Getting Active & Staying Active

I've been purposefully adding more physical activity into our days.

All three boys have been encouraged to get at least 1 hour of physical activity each day and I thought that was a piece of cake and something we had completely covered.  But the more I watched and started taking note the more I realized that they weren't THAT active.

So we set our plan into place.  We're adding exercise to our morning work and we're purposely planning things to do.

It's only Tuesday so we've just been at this a few days but so far we've all used the treadmill/ elliptical machine for a 20-30 minute workout.  We've gone swimming and we've gone on a few family bike rides.

We have plans to go hiking/ walking later this week and I'm trying really hard to point out to them when they're being active and trying to give them all an idea of how many muscle groups what they're doing entails.

It's only been a few days and we're fast running out of ideas.  My kids are super active when they're around other kids but when it's just us home it's much harder to find fun and engaging activities to do.

 Some days an hour of activity is no problem-- karate is an hour, days we go to Soar Indoors we're usually there for several hours at a time, meeting up with our playgroup at the park the kids will happily run, jump, chase, and climb for hours.

We're usually the first to arrive and the last to leave at almost all of these activities soaking up all the last moments of play and activity that we can.

This summer they spent hours each day in the water swimming, jumping off the dock and playing on and around all our tubes pulling themselves up to stand, jumping off, swimming back over and climbing right back up; usually only when we had friends over though.

With summer coming to and end and knowing winter will be here before I know it I'm trying to come up with a great list of ideas to keep us moving all year round, every day.

Here are some ideas we've come up with that I think can last a good 30-60 minutes each:

1. Swimming-- pool, ocean, lake
2. Biking
3. Elliptical
4. Walk the river trail
5. Hike
6. Ping Pong games
7. Wii workout videos
8. Hula Hoop
9. Bowling
10. Jumping rope
11. Soar Indoors
12. Launch trampoline park
13. Twister
14. Hopscotch
15. Capture the Flag
16. Gym day/ Park day with homeschool group
17. Roller skating
18. Ice skating
19. gaga ball
20. sledding
21. Tag (with silly string)

   It's not a bad start but I hope we can continue to add to our list.  

 What are some of your favorite ways to keep your family active?