Children and Exercise

Children and exercise-Blog post

The key to exercise at a younger age is making it fun and should be more about active play rather than exercising.  Children love to emulate their parents so this is why I have focused on your exercise this past month, it always starts with you!  So focus on getting them out and about and moving.  

 Exercise improves blood flow to the organs, especially the brain and help your body to make it’s own internal medicine to help heal it from inflammation.  When you exercise, your blood flows faster through the vessels which allows the vessels to secrete Nitric Oxide so that the vessels can dialate.  When this happens more blood can flow through the vessels and brings more nutrients to the body and organs and is the safest way for us to lower our cholesterol

 Monkey bars are a wonderful form of exercise as hanging and moving through motion while hanging is great for their shoulder mobility.  Honestly, I would recommend everyone spend some time hanging as you may notice less tension in the upper back and shoulders when you start to do so.  

As children get older you can start to allow them to do more bodyweight specific exercises like squats and pushups but hold off on the weight training until they are in puberty when they are producing enough testosterone to drive progress and allow for proper recovery.  Yes it’s ok for them to have fun and do a few bicep curls here and there, but it’s more important to allow their body to move through different modalities so that they don’t suffer from overuse injuries.

If your child is playing in a specific sport, make sure that you have them do other sports as well for fun; even if its in their own yard so that they are working their muscles differently.

Ideas for moving more as a family:  

Go for daily walks

Play hide and seek

Fun challenges-ninja warriors, floor is lava, 

 Actionable step is practice time moving = time sitting

Let us know how you and your children find ways to move at Form Fit Mom Community on Facebook. 

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Transcript

Episode Four children and exercise, I believe we all can agree that 2020 was definitely a year. And unfortunately with that came some detrimental things for our children, one of them being the lack of movement that our children are dealing with due to this pandemic. So I wanted to quickly go over an article that was published in the Journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity, which studied kids in Canada. So the study had to do with their physical activity, how much limited sedentary behaviors they had, and if they had adequate sleep, because we should know that all of these things are important to healthy childhood development. And unfortunately, it's very dreary, what the results found, so only 4.8% of children, and they identified children as being from five to 11. And point 6%, not even 1% of use, and use being 12 to 17. We're meeting that combined movement behavior guidelines that children had lower physical activity levels, less outside time, higher sedentary behaviors, including the leisure screen time and more sleep during the outbreak, what they did notice was that the children who were more active amongst the group that they looked at the parents were encouraging and supporting them on being more active, the parents were engaged in the activity as well. And family dog ownership was one of the greatest signs for the positive movement. And hopefully, this is eye opening for you, as someone who wants to make sure that you're raising healthy children, we are already a society who moves less. So 2020 really pushed us back. And I find it interesting, because right when everything happened, I remember going for walks in my neighborhood with my kids, and everybody was outside with their families. And I thought, if anything, this is a great thing to come out of this devastating situation, because families are together and you know, moving more, but unfortunately, that was not long lasting. And I think what became of it was more devastating than what we had, which is one of the reasons I wanted to one put the podcast together and to talk to you about this so that hopefully, we can learn from one another different ways to start moving more in encouraging children to get more involved in exercise. And honestly, I don't like to think of it as exercise because we all know what that brings to mind. So the key for children at a younger age is making it fun and should be more about active play, rather than them exercising. So if you have a child who lives a sedentary life, one thing that I can encourage you to do is to make sure that you are encouraging them in a way of bringing on more fun activities. Rather than telling them they need to go outside and go for a walk or something like that. Also, children love to emulate us, which is one of the things that stated in that research, the children whose parents were involved in exercise with them, the more they were moving as well. So that is one reason why I focused the first half of this month discussing these things so that you can start finding ways to move more yourself and by you working on yourself and moving more you will naturally encourage your children to do the same. And why do we want to make sure that our kids are out and moving about I have mentioned this before but it is extremely frustrating to me that fitness has turned into what you look like it's all about what you look like and we are missing so much of the deeper purpose of exercise or movement and I want to just let you know that the more you can get your children moving, the healthier they will be. So if you look at exercise improves blood flow to the organs, all of the organs, especially the brain, and it helps your body to make its own internal medicine to help heal it from inflammation. And what is the big conversation around inflammation is inflammation is the cause of disease. So when you exercise, your blood starts to flow faster through the vessels, which allows the vessels to secrete nitric oxide so that the vessels can then dilate. When this happens, more blood can flow through the vessels and brings more nutrients to the body and organs and is the safest way for us to lower our cholesterol. And it is nitric oxide is like your body's internal medicine. Just think of it that way. If you want to heal yourself, you have got to start moving more. If you want your children to be healthy, you have got to start having your children move more. And I'm as I'm saying this, I want you to know that I deal with the same thing in my household, I do not say that I know at all at all my children are they are active, for sure. But they are more sedentary than what I would like my children love to be on their, you know, on their electronics, they love it. And I don't discourage it honestly, on the weekends, because I like to sit and read books, I love reading. They don't bother me when they're on their electronics, I do want you to understand that this is something I'm working on as well. I'm not here to preach to you about what needs to be done. What I want to do is help provide you with information that maybe you're not honestly interested in looking at, which is completely fine. This is something I like to geek out on. So let me go find the information for you. And then I'll just relay it to you in a way that I think will resonate. Yeah, I've got to work on it as well, our household needs to work on it. One thing that we have in our house is a hanging bar. And I think this is a great way to get movement to start to occur in your own house. So you can go buy a hanging bar, and you can either put it you know in between a doorframe or you can get one that kind of hooks on to the doorframe where you can take it up and down. And is it the most aesthetically pleasing thing. No. But I would say that it's more important to create opportunities for movement in your house and outside of your home than it is to have an aesthetically pleasing home. But I'm also a fitness professional, not an interior designer. So what we do is we have a pull up bar in our house. And when we go through that door, most of us hang on it for a second, sometimes we'll hang on it longer, but usually for 510 seconds. And what this does, it is great for shoulder mobility. So if we think of our shoulder, most of us, especially since we live such a sedentary life, we kind of round our shoulders forward, we go into this relaxed posture. And this decreases the space within our shoulder complex. So that creates a lot of impingement issues. So one thing that can help with shoulder impingement is hanging from a bar. So you would then hang on a bar, it helps the mobility of the shoulder, it helps to open up those areas that have become tight, and it helps to lessen the tension in the upper back as well. Now if you're like me, you might say I can't hang on a bar, which is fully understandable, you have to if you have not done it in a very, very long time, it is not easy. So I would encourage you to grab a hanging bar or if you have to go to a playground, hold on to the monkey bars or something and just hold and see what it feels like. If you're not able to do that, then you might want to place a stool or a bench near that hanging bar to where you can prop your feet up as you hang so that you can work on practicing hanging with still allowing your feet to be underneath you to help with some of that weight distribution. And then just work on that over time. That is one of the I would say easiest ways to start getting movement in your house. And it's great for children to start working on as well so that they can work on hanging. And remember that the more you start to do things like this, the more your children are going to watch you and they're going to start to emulate you so make sure that you are finding ways to move. One thing that my husband I have always noticed with our children is we will hound them to go outside and play like basketball. Get outside, go play basketball, go outside do something and they would have every excuse As to why they didn't want to go outside. So we would get to the point where we would go outside and we would be doing something him and I, and lo and behold, guess who starts coming out the door, every single one. It's like, I've got 10 children here, I only have three, but all of my children will head outside, they all end up coming outside. They're like, what are you doing? Oh, dad and I are throwing the basketball around, can we play? Can we get involved, and then it turns into this, they start playing Yes, we play with them for a little bit, we'll usually play like pig or horse, something like that. And then 1015 minutes later, we start playing, and they continue to play. So even if you can start encouraging in that way where you get involved in the beginning, and then you slowly step back, that's a great way to help those kids get involved in exercising or movement. And I encourage you through this to really work with your children on creating different types of movement patterns. So unlike going to like a gym, or working out in your garage, or something where you're doing bicep curls, and things like that, it's okay for your kids, if they want to, if they're old enough to be able to follow directions, heed safety guidelines that you impose, then they can have fun with it. But I'm not one to encourage people to work on weights with their children. I personally and I know there's some controversy around this. But I believe that children should do bodyweight exercises when they're younger. If that's something that interests them, I honestly think that movement is the most important thing. But if they do have an interest in exercising, bodyweight specific exercises would be the first option. And then once they hit the age of puberty, once they would say Tanner stage for where they are in full puberty, and you are starting to see the hair under the arms, the things like that, then that is then when it's safe to start adding weights, because then their body is able to produce enough testosterone to drive progress and also allow for proper recovery to occur. So let them have fun with that, if that's something that you're doing, and they see you doing and they want to do it as well let them have fun with it. But I encourage you to help them start to move through different modalities so that they don't suffer from overuse injuries. And honestly, everything that I say for children, I say for you, I don't think it is imperative for us to do 100 of one specific exercise, that's when you start dealing with overuse injuries focus on finding different ways to work specific muscles in different patterns. That's how we keep a more mobile body. And I would like to say this as well, when it comes to sports, we live in the south. And for whatever reason, the South is very gung ho on their sports. And if you're not like two years old, starting your basketball or baseball or you know, your sports career, you are late, too late to the game, you're too late. And I encourage parents, you know, if that's something you're into, go for it, let your kids do that activity, especially if it's something they love, but do not ignore the fact that if they are only using their muscles in one specific way, like throwing a ball over and over that repetitive movement, they will suffer injuries. So that doesn't mean you should stop them from doing it. No, they will still have to do that. Because they have to do that for the sport. What I would encourage you to do is ensure that they're finding other ways to move as well, other than just that one thing. So that comes into play with when you're thinking about your children and their exercise and you're like, Oh, well, my son goes out and he plays football all the time. Okay, he does do that. But he's only working through specific modalities with football. So I would encourage you to have him also work on something different to work his you know, his movement patterns in a different way so that his muscles and joints can stay strong and healthy. Okay, so now I've given you the reasoning why I'm encouraging you to move more, find different ways to move more. And now we've got to bring it all home with an actionable step. I do want to give you some ideas. And I also want to encourage you to share ideas that you have because I like I mentioned I love to learn as well. And I want to be able to learn from you ideas that you have in regards to things that you do for fun to get your children to move more easy ones go for a daily walk, go for a family bike ride, those are easy, everybody. Well, if Your children are old enough to know how to ride a bike, there's, you know, they're able to do that don't worry about the speed with which you do these activities as different speeds will activate different muscles. So don't think that if Oh, you know, my child's three years old, they're just learning to walk, it's gonna, it's not going to be your exercise, but think of it as movement. And it's your opportunity to move your body in a different way, some things that we like to do are setting up our house like a ninja warrior arena. So we would, my husband would throw pillows around on the floor and have the kids jump from pillow to pillow. And we would create these obstacle courses through our house, we would also create obstacle courses, we have a pool, so we would create obstacle courses on our back porch. And we would have them do different things like okay, you're gonna run around the house once, and then you're going to come in through the back door, and you're going to run through and jump over this. And you can have it like a simple bat laying on the ground, jump over the bat, and then crawl around this chair and then dive into the pool, do four laps in the pool, and then we have a hot tub. So then we would have them try to do a pull up on to the hot tub, go touch this button, whatever. So we create a lot more fun. And then to bring another element to it because we had two boys close in age that were very competitive with one another. So we would do some fun competitive stuff for them. And of course, even at out we also have a younger daughter. So you know, she was a lot younger at the time. So we'd have her do things as well. And she would only do one lap in the pool while the boys were doing four laps in the pool, things like that. So that everybody almost finishes at the same time. And it's more about having fun with it, then who actually wins. So things like that The floor is lava. That's a fun game to play with the kids as well. Any kind of dance parties, great hyden. See, I mean, that's not a ton of movement. But it is because if you think of Okay, I'm going to go hide and where do you usually hide, you're not going to hide like in a chair, you're going to have to like scrunch down into a position you're not used to. And if you've ever been in a weird, uncomfortable position for long periods of time, while you're the last one in that position, you'll start to exhaust those muscles, they will be affected. So things like that have fun with it. I was going to say this for a future episode. But one of the most fun things that we did during COVID was we bought a ton of water balloons. And we had like a water balloon tag in our backyard while we actually went around the whole house. And we had so much fun doing that. And not only were you running around running away from each other, throwing the water balloons, you know, as soon as the water balloon hit you, you were out. So that was lots of fun, it was kind of taking tag and hide and seek and then throwing water balloons into it as well. We had a great time doing that. But then after it was all over, guess what we had to go clean it up. And there were like a kazillion squats or deadlifts, not dead lifts, but things that we were having to do for that as well. So it was kind of like workout within a workout. So that's what I'm encouraging you to do. And your actionable step for this week is going to be in regards to looking at the time that you move equal to the time that you sit. So this will be for you and your children. They're going to love it.