate some kind of fitness equipment here, that’s great!
Some fun variations: Any commercial that features mostly kids, and the parents must do an exercise. If the commercial features mostly adults, the kids have to do the tasks.
The variations you can make yourself are broad. The objective is to make what is normally a benign, minimally beneficial pastime into a family fun fitness activity.
Charades
This party favorite can be modified slightly to add fitness to the fun.
- Tear or cut a sheet of paper into small squares (1-2″ square) and write a number on them between 10 and 20. (Each piece of paper will have only one number.) Put the numbers in a box or hat.
- Do the same for a second piece of paper, but on each of these write a fun exercise. (Jumping jacks, frog hops, pushups, etc.)
- Use whatever method you choose to decide who will be the first actor.
- The actor will decide what s/he wants to give clues on, and will begin to give those clues to the rest of the players.
- Whoever guesses the correct answer is the winner. The winner will pull an exercise from the hat or box, and the actor will pull a number from that pile.
- The other players (excluding the actor and the winner of the round) must do the exercise on the piece of paper for the number of reps pulled from the number pile.
- After the exercise is done, the actor joins the rest of the players, and the winner of the round becomes the new actor.
Add your own twists to the game by incorporating jump ropes, dumbbells, resistance bands, etc.
Corners
This is a variation of the”4-Corners” game. Everyone is assigned a corner (or space) in the room. Also in each corner or space is an exercise written on an index card or piece of paper. Similar to musical chairs, everyone walks (or hops or skips) around the room while the music plays. When it stops, each person has to do the exercise they are nearest for 30 seconds. If you don’t have music, each person will take turns yelling, “Go!” and then, “Stop!” instead of music.
You can do this for as many rounds as you like, and if there are younger children, you can let them decide what exercises they’ll do when they land on a space. If this is the case, on each card should be an exercise for the adults, and one for the kids.
Scavenger Hunt
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Outdoor Games
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