Its as simple as brushing your teeth!
Parents often contact me asking me for advice and tips they can implement with their children to get them to be more active. I always share with them my "5/5/5" plan which I implement with my own children. The "5/5/5" plan is something I came up with at the start of the summer for my two boys and it connects activity with a daily habit in our home which is brushing our teeth.
I shared with the boys that the plan for this summer is to do 5 squats, 5 sit ups and 5 pushups each time they brush their teeth. So that is once in the morning and once in the evening. I shared with them that they would be doing a total of 10 squats per day, 10 sit ups and 10 pushups. My boys are 7 & 9 and I really wanted to reinforce how something which is relatively easy to do could make a huge impact. I explained to them that if they do that for the 7 days in a week that is a total of 70/70/70 and if they do that each week and do that for four weeks that is now 280/280/280. At the end of the 3 months of summer that would be 840 squats, 840 sit ups and 840 pushups.
If I would have asked my boys at the beginning of summer if they could do 840 squats, sit ups and pushups by the end of summer they would have told me "no Daddy". But breaking this down to 5/5/5 two times per day in their minds made it doable.
This number could be more or less for your kids and it could be different exercises or even different activities or chores but the key here is daily "deposits" can add up and make a big impact.
Another thing my wife and I have done is enroll our boys into our daily health goals such as our step count and daily movement. We will aim to have a family walk each evening and we always let the boys know where our step count is at the beginning of the walk and then we play a game as we get close to finishing our walk to see who can guess the closest to our total steps after the walk. The boys get daily movement, we get a walk in, we connect as a family and we connect with nature.
Vishant Dave, Owner/Trainer, ALCHEMIST
Ocoee, Florida
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