Keep Your Kids Active & Healthy

3 Suggestions to Keep Your Kids Active & Healthy

For anyone around (or older than) the age of 40, you can close your eyes and remember summer days filled with running around the neighborhood, riding bikes to your best friend’s house, building forts, climbing trees, and spending the entire day outside until it was time to run home for dinner. It was common for us to run, jump, climb, crawl, skip, and hop throughout the day.

Movement is key to optimal health

Those activities were second nature for the older readers of this article. But for the youth growing up today, days filled with outdoor adventure and movement are more the exception than the norm.

Society is more sedentary today than it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Most of us, including our children and grandchildren, sit more than we move. And, when we do move, our motion is more limited.

Gone are the endless summer days filled with a wide variety of movements. For most of us, our motion is restricted to a small series of movements required to carry out our daily existence. We get up out of a chair, walk down a short hallway, twist at our desk, and climb a flight of stairs. If we choose to exercise, our movement is often limited to a single plane of motion. When was the last time you (or your kids) jumped over something, crawled under something, or moved side to side?

The problem with our limited movement is that we need movement to ensure optimal health. And it isn’t just important for those of you reading this article. In order to keep our kids healthy, both now and well into the future, movement is crucial for them as well.

Movement not only keeps kids physically fit to help combat things like childhood obesity, heart disease, and high blood pressure, but according to a Michigan State University article, research suggests that movement can help “increase memory, perception, language, attention, emotion, and even decision making.”

That’s quite the list! The physical and mental benefits of movement can’t be ignored.

Keeping your kids active

If you are wanting to get your kids active (and away from the screens this summer), here are some suggestions for keeping your kids healthy, the benefits of which will be realized well into the future:

1. Get creative – Or, better yet, let the kids get creative! Get them crawling under things, going over things, using their non-dominant side to throw or kick something. Get them using their body and their brain!
2. Make it fun – Challenge them with simple competitions. Let them keep score, let them create their own games, and even let them change the rules to their made-up games for no rhyme or reason!
3. Involve the family – As a parent or grandparent, you can have a huge impact on your child’s or grandchild’s overall health. Keep in mind, they want to mimic what you’re doing, so the more they see you moving, the more they will want to move. Agree to learn a new sport together, go for a family hike, or get in the habit of working out together.

While today’s youth (and many of us adults for that matter) aren’t moving as much as they should be, that can change today. Get up and get moving.  Remember, we are designed to move. If it hurts to move, it is a sign that your body is out of balance, exposing muscles, bones, and joints to unnecessary wear and tear that often results in pain and injury. Get your body back in balance and pain-free movement will follow. Contact The Egsocue Method today!