Bursts of Exercise Can Make Kids Healthier

Exercise is one of the main pillars of good health. Your body was designed to move throughout the day, constantly and in many directions. With well over 200 joints, your body has the ability to do amazing things. This can include an impressive display of balance, power and flexibility with hardly any discernible effort. However, unfortunately with the improvement in efficiency of our every day life with digital technology, a sedentary lifestyle has been adopted. This lifestyle discourages movement and leads to more sitting behaviours.

Most people sit between seven to fifteen hours each day. Excessive sitting increases your risk of metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

It’s not just adults that face these challenges. Children are becoming increasingly sedentary and the rising number of children suffering from obesity is sky-rocketing. About one third of all children and adolescents are either overweight or obese. This trickle down effect means that there are a staggering number of adults who are now at higher risk of multiple health concerns, ranging from obesity to degenerative arthritis.

Contributing factors to declining health include poor food choices, insufficient exercise and lack of quality sleep.

Getting kids to exercise has become increasingly difficult over the past 20 years. What used to be common daily activity for children playing with their friends has turned into a chore. The effect of this attitude shift is evident with the growing number of children suffering from obesity.

Recent studies have shown that children may benefit from very short periods of high intensity physical exercise. Researchers have modified the term “high-intensity interval training” (HIIT) to a more kid-friendly version of “Fun Fast Activity Blast” (FFAB).

The study evaluated 101 adolescents, measuring triglyceride levels in the blood, waist circumference, blood sugar, heart markers, blood pressure and aerobic activity. They monitored a group that continued their normal activity and a group that participated in three 20-minute high intensity exercise sessions per week for 10 weeks.

They found that the group that exercised had lower triglyceride levels and reduced waist circumference. They also found that this group increased the amount of overall physical activity (not including these sessions) by 16 minutes per day compared to the group that didn’t exercise at all.

This increased activity during non-exercise hours suggested to researchers that increasing structured exercise actually increases overall activity levels during unmonitored hours. This discovery is a step in the right direction to finding a program that works to make daily exercise both practical and sustainable.

Finding exercises that children enjoy may be the key to unlocking the desire to move throughout the whole day. Unfortunately, reduced time in physical education classes and recess, combined with spending the majority of the day sitting at desks, significantly adds to the problem of sedentary lifestyles.

There isn’t time to wait for the schools to change their physical activity requirement. Therefore, it’s important to encourage them to be active in the hours they are outside of school and on weekends. Competitive sports, interval walking, biking, basketball, dance or any number of 20-minute high intensity interval training workouts can be beneficial. Joining the kids for these workouts would be beneficial not just for their health but for yours as well. Kids are more likely to do what you do and not just what you say.

A healthy lifestyle involves many factors such as nutrition, sleep, exposure to toxins, low stress levels and exercise. Essentially, you become what you do each day. The more you move, the easier it becomes to move and vice versa.

The more physically active your child is, the better they do in school, the better their mood and the better the family functions as a whole.

Chiropractic care is another great way to ensure both you and your kids can get moving and keep them moving. Bring in the kids for an assessment and treatment to get their spine moving optimally and keep them playing the activities they love. This ensures proper function and keeps everyone feeling great!