My Gym: Active Kids Win Prizes

With an increasing number of young children being registered as obese, there's never been a more important time to promote children's fitness. Children's fitness is especially important because it makes a difference to their health not only in the immediate term but also - by establishing healthy metabolic patterns - throughout heir lives. So how can you help your kids to enjoy being active?

Children are most interested in being active when they're doing it as part of a group, so the most successful Children's fitness regimes generally involve groups of kids playing together. This is an excellent thing to consider at parties, on weekends away, and in other situations where your children and their friends look forward to getting together to have fun. Work together with other parents in your area to make arrangements for fun group activities where children's fitness can be promoted through games.

All kinds of different games can be used to improve children's fitness. Try to let the kids in your group take the lead by telling you what they'd like to be doing, then adapt that to make sure it's sufficiently challenging. Don't give orders - for instance, by telling the kids you want them to run all the way round a field. Instead, set challenges by suggesting that you bet they can't run all the way round the field, or you bet they can't do it faster than you can.

Even if it's easy for you to win, be ready to let yourself lose sometimes. Children's fitnesss is all the more fun for them when they feel they're beating adults at their own game.

When the children in your group do well, give them prizes. Make sure that everybody gets a prize sometime - keep in mind that sometimes it's the less successful kids who're actually working hardest. The important aspect of these children's fitness activities is that everybody should be active. This way, you can demonstrate to them that physical activity is rewarding and fun.