How To Exercise With Your Kids

Babies and toddlers spend most of their day strapped in their seats, kids and teens rather play on their phones than do anything physical and you probably rarely find any time to dedicate to your workouts. Well, you can and must change that! Luckily, there are so many easy ways you can exercise as a family no matter how young or mature your kids are. Take a look at these ideas, see what works for you and start moving today! 

Teach kids yoga

Yoga is a great activity for the entire family and some poses and flows are perfect for little kids and adults alike. When teaching kids poses and sequences, make sure not to push them. Kids are usually very flexible, but make sure to go slow. At the end of every session, you can even try some inversion poses or acro yoga poses—these always get a lot of laughs from kids and parents. 

Modify your exercises

If you love to work out but want to include your little ones into your sessions, here’s what you can do. While most kids probably can’t do proper push-ups, you can modify this exercise and allow them to do knee push ups. While you do your bicep curls and chest presses with dumbbells, you can give your older kids their own light weights (1 or 2 pounds weights are more than suitable) and teach them how to work out properly. Younger kids can use bean bags, wooden blocks or water bottles if they want to imitate what you’re doing.  

Go for a post-dinner walk

No matter if all you can do after dinner is take a stroll around the block, having some regular post-dinner activity is great for your family’s health. If you have toddlers, make sure to alternate their time in and out of the stroller, but older kids can walk with you and chat about their day. If you’re brave enough, you can even have a light jog and come back home walking. And this activity is great because it requires nothing but good shoes and good motivation to go out. While you can’t really buy the latter, you can check out shoes at Walk Jog Run and find useful shoe reviews. Pick a pair that fits your foot and your chosen activity and you’re ready to hit the pavement. 

Invent fun games

Kids love to be silly, so if you just can’t get them interested in push-ups or sit-ups, they might be interested in Princess Warrior Push-Ups or Batman Sit-Ups. Kids also love to act out different scenarios, so you can pretend you’re in the army, or superhero boot camp and order them to “give you five” or “follow your lead”. Young kids can also participate with simple moves like marching, clapping and crawling. 

Have a family exercise night

You heard about game night, but what about exercise night? Grab a deck of blank cards and fill them with different exercises or buy pre-made exercise cards. Once a week, you can pull out the deck, give it a shuffle and take turns drawing and performing exercises until you run out of cards and breath. 

Dance like no one’s watching

This is a classic activity all kids and adults love. When you’re in a time crunch and can’t really organize a real workout, play some jams and have a fun dance-off. Choose fast songs so you can really jump and twist to get a good cardiovascular workout. You can even follow a dance workout video while your kids do their own improvised moves. 

Working out with your family is a great way to spend time together and work on your collective health. If you encourage kids to exercise when they are young, they will probably stick to this habit when they grow up as well.