Everyday Exercise Ideas For Families With Young Kids

Take Your Kids Shopping And Make Them Do Chores

Why not kill two birds with one stone? Not all physical exercise comes in the form of traditional workout-style activities. As long as it gets the heart rate up or builds muscle strength, it counts as exercise!

Not sure you want to? Keep this in mind. Young kids are less likely to act up in a store if they have something to do. Walking to a grocery store or farmers' market will already provide you all with quite a lot of exercise, depending how far away the target location is. Walking around the store or market and giving your kids instructions to spot particular products you need adds to the whole experience — especially if they don't know where the products are.

Dusting, hoovering, mopping, picking toys up, mowing the lawn, and washing a car are all examples of chores that are also good for the body. Your chore time is more likely to be a positive experience for all if you all work on different tasks at the same time, remain upbeat, and give lots of compliments.

The Internet As Your Gateway To Great Workouts

You can and should go to the local park and allow your kids to enjoy free play time with other children, as well as playing soccer, tennis, basketball or other active games together with them. Many kids will have the opportunity to be part of extracurricular sports activities as well.

Where do you get the inspiration? The internet is a fantastic — and FREE — place to start looking. Ask your kids if they'd like to do some military-style exercises, or dance around the house like a ballerina, or do the tango, or relax with yoga poses. All of these suggestions and more are around on the web, and all of them will give everyone in the family a nice workout.

We like to follow along with easy workout videos we find on the web, but we also take note of exercises we really like so we can repeat them whenever we want without the computer. The key to these free and simple family workouts is to have fun. Don't just watch your children as they exercise, join in! You can start with 10 minutes and build up slowly from there.