Family Fitness Made Fun

Remember when childhood was synonymous with running, jumping, and playing games?

These days, kids spend more and more time parked in front of television, videogames, or computer screens. It shows. Since the 1980s, rates of childhood obesity have soared from 11% to 30% in developed nations. They’ve leaped from only 4% to 14% in the developing world -- proving that the problem of inactivity is a worldwide crisis.

The fatter kids are, the less healthy they’re likely to be. What can you do to encourage the whole family to become more active and a lot healthier? Plenty. “Sometimes the modern world seems to conspire to make us sedentary,” says Steven Blair, PhD, an expert in the epidemiology of exercise at the University of South Carolina. “But with a little creativity you can inspire the whole family to get up and become more active.”

Become an Active Role Model for the Kids

“We know from many studies that children are more likely to be active if their parents are active,” says Jennifer Huberty, PhD, associate professor of physical activity and health promotion at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. Being active with your children, Huberty says, also helps give them confidence and teaches them the skills they need for a range of activities.

Behavioral scientists say one strategy to make exercise fun is to turn activity into a friendly competition. Family members can compete against one another or, in larger families, can divide into teams.

Rewards are also a great way to keep everyone motivated -- especially rewards that encourage activity, such as new running shoes or a cool new pedometer. Another trick is to make activity part of everyday life. Encourage kids to share in vigorous household chores. Plan vacations built around activities such as bicycling, canoeing, or hiking. Get into the habit of walking when you do errands, and encourage kids to join in.

8 Ways to Get Started on Family Fitness

Experts offer a few ways to get started:

• Turn chores into fitness challenges. Chores such as vacuuming, cutting the grass, washing the car, or cleaning out the basement burn extra calories and give muscles a workout. Plan a weekend day when the whole family pitches in. Make a game of it by offering a reward such as a movie or dinner at a favorite restaurant for a job well done.
• Explore your local parks. Most communities have parks where you can hike together as a family. Check online or with your local parks and recreation department for a complete list. Put a map of local parks on the refrigerator and challenge the family to visit every one over time.
• Walk the dog. Too many family dogs -- like their families -- are overweight. Dog walking offers a great opportunity for being active, one that benefits everyone. Encourage everyone to take turns or go together on dog walks. Don’t have a dog? Chances are you have elderly neighbors or people who travel who would welcome the offer to give their pooches a vigorous walk. Another option: volunteer to walk dogs at the local animal shelter.
• Dance, dance, dance. Whether it’s country & western or ballroom, dancing can be so much fun that it doesn’t even feel like exercise. Yet dancing burns calories and improves cardiovascular fitness. Many communities offer dance programs. If you have younger kids at home, all you have to do is put on some lively music with a great beat and throw your own dance party.
• Join up. Many gyms offer special family rates. Sign up and encourage the family to work out together. Set goals for each member of the family and keep a chart on the refrigerator to tally up the results. Fitness trainers can create individualized plans for each member of the family. Many gyms offer active childcare programs for the youngest family members, allowing an opportunity for those old enough to hit the treadmill or the lap pool.
• Step up your everyday activity level. If your kids love gadgets, buy everyone in the family a simple pedometer (a strap-on device that counts steps). “Challenge the family to see who can tally up the most steps during the week,” Huberty suggests. “Or set a goal for the whole family to contribute their share. Keep track of the results on your refrigerator.”
• Assign an activity director. Each week, assign one member of the family to be the activity director. The task: choose an activity that the whole family will try. Encourage the family to take on something new, whether it’s bicycling, bowling, rollerblading, swimming, canoeing, kayaking, ice-skating, or playing Frisbee.
• Plan an active vacation. Make reservations to stay at hotels or motels with swimming pools or other options for activities. Take the family camping and hiking. If you plan to explore a city, decide on city walks that you can take together every day.

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Have you thought about how great it would be to include your family in your pursuit to exercise more regularly? Family exercise will improve the health of your loved ones, make exercise more fun, and at the same time develop stronger connections between all of you. With a little creativity, you can find a way to make it work for everyone.

How to Start
First, decide what level of participation your family is ready for. If your entire family is committed 100%, you could go as far as setting up a Family Olympics. If it's a struggle to get your family to do anything together, starting out small might be the better option.

You may simply focus on educating each them about the benefits of exercise—in a smart way.

Bombarding them with stats each morning as they come down to breakfast might not be the best option. Put up a healthy living bulletin board in your kitchen (or use the fridge door) with articles and other resources that will help get your point across without having to say much of anything. For example, if one child is an athlete, an article about a successful athlete who commits to fitness could go a long way. Or, post a story about a young person who had trouble focusing at school but started exercising and saw an amazing difference.

You are only limited by your creativity!
 
Here are a few other ideas to get your family focused on fitness:

• Combine exercise and household chores. On small pieces of paper, write down chores and body weight exercises. Throw the papers into a couple of hats and have everyone pick one of each. Maybe Dad gets to clean the bathroom and do a set of squats every few minutes until he is finished, while one of the children is cleaning the kitchen and doing forward lunges, etc—the combinations are endless. Mix it up with yard work, seasonal chores, and even some aerobic components like jumping rope.
• Hire a certified personal trainer to design a program for each family member based on their individual needs, and then work out together. If Mom is looking to tone her body and her teenage daughter wants to improve her basketball conditioning, a similar circuit can be set up at home, indoors and outdoors, to achieve both.
• Have each family member pick an exercise at the beginning of the week and do as many reps as they can. Then train throughout the week with the goal of improving by the weekend. The family member who has the highest percentage increase is rewarded with something small (but motivating). Keep the focus on the fact that everyone is improving.
• Designate one evening as family fitness night. Each week, a different person designs the family workout that you will all do together. Whether it’s swimming, rollerblading, walking, Frisbee golf, or a two-on-two basketball game—everyone gets to do something they enjoy, and your workout will never become dull.
• Buy small pieces of equipment to keep around the house. Then make some fitness rules: Exercise during commercials every time you watch TV; stretch before bed each night. Purchase a few inexpensive items (jump rope, resistance bands, stability ball, dumbbells) and rotate them through the house on a daily basis. Treat them as scavenger hunt finds-- if you find the jump rope placed in the garage, you have to use it for one minute. Next time you may find it on the porch, or in the basement.
• Each week, measure your fitness levels to determine your family’s overall fitness average. Add each person's own calculation of their level of fitness for the week; zero meaning they did nothing, and 7 meaning they exercised daily. Divide the total by the number of family members. Set a goal to average at least a 5 or 6 each week, rewarding the entire family if it's met.

Most of all—make it fun for everyone! In the process, you’ll teach your children about discipline, goal setting, and the importance of not only health, but also family connection.

What You Need To Do First

Fitness needs to go beyond the corporate workout area. Most everyone has a significant other and a child or two. These people can positively impacted by what goes on at work. That is, if you are into fitness, you can become a great role model because your family will want to think, feel and act as fit (biologically young) as you. That's just how fitness is : it's contagious in a positive sense, carried by ones who are into it to those whom they care about.

In the last chapter, costs were the primary concern. If the numbers can be trusted, there is a lot of money that is being spent on correcting problems which could have been headed off on the front end. These were incurred not just by adults, but by children (families) as well. They are indicative of the nature of our whole society. We are living in a sedentary time and something must be done about it. If we don't, matters will get far worse from an economic perspective. That of course says nothing about the increasing individual suffering and disappointment, which is is really more primary.

The above articles are concerned with family fitness, and in a sense say pretty much the same thing. They are what experts believe to be true. Thus, they should be taken seriously even if they initially seem to be a bit fanciful That they may sound too optimistic to be real is only natural if your family is currently crashing in front of the computer after what everyone seems to feel is too much of a long day. That's the primary symptom of being hooked on the standard American lifestyle; and that's what has to change.

Fitness needs to be made a fun if it is to be a family affair. Really the same could and should be said about individual fitness right at work. Workouts should be a fun thing to do everyday--something which picks you up, which feels like not-work, making the rest of the day go well. Once this fun aspect has been mastered (possibly after six weeks to six months), you are ready to lead your family in something which will work for each of them. But you cannot lead where you will not go. Your own house must first be in order.

What makes fitness fun for the person at work?

It's assumed that you will be using your new corporate facility on a daily basis, and that you will feel OK for doing so because management does the same on their lunch breaks (or at another set time.) You are lucky if they do, because if they need this time for deal-making, they will work right straight through the day making you feel you must do the same. That causes diminishing returns for both of you. People need something different during same old rigor, day in day out. All work no play makes Jack a Jackie a dull person, and all that. More about this in the next chapter. What you both need to see is that fitness makes you able to do more in less time.

It is also assumed that you are eating right and supplementing. Those things you should be starting right away at home--long before your first workout and long before starting to do any family workout-like activities. In fact, a few weeks of proper nutrition will make all of you feel like getting into motion so that you stay in motion, as the recent commercial says.

But if switching into  training table dieting seems impossible, you need to show up at your once a month group meeting. After hearing how everyone there also feels its impossible, you will all start coming up with ways to replace the wheat products with gluten-free, the soda with natural juice, healthy dinners with the microwaved dinners, etc.Of course, your spouse may initially object (change is hard on people and America has it's co-dependency relationship with real food,) but that's a problem to talk about in group as well

How this gets presented at home determines whether it becomes a new way of living or not. In short, merely laying down the law or how its going to be may sound assertive, or some other such overused word, but it's a turn-off which will eventually come back on you. Besides, you don't need a group or a corporate fitness director to get you Draconian (into being a macho man or mommie.) What you need is finesse--a tactful way of being which comes from thought and talking with others.

The point is that a lot has to go on before anything in the above family fitness articles have a chance of working. Kids do not like authoritarian parents (nor do spouses), which is one of the reasons that modern day psychotherapy has been trying to breed this out of the American consciousness. Father Knows Best or Mom-ism are really set-ups for dysfunctional families and should be gotten out of your act at once. They are no better than a coach who never encourages, or a drill sergeant who always humiliates.

What you need is to start looking great, feeling better, and thinking like the cool parent whom kids love to be around. That will serve as your PhD or CEO status at home. It will come from getting into your own thing at the corporate facility. That's what a corporate fitness director is there to help with. That's why should never miss group.

So, where do you start on yourself? By making it fun--just like you are going to do for your kids. That's what the articles say. How do you do that? By doing something with your time in the gym that makes better what you do behind your desk. Contrary to some dreary anti-exercise professionals, exercise does not have to turn you into a dumb jock or muscle-bound fanatic. The ancient Greeks never believed this nor did Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt or JFK. Rather, it can do, and generally does do the opposite, namely make you better at what you do. That's because of the escalated endorphins, increased oxygenation and elevated blood flow. It makes you better able to think. What about?

Mentally, you can plan your entire day while doing your workout. You can rehearse your sales presentation for your clients. You can vent in your head instead of at you boss. You can plan your projections before you sit down at the computer to fill out your spread sheet. You can rehearse what you're going to say to your subordinates. All of that, and more, can be done while you are working out. In fact, all of that, or something like it, should be done because it will mean that your mind will not be on how long it is taking, how hard you're working and the like. Anyone who has thoughts like these will stop working out altogether anyway.

Those are only suggestions. Perhaps you have some better ones for you in specific. Once you come up with them, and make them operational, you will be positively-hooked into sticking with your program. That will not only make your life better, but will give you a way of dealing with your family when they ask Why is that you want us to be active when Janie and Johnny's parents let them play Intendo all evening? You will be able to honestly say Because this is better-- more fun and infinitely more likely to give you a better life  than your friends will ever be able to dream of. In short,do like I say and do like I do. That's being a leader, and that has the greatest potential of keeping your entire family clear of any of the costly doctor-drollness that everyone seems to be into nowadays.

If this is family fitness article why is it concentrating on the individual?

Just like The buck stops here (Harry Truman), the ball starts rolling here. You've got to be into this before it will do an ounce of good for your family. Sure, a few will be lucky enough to have kids who go out for athletics, but this does not take care of your spouse or the other younger kids. Besides, we are talking about a family fitness lifestyle, not a lone athlete pursuing the state championship in some sport. Yet, doing well in high school athletics may really be dependent upon having all of those good habits in place from kindergarten on. So, if any of you have dreams about your kids as athletic heroes or heroines, here is the place to start--right where you are sitting--with you.

There are helpful hints on the internet for everything--how to make family exercise a fun thing and the like. Some are in the above articles. There are more. All you have to do is a little Googling. But, none will work unless you yourself are into fitness. If you are, even better ideas, ones which are not there right now will come to you. And, they will work for your family, who will love and respect you for them.

You may now be wondering if Rocky came from such a family. More than likely he did not. If he would have, his rise to the top would have been less contentious. Maybe he would even have opted out for just running, which is a whole lot safer than continually getting hit in the head. But, the movie portrayed him as a self made hero. All that means is that if you fail at fitness, your kids may not. Life has a funny way of working in ways that are just not always understandable.

For further thought on a fitness lifestyle order my e-book "Think and Grow Fit."