Excessive Screen Time and Lack of Exercise Impacting Youth
Excessive screen time combined with insufficient physical activity is negatively affecting adolescents. Engage your children in quick fitness exercises to guide them toward a healthier lifestyle.
The 2012 Active Healthy Kids Canada report indicates that 63 percent of children’s after-school hours are spent in sedentary pursuits. During lunch and after school, kids manage to squeeze in only 24 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise out of a total of four hours available.
Merely 38 percent of parents report frequently playing active games with their kids in the past year. Our complacent approach to health and fitness is unintentionally guiding our children down the same path to obesity.
A Troubling Reality
In 1981, the average body mass index (BMI) for a 12-year-old boy was 18.1, while for girls, it was 18.4. Today, those figures have risen to 19.2 and 19.5, respectively, indicating that today’s youth is heavier.
Statistics Canada corroborates this trend, revealing that today’s children exhibit weaker grip strength and decreased flexibility compared to their peers a decade ago.
Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, a family physician specializing in bariatric medicine in Ottawa, asserts that the strongest habits are formed during childhood. He emphasizes that fostering an active environment is one of the most valuable gifts parents can offer their children for better health.
The Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines advocate for children to engage in at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity daily, including vigorous exercises at least three times a week. Unfortunately, less than half of our children meet these standards, which is far from the recommendations set by health experts and authorities.
Building Healthy Routines
To instill healthy behaviors and help your children develop a lifelong fitness habit, share this enjoyable circuit they can perform independently—or make it a family activity following your evening walks.
Ensure your children remember to land on the balls of their feet with bent knees during jumping exercises to minimize injury risk.
Walk the Plank
Train your child’s core while enhancing their hamstring and lower back flexibility.
- Stand with feet hip-width apart, keeping legs straight while bending forward to place both hands on the ground.
- Walk the hands forward until the body is parallel to the ground (called a straight-arm plank in fitness).
- Maintain alignment with shoulders, hips, and ankles while reciting the alphabet up to M. After finishing, slowly walk the hands and body back to an upright position, keeping the legs as straight as possible.
- Complete another round and recite the alphabet from N to Z.
- Perform 6 rounds.
Touch the Sky
This squat and jump exercise will build your child’s leg muscles and enhance their bone density.
- Stand with feet hip-width apart, pretending to sit down by pushing the hips back into a squat.
- Quickly explode out of the squat and jump, reaching skyward with the right hand.
- Conduct 10 jumping squats while reaching with the right hand, followed by 10 jumps with the left.
Over and Under
Elevate their heart rates with this engaging drill.
- Secure a broomstick or exercise tubing at knee height.
- Stand with the side of the body facing the stick and jump laterally over it.
- After jumping, crawl underneath it to return to the starting point.
- Repeat the over-and-under sequence for 1 minute.
Crab Walk
This fun exercise targets your child’s glutes, shoulders, and coordination.
- Sit on the floor with knees bent and feet flat, placing hands at your sides with fingers pointed towards the feet.
- Lift the body into the air, arching the back by tightening the glutes as much as possible.
- Maintain this position while stepping with one hand and the opposite leg, moving backward.
- Avoid letting the hips drop. Upon reaching the end of the room, turn around and come back.
- Perform for 1 minute.
Wooden Soldier
Enhance your child’s hamstring flexibility through this exercise.
- Stand upright, mimicking the posture of a wooden soldier. Swing one leg straight out while simultaneously swinging the opposite arm.
- Touch the toe to the opposite hand.
- Move forward, alternating between straight legs and reaching hands to touch.
- Once you reach the end of the room, turn around and return.
- Perform for 1 minute.
15 Fun Family Exercise Ideas
- Set a fitness example by being active yourself.
- Play tag, either indoors or outdoors.
- Do squats during commercial breaks while watching TV.
- Host a sit-up competition.
- Get each family member a pedometer and challenge one another daily for the most steps.
- Visit a zoo, museum, or amusement park for ample walking.
- Organize a hula hoop contest.
- Jump rope together.
- Agree that for every 10 minutes on the computer, everyone has to run up and down the stairs 10 times.
- Volunteer to walk dogs at the local SPCA.
- Go on a scavenger hunt.
- Hold a bike race around the neighborhood.
- Choose gifts that encourage movement like balls, bikes, skates, or kites.
- Set up weekly fitness challenges for the entire family and display them on the fridge—like performing 10 jumping jacks daily or squats before sitting down.
- Keep a box in your car filled with balls, jump ropes, and chalk to be prepared for spontaneous fitness fun.
