Whether the months are cold or the weather is hot, it is easy to find an excuse not to get up and get moving. It is just so comfortable to lay in bed all day. It uses up less energy, too.
The unfortunate truth is that the less exercise you do, the more exhausted you will feel every day. Exercise actually helps increase your energy levels and boost your mood.
Since staying active is a must for both kids and adults, as a family, you should all set aside time every day for exercising. To encourage each other, why not do it together?
There are lots of activities you can enjoy with family as part of your fitness routines. What’s amazing about these is that they can be done safely at home, too!
Five Family Exercises to Do at Home
These are some exercises that you can do together and tweak as you wish to fit everyone’s preferences. While not every activity is strictly a workout, each of these is sure to help you and your kids break a sweat.
1. Do some laps in the swimming pool
One easy way to get kids excited about exercising is to announce a swimming day. Before jumping in the pool, check if the area is safe for your kids to be frolicking in. You may be due for a deck replacement to keep from burning your feet under the sun or getting into accidents due to slippery floors.
Once safety has been ensured, plan your pool games. Children can’t resist a good old race, so simply doing laps in the pool gets their competitive spirit going.
If you have a beach ball, you can play a game of catch, too. You don’t need equipment at all, though. If you have some coins to spare, you can play a fun game of coin dive, with the winner being the one who gathers the most coins!
2. Play a game of Twister
If you need a game to warm up for the rest of your family game night or your other exercises for the day, nothing beats a game of Twister. For this one, you can leave the kids to play and be there to man the spinner and supervise to keep the game safe and fun.
This can also be educational for younger kids, as it teaches them about different colors. It also helps them respond better to instructions through the game mechanics. Twister also encourages kids to perform some basic problem solving!
3. Have fun with some hide-and-seek
For days when you can’t be bothered to bring out equipment to exercise, there are still great ways to get active indoors. A game of hide-and-seek never gets old. Play it a little differently to make it more exciting: use a whole floor of your house as the game area!
With a larger “arena” for hide-and-seek, it challenges the “it” to comb through the area with more effort, thus getting your blood pumping and giving you a good cardio workout. If you have kids who are afraid of the dark, you can have a “lights on” policy to make it more comfortable for them.
4. Play fitness video games
If any of your children is an avid gamer, chances are you already have a game in your console somewhere that encourages movement. There is an awesome variety of fitness games available on different platforms, from your own smartphone to consoles such as the PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.
Your kids, however, may not be too interested in games that are straightforward exercising games. Fortunately, there are games such as Beat Saber, Just Dance, and Pokemon Go that encourage movement despite not exactly being for exercise. They can sweat it out while fully enjoying themselves with these.
5. Level up your Jenga games
You also don’t need to come up with brand-new activities all the time just to make your exercise sessions fun. You can just play your usual board or card games and add a bit of a twist.
One example is to play a leveled-up game of Jenga with the family. For this one, you can require each player to do a five-second dance move for each block they pull from the tower. The tower has to stay standing throughout the whole dance the player does.
You can tweak your other games and activities to accommodate physical movement through simple changes that make the game more challenging for everyone. These help you realize that staying physically active at home with your kids is really not that hard.
