Physical Fitness: Why is Important?

Physical Fitness

Many of us know that physical fitness is important for the development of fine and gross motor skills, but it seems to be excluded from the curriculum or left out of our day when time gets away from us. In this blog entry I am going to explain the importance of physical fitness, and how parents and caregivers can help children get active.

Importance of Physical Fitness

Why is physical fitness important for children birth through school age? Well just like physical fitness is important for adult health, which helps reduces the risk of heart disease, controls blood pressure, and controls weight, it is just as or more important for children.  As a child, being active helps with healthy growth and development, achieving and maintaining a healthy weight, stronger bones and muscles, decreases risk of developing diabetes and other diseases, and improves mental health. Not only does physical fitness help with the child’s health but it assists in developing gross and fine motor skills, improves confidence and self-esteem, and gaining social skills.

What can happen if a child or an adult are not physical active enough? If a child or adult are not active enough, they can become overweight due to the fact they maybe eat more calories than they are burning, and muscles, joints and bones can become weaker over time and become more susceptible to injury. Also a child as well as an adult can increase their chances to develop illnesses or diseases, like heart problems, type II diabetes, and the common cold. With all of these effects of inadequate physical activity, the child and adult could have low self-esteem and think that they are not likes, not good enough, ugly, fat, made fun of, and not part of the in crowd. These are all the more reason that we should all strive to be physically fit.

The positive impact on a child and adult who are physically active can help with their overall health, and prolong their lives. While watching the TV show The Biggest Lose once, they had the doctor talk to each contestant about what their weight and what the lack of exercise did to their body. It was a wakeup call for me and how I need to be more active, because the weight can affect your heart, bones, age you, and lead you to an early grave. I will tell you that after that episode I change the activity level for my class as well as myself.  

How we Can Encourage Physical Fitness

Like with pretty much everything we would like our children to do, we must first model what it is we are expecting from them, like being active, healthy eating, and work ethic. If parents and caregivers don’t model or encourage physical activity, how do we expect children to be active? We can’t! Like Milton Bradley encourages us to take time away from being a couch potato, and have a family game night; we can go outside and be active with our children. To be active doesn’t mean playing organized sports, like football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and ice, roller, and field hockey, it just means to get your heart rate up and your muscles moving. Some physical fitness activities we could do as a family, or school group are play catch, ride bikes, take a hike, go sled riding ( when it snows), swim, play a game of one on one, or playing the Wii. Even the President of the United States and the NFL are challenging children to be active with the play60 program, and the president fitness challenge.  So why are we struggling with obesity in our children? Years ago if you drove down a residential street you would have found a ton of children running around, riding their bikes, and playing hopscotch, today you see more children and adults attaches to some type of electronic device. Let’s take at least 60 minutes away from playing on electronics and be active, here are some fun fitness activities both gross motor (large muscle movement) and Fine motor (small muscle movement) the children like to do at my child care facility.

Gross Motor                                                                           Fine Motor

Obstacle course                                                                   cutting

Musical chairs                                                                      Color pom pom sorting

What time is it Mr. Fox                                                         Beading

Jump rope                                                                             Stacking cups

Catch/ four square                                                               Finger painting

Football                                                                                  Squeeze painting

Ring a Round the Rosie                                                     Writing

Freeze Dance

As you can see from the list of different gross motor and fine motor skills that my children at my Child Care center love to do when we have free play time, it is easy to get the children active with little to no materials. These are some ways we can encourage children in our care to be active.

            I want to leave you my followers with a couple of thought-provoking quotes that captures the importance of fostering healthy growth and development.

“Physical Fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity” ~ John F. Kennedy

“Most of us think we don’t have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don’t have time not to. We’re talking about three to six hours a week – or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162 – 165 hours of the week.” ~ Stephen Covey

 

References

Robertson, C. (2013) Safety, Nutrition, and Health in Early Childhood, Belmont California, Wadsworth Cengage Learning

American Red Cross, (n.d) Prepare for Emergencies with American Red Cross First Aid, CPR and Automated External Defibrillator (AED) Courses retrieved on December 20, 2013 from http://www.redcross.org

American Heart Association CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care retrieved on December 20, 2013 from http://www.heart.org

Eating Well, May/June 2008, Eating Well for Healthy Heart Cookbook, retrieved on December 27, 2013 from http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/

Move Me Quotes, Top 21 Health and Fitness Quotes, retrieved on January 3, 2014 from http://www.movemequotes.com/top-21-health-and-fitness-quotes/

Goodway, J. D., & Robinson, L. E. (2006, March). SKIPing toward an active start: Promoting physical activity in preschoolers. Beyond the Journal: Young Children on the Web. Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200605/GoodwayBTJ.pdf

National Association for Sport and Physical Education. (2006, May). Active start: Physical activity guidelines for children birth to five years. Beyond the Journal: Young Children on the Web. Retrieved from http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200605/NASPEGuidelinesBTJ.pdf

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2008, November). Childhood overweight and obesity. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood/index.htm