Let's Get Moving: How to Keep your Kids Fit Through Winter

As the days shorten and the old Jack Frost settles in for a long visit, it’s more difficult to motivate yourself to get outside and have fun. Your natural inclination is to hole up at home and eat comfort food, but this isn’t healthy or productive. Here are some practical and fun ways to keep your family fit this winter.

WINTER SPORTS

If you haven’t taken up a winter sport, then this is the perfect time to find something you enjoy doing. Skiing, snow shoeing and skating are great traditional winter sports to keep yourself busy. If you want to do something more local, taking walks around your neighborhood or in natural areas can be really interesting over the winter. You can also toboggan with younger students and have snowball fights. Check out these snowball gloves which you can make with an old ball and a glue gun.

WINTER PROJECTS

When you have a goal for the winter, it’s easier to motivate your students to get outside. Take a look at this amazing igloo. This was built from ice bricks that were frozen in old orange juice cartons. It took several months to make, but ensured hours of outdoor winter fun. If an ice igloo seems like too much effort, make a snow fort instead.

GEOCACHING

If you live in a place with no snow, try Geocaching. This is a super fun game where participants create a geocache and hide it in a secure natural location. This location is then posted to the Geocaching website here. You can use your smartphone or GPS to locate a geocache. Fill in the log book and take an item from the cache and leave another one for the next visitor. Visit the website for instructions on how to play the game and what items are acceptable.

NEW HOBBIES

Swimming - I love swimming in the winter. It’s a great all-body workout and its fun too. You can join a gym or your local YMCA to get access to an indoor pool. Games like water polo and volley ball also take place at indoor pools or get your students ready for the summer with swimming lessons.

Dance Classes - No matter their age or music preference, there is a dance class that’s perfect for your student. From ballet to hip hop, learning some new moves will make them more confident, it will improve coordination and is a great workout too.

Indoor Sports - From martial arts to gymnastics, having an indoor sport option that your student enjoys is a great way to keep them fit this winter. If they aren’t into sports, get a gym membership so that they can swim, workout or join an exercise class.

Long Term Health Effects of Too Much Sitting

A sedentary lifestyle may not be what you think it is. If you sit for more than eight hours a day, you qualify as having a sedentary lifestyle. I probably just described about 95% of the population! Students and their parents spend most of their day at a desk. It’s simply the way our modern society is structured. Whether you are studying, in class or working on your computer, sitting is probably what you do most of the day, followed by a couple of hours sitting in front of the TV before you go to bed. Researchers now believe that all this sitting could be shaving decades off our lives. The detrimental effects of sitting on your health are profound and aren’t mitigated by the other activity you do.

Why sitting is bad for your health

This means that if, like me, you get plenty of exercise, you will still suffer the negative health effects that are caused by years of sitting. A study by the Universities of Leicester and Loughborough found that over the 18 studies that they looked at involving 800 000 participants, those who sat for long periods during the day were 54% more likely to get heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Prof Stuart Biddle, of Loughborough University who was part of the study had this to say: “What is clear is that anyone who spends lots of time sitting or lying down would benefit from replacing some of that time by standing or walking. Aside from any direct effect reducing the amount of time you spend sitting down may have, getting more physical activity is a great way of helping maintain a healthy weight, which is the best way of minimising your risk of Type 2 diabetes.”

Prevention is better than cure

While you can take measures to reduce the amount of time you spend in front of the TV and include more physical activity in your daily life, it’s really tough to reduce the amount of time you spend working at your desk. This is true for parents and for students who have to put in the hours in front of their computers.

One of the solutions to this problem is the stand-up desk. These desks can elevate their surfaces so that users can stand while working on the computer or the level of the computer can be lowered so that you can sit and work.

It’s tough to get used to standing for long periods while working. I spend most of my day at a desk so I decided to try out the standing desk concept before I invested in a new desk. I put my laptop on a breakfast tray (the kind with the fold-out legs) so I could raise it or lower it as I liked.

At first, I could only stand for about 15 minutes before I started to feel uncomfortable, but I was surprised at how soon I adjusted. It’s a small price to pay to add a few decades onto my life!

The desks have become a popular seller at most furniture and office supply stores.