Promote Physical Fitness for Your Child
If your child is to derive the benefits of physical fitness, then physical activity must be habitual and lifelong. Moving should be as routine as brushing teeth and bathing. But this is only likely to happen if:
. Physical activity is a habit of yours and of your family s.
. It s associated with pleasure rather than pain!A pleasant association is most likely to happen if you:
* Choose individual and family activities that fit easily into your lifestyle.
* Select activities that are within your physical capabilities and those of your family members.
* Pace activities with fun, rather than heart rates, in mind.
* Don t worry about scheduling; consistency is important, but
...not adequate you can land up injuring yourself. When you begin to consider what benefits there are to you once you decide to get involved with physical fitness you will quickly realize that you should have gone this direction much ...
* Encourage one another, pointing out what s right about what you re seeing.
* Don t insist a child do something he s not comfortable with; you can always try again in several months.
* Expose your child to a wide variety of physical experiences. Just as you wouldn t feed your child only chicken and spinach, you shouldn t limit activity choices.
* Keep competition out of the equation. No good can come from comparing children.
It s important, too, to view fitness as an ongoing process rather than as a product. The latter gives the impression that there s an end point to be reached, which is a
...of aerobic vs anaerobic it should be aerobic and anaerobic! To exclude the training of any one energy pathway will greatly diminish the performance improvements from your metabolic training. My advice... Put an end to the Aerobic vs Anaerobic Controversy! ...
Writes Curt Hinson, in Fitness for Children: Your goal should be to teach children that their level is acceptable, wherever they are on the continuum, while at the same time encouraging them to move in
...best of luck to you. Remember, it is not necessarily a great idea to begin practicing these three things all at once. You may need to move yourself gradually into a physical fitness program, or you may decide to work ...
A Harvard study conducted in 2000 demonstrated that children regularly overestimate the amount of time they spend moving. When outlining their activities for the day before, the 45 participants (11 to 13 years old) reported an hour of vigorous exercise, like running. But they d been wearing motion recorders on their hips that exposed the truth of the matter: They d actually engaged in vigorous activity for two minutes. The remaining 10 hours of the day had been spent in sedentary activity, like playing videos, watching TV, and sleeping.
The goal is to make physical activity a customary part of your child s and your life. However you
...(RHR) of 69 BPM has a training heart rate (THR) goal of 161 BPM. During aerobic exercise, the body will usually have reached a "Steady State" after five minutes of exercise, and the heart rate will have leveled off. At ...
Rae Pica is a children s physical activity specialist and author of Your Active Child: How to Boost Physical, Emotional, and Cognitive Development through Age-Appropriate Activity (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Rae speaks to parent and education groups throughout North America. Visit her and read more articles at [http://www.movingandlearning.com]http://www.movingandlearning.com.