In a world where we are all spending more time sitting and more time in front of screens, exercise offers parents the opportunity to get active. It allows parents to spend quality time with their children and loved ones while developing positive habits that can benefit all aspects of family life, today and in the future!

Here are some of the main reasons reasons why exercise can help improve the health and well-being of your family!

Get Healthy Together

Exercise has been shown time and time again to improve our physical and mental health.

It strengthens your heart, lungs, muscles and bones. It helps control blood pressure, cholesterol and increases blood flow. It improves your fitness, strength, and balance. It helps your digestive system work more effectively, burns fat and helps maintain body weight. It helps you feel happier, builds confidence and reduces stress, anxiety and prevents low mood.

People who exercise regularly are less likely to develop many of the medical conditions that can cause disability or death such as heart disease, respiratory disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes. If you have a medical condition, exercise can play be a key part in in managing it and minimizing many of its side effects.

Therefore exercise as a family, can help you all live happier, longer lives!

Helps manage challenging behavior

Taking part in regular exercise supports your child’s development. It helps them develop their communication, social skills, team-working, problem solving, self confidence, flexibility and perseverance. Exercise improves blood flow to the brain which leads to improvements in memory, thinking, decision making, and problem solving. It leads to improve sleep quality and duration.

Therefore, in addition to the mental health benefits described above, this can lead to improved behavior and a reduction in challenging behaviors in the home and at school.

Set a Good Example

From the day and hour children are born, they are looking up to and learning from their parents. They are watching your every move, listening to your every word, mimicking your actions, developing attitudes which are similar to yours.

Your attitude and practices around exercise will inform your childrens. Spend all of your day sitting, and they will begin to do the same. Let them see you take part in and enjoy exercise, talk about its benefits and why you enjoy it so much and they will begin to see this too and it will begin to inform their beliefs about exercise. Exercising together reinforces this even further.

Creating a positive culture of exercise at home and in the family, increases the likelihood of your children becoming active and staying active in adulthood, enjoying all the benefits that it can bring!

Opportunities to Communicate

Busy work and school days, commutes, managing the home, attending appointments catching up on the latest news, sports, podcasts or tv shows, or doing any of the other 150 priorities we have to manage during a typical planning is not exactly ideal for creating time to just talk with your children.

Exercise though can create the time and space needed to talk. Whether its the drive to a game, time during a walk or snack time at the local play park, it creates moments, without distraction from our daily chores to talk. Catch up what is happening is each others lives, talking about upcoming events, goals or challenges, plan the next trip, discuss problems together, support each other through any difficulties you may have.

Whatever the topic, exercise can create the time and space to talk. Children growing up in a very complex world, and their parents, need this!

Family Bonding

Hopefully you can begin to see the benefits described above and how they would be beneficial to family life. These benefits are for the entire family, spending quality time together, checking in with each other regularly, getting to know each other and supporting each other through the highs and lows…

Getting happier, healthier and growing together!

Thanks for reading. Comment below and let me know what benefits exercising together bring to your family!

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