How to Make Exercise Fun for Kids

Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here is explains how parents can get their kids to enjoy being physically activity.

Getting older children to enjoy physical fitness starts off with turning whatever activity they are practicing into a game. Here at My Gym, most of the activities we do are hidden within some kind of game. So the kids just think they are playing a fun game, and they don’t even realize that they are exercising at the same time.

One great example of that is something we do here called the snowball war. We are throwing snowballs at each other and having a great time. But what the kids don’t realize is that they are also working on their hand-eye coordination at the same time. Of course, we aren’t telling them they are practicing a certain skill, because if you just told a kid to stand in one spot and throw a ball at a target for hours he wouldn’t have any fun at all. So we make these things fun and we don’t focus on having any winners or losers. We never do anything like that.

Instead, if we have a snowball war, we are just telling the kids that we’re all going outside to throw snowballs at each other. They end up laughing because they got hit, or they are laughing because they hit someone else with a ball. From a socializing standpoint, if they want to interact with a friend, then they are going to go throw a ball at them. And we’ll even mix the parents into the fun, too. So we are working on specific social and physical skills, but using a whole other format to do it.

Snowball wars aren’t the only game we play at My Gym. We do many different games like that, including tags, relays, and other things where it is all a game and we don’t have a winner or a loser. In fact, when nobody is a winner then the prize for doing good is really just the opportunity to do the activity again. So if a child finishes a race first, we say “Congratulations, now you can go again!” Because it’s so much fun, they love that. We don’t need to have any outside reinforcements for winning.

The same thing applies with our cardio runs. We have the kids chase one of the teachers rather than just running in circles around a track. And they love that. The teacher will run backward, turn around, do a forward roll, all the while he is interacting with the children and the kids are running pretty much until they are so exhausted they are about to fall down. In comparison, if you just told a group of kids to go run until they fall down, they would go about 10 steps before they decided they were done.

Here at My Gym, we also have a zipline for the kids to use. If you want to build upper body strength, that’s the way to do it. The kids hang on a zipline and hold on while they go across the gym. They hang on because they don’t want to fall and they’re having fun. But if you tell them you just want them to hang onto a bar they’ll instantly say they are done. That’s just how kids work.

So hiding the activity inside a game format or a fun format is a great way for parents to help their children become more physically active. Also put them in situations where they can choose to do the activity spontaneously. Making fitness fun is about making it into a game. That’s why we say at My Gym. Fitness made fun is one of our slogans.

The information in the article is not intended to substitute for the medical expertise and advice of your healthcare provider. We encourage you to discuss any decisions about treatment or care with an appropriate healthcare provider.