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* Find a My Gym for kids near your home now!
Friday, July 07, 2006
It's a fact-our children are overweight. And they don't get enough exercise. In this day of busy parents, fast food meals, and video games our children eat more, eat the wrong foods, exercise less and are far more sedentary. Children's activities just don't burn the calories of years past.
For baby boomers and older folks, children's exercise was a part of a schoolday routine. You didn't get out of gym class, and you played vigorously at recess. Schools don't offer these things consistently anymore and parents are home less and less to take part in children's exercise or outdoor activities. Televisions and computers are, all too often, substitute babysitters.
One study just completed by Indiana State University suggested that an alternate to pushing children into exercising and playing sports more often is to have them make the most calorie-burning advantage of the time they do spend in strenuous children's activities.
Two researches completed a research study with children seven and eight years old. Half of the children carried three pound weights. Half did not. They wore portable metabolic units that measured the children's physiological characteristics.
The results indicated that the extra weight helped improve the children's physical fitness. The addition of the three pound weights caused the children to expend more energy, and also increased their heart rates, as well as their respiration and the activity of their muscles. They simply burned more calories as their heart rates increased.
The promising findings on children's fitness and the correlation to children's activities were presented at the annual conference in Denver for the American College of Sports Medicine.
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