Happy New Year from our pediped family to yours! Your health and fitness, are typically at the forefront of most New Years Resolutions, and we wanted to help incorporate a little Family Fitness fun. We came up with 10 activities you can do with your kiddos, to help them get active and enjoy it at the same time.
Don’t forget to pick up some quality athletic shoes to kick off the fitness endeavors. Click here for a few of our personal favorites, for kids.
Place notecards around the house with fitness challenges attached to each one. For example, you might hide a notecard under their favorite toy, and that challenge could be 10 burpees etc. The next card could say, 15 jumping jacks and so on.
Get back to your Jumping Rope good ol’ days parents, and to the delight of your kids, see how many double unders you can get per day. Watch that number grow as you practice again, and watch your kids outshine your elementary school records.
Turn on Kids Bop and get dancing or create a playlist. Show your kids your best moves. The other family members can be the judging panel. Go for a “10!” The best score you can get!
I’m a mom of three boys, and let me just tell you, I know the struggle is absolutely real in regards to too much screen time. I try to limit their exposure especially to video games during the school week as much as possible. But my kids are definitely reward driven, and screen time is one huge motivation for them. So let’s use that to our advantage parents.
How this works, is you establish a reward system, so for 30 mins of activity (bike ride, family hike etc.), they can earn 15 mins of screen time of their choosing. (ie. Video games, TV etc.) Get them moving is my goal!
Get ready for a plank off. Whoever in the family can hold the longest plank, gets the days bragging rights, and maybe a choice of a fun family board game to play together sometime that day or choice of family activity.
Like the plank-off. This would be similar to see who can do the most push-ups for the day, and then let them decide what will be for dinner.
There are so many great, family-friendly, yoga videos out there to rent, buy, or download to help get the whole family to find their Zen. Great morning or evening activity. You can also just play “Spa” music and practice deep breathing and stretching.
Take advantage of commercial breaks, and have the kids do jumping jacks, run the stairs etc. And maybe when they do so, they get a little extra time to watch their favorite show.
Challenge the kids to a DIY obstacle course. Let the kids get creative because we all know they love to build forts, and come up with a family obstacle course. Let them know it needs to include jumping, running, crawling, and climbing. They could setup a broom between a chair and low table that needs to be crawled under, stairs to run up, jumping over pillows etc.
Play a game of hot potato. This is where you can’t let the object you are passing around hit the ground, or stay in your hands for too long or you will get burned. Up the activity level by the other participants in the game who aren’t holding the potato have to run in place or do high knees.
Hope these activities provide some healthy fitness, family fun, and loads of laughter to start the New Year. Enjoy!