The American Heart Association recommends children ages 3-5 be physically active and have plenty of opportunities to move throughout the day. For kids ages 6-17, they recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity every day or most days. How do we do this with our full schedules?! It can be challenging at times—but with a little creativity and planning, it can be done! Here are three of our favorite ways.

Habit Forming
The first step is to carve out time regularly with your family to get moving. Prioritize this time together as often as possible! It’s never too late to form a healthy habit! 

Start slow—set aside 30 minutes a day to start, a couple of days a week. Get your whole family together to do something active. In the beginning, you might want to (or have to) pick the activities and see which ones take. After a while, you can start adding a day more per week, and have your kiddos decide what they’d like to do. Before you know it, you’ll have a regular Tuesday evening fun fitness routine, or a regular Wednesday night date to play at the park with your family!

A Walk in the Park
Speaking of the park, local parks offer large swaths of open grass fields where your kids can be their most wild, free-range selves. Field games are a great way to get the family moving and involved in a fun activity together. One field activity you can start with is throwing a frisbee around. Inexpensive, simple, and great for developing hand-eye coordination, frisbee is an easy way to inspire your family to run around a little bit. Start by teaching your kiddos the most basic ways to throw a frisbee. Move on to some harder ways to throw. Get creative and start coming up with your own style and ways to throw! Once your kids start to get really good, you can start incorporating a second frisbee into the mix, or even move on to disc golf courses in the area!

There are tons of other games you can bring to the park as well. See what your kids get into, and change it up.

Bring it Home
Sometimes it rains. Or the car is in the shop. What do you do then? Ingenuity to the rescue! Do you like to hula hoop? It’s a great way to build coordination and engage muscles. What about jumping rope? It can help get your family’s heart going. Challenge your kids to see if they can do double under, who can get the most consecutive jumps. Maybe learn double dutch together! It’s a great way to build stamina, cardio, and TOGETHERNESS.   

And there’s always GoNoodle. As you probably already know, we’ve got hundreds of videos and activities designed to get your kids moving, dancing, singing, and burning those calories, including a few brought to you by the NFL and the American Heart Association to celebrate the Playoffs. We’ve got fitness bingo, an activity to teach your kiddo when to use “a” vs. “an” before nouns, a warm up video with Coach Terry and Sherry and Flash Bolton, and more!