Encouraging your family to be more active can often feel like a losing battle, family fitness can be challenging, especially if your kids don’t take it upon themselves to exercise.
Prioritizing health and fitness as a family can make it more likely that your kids will have a good relationship with exercise. In addition, if your little ones are used to being active early on in life, it can build a super-strong connection with training as they get older.
Hosting regular family fitness challenges can be a great way to get the whole family involved in fitness and help them to love it. Here are some super easy ways to introduce family fitness challenges and make sure they’re a big hit.
Set Goals
What are you hoping to achieve through your family fitness challenge? Your goals may be linked to getting fitter or stronger or working towards a specific milestone, such as entering an event as a family. You may not have the same goals across the board, and people may be working towards their own individual goals as part of the broader challenge.
Make sure your family’s fitness goals are achievable (while also being challenging, of course!) and motivational. If they feel too unrealistic, it can quickly affect enthusiasm for carrying on with the challenge. Your goals can be health-related, as well as fitness-related. For example, you may set the family goals around eating a certain number of fruits and veggies each day alongside their fitness goals.
Track Your Progress
Think about how you’ll track your family’s progress towards your goals. These may include monitoring the number of steps you take in an average day, personal bests, weight loss, for example. If family members have their own goals, they may be tracking different goals to each other.
Set Up Progress Rewards
One of the most complex parts of getting involved in a family fitness challenge is staying on track, especially if some members weren’t too enthusiastic about starting. Plan rewards for every mini milestone ticked off. It can work great if each person can choose their progress rewards for meeting their goals. It can be super helpful for keeping your little ones engaged in the challenge and enthusiastic about making progress.
Bonus points if you can keep your rewards linked to health and fitness. A trip to the pool, a picnic in the park, or an afternoon of roller skating can be super easy ways to have fun. However, it’s super important not to make food the center of your progress rewards, incredibly unhealthy treats.
Maintaining Momentum
Rewards are essential for maintaining momentum, and praise can also be hugely influential. So as your family moves through the fitness challenge and completes mini-milestones, let them know how proud you are of their efforts and how well they’re doing. A little bit of praise can go a long way for boosting confidence and maintaining enthusiasm, especially for younger family members.
Ideas for Family Fitness Challenge Activities
Not sure what kind of activities you can include as part of a family fitness challenge? A lot will depend on each person’s individual goals, but some activities can be super intelligent choices across different fitness goals:
● Walks are a super-easy way to get more active. If you aim to get more steps in an average day, it’s a smart way to ease yourself. In addition, you can make walks more interesting for younger children by asking them to find fun sights along the way.
● Climb the stairs at every opportunity, both at home and when you’re out and about. You can even “climb” escalators for a mini-workout.
● Put some energetic tunes on and get dancing. Then, have a family dance-off to make things super fun and add a competitive factor.
● Use commercial breaks to your advantage and encourage your family to do sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, or squats while they’re on. Bonus points to whoever clocks up the most in a single commercial break
● Trampolining and roller skating are fun ways to burn extra calories. Ice skating can be a whole heap of fun in the winter months, too.
● Younger kids will love the idea of getting involved in a treasure hunt or obstacle course. And you can easily set one up in your backyard with some simple materials. For example, Hoola hoops, ropes, and ladders (laid out flat on the ground) can all act as obstacles. Then, ramp up the intensity by setting up stations at specific course points. At these stations, make it mandatory to do a few jumping jacks or sit-ups before moving on with the rest of the course.
● Turn chores into exercise and get everyone involved. Allocate each family member a task and set a timer to get as much done as you can in a specific time frame. Time will fly when you have fun tunes.
What to Do When a Family Fitness Challenge Ends
Have you finished your first family fitness challenge? Time to get ready for the next one! Set a new series of goals or do the same again with higher benchmarks.
You don’t have to dive into another challenge right away, but you can make it a regular occurrence throughout the year if it goes well.
