Tag: active

Healthy Cove

FITNESS FOR A WHOLE FAMILY

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Create a New Level of Wellness

It’s a fact, children are spending an increasing number of hours indoors and in front of screens, cultivating a sedentary lifestyle. Now it’s more important than ever for each member of your family to be involved in a fitness plan. Teaching your kids healthy habits today will change their lives for the future.

Get Everyone Active

The benefit of regular exercise is undeniable. As adults, our fitness program typically works around our busy schedules. Waking early to run outside before heading to off to work, joining a CrossFit squad, or fitting in a tranquil yoga class during lunch hour. While we often create goals that align with our individual lifestyle, shifting the focus to family activities can inspire better physical health and a greater state of overall wellness—and it can even be fun!

Some benefits from regular physical activity include:

  • Improved blood circulation throughout the body
  • Helping maintain healthy weight
  • Preventing bone loss
  • Boosting energy levels
  • Releasing tension
  • Preventing and helps manage high blood pressure
  • Improving sleep
  • Supporting a healthy self-image
  • Helping to manage stress levels
  • Fighting moderate anxiety and depression
  • Increasing muscle strength

These are just a few reasons to focus on family fitness and instill a healthy attitude for an active lifestyle. Spark an early love of exercise as you inspire your family to make physical activity a normal part of their daily routine.

Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids

Find the right balance for your family by modeling healthy habits yourself. Activity levels will differ from family to family—focus on a sound middle ground. An environment of health and wellness, one that allows children to explore different activities and cultivate their own athletic interests, leads to healthy bodies, minds, and experiences. And, most importantly, builds high self-esteem.

Most kids naturally want to try things they see their parents doing. Stroke their curiosity with a fun workout, stretching, and energetic games. If they see you happy and thriving with daily exercise, they’re more likely to join in and see physical activity as a normal part of life.

Adventure in the Everyday

The habit of movement can encourage adventure. Find and explore new trails, bike paths, or create an outdoor game at the park. Infuse imagination with physical activity and encourage unknown outcomes. This teaches your kids how to take risks safely and gives them the freedom to have rich experiences under supervision. A great way to nurture their spirit of exploration is to plan day trips or vacations to national parks, mapping out memorable hikes together.

Family Fitness Vacation

Encourage Playtime

iPads, Xboxes, cell phones, and computers often give children a false sense of enjoyment. A National Survey of Children’s Health found that young people who spend seven hours or more on screens each day were twice as susceptible to depression or anxiety. Twenty percent of kids between the ages of 14 and 17 fit into this category, as many parents let hours go by without regulating game, video, and other media kids use.

Take steps to limit screen time and, instead, encourage playtime. Advocate walks, bike rides, or set up equipment in the yard. Tournaments and ongoing games give kids a healthy dose of competition and something to look forward to in the days ahead.

A Gift of Grit and Determination

As adults, we accept that responsibility and facing daily challenges is a part of life that often brings great rewards. This is a hard lesson to teach children who are not yet emotionally mature and don’t quite understand the importance of perseverance. Life isn’t always fair. Help your kids realize what they’re good at physically and work with them to develop these strengths. Fitness will show them that grit and determination can transform their talents and help them gain a healthy confidence around achievement.

Sweat Together, Stay Together

Integrating regular family fitness activities is a great way to create memories. Adventure and play will naturally bring you together, teach you how to get along with one another, and help deepen your family relationships. If you spend evenings and weekends training together, learning to swim, traversing mountains, you bet you’ll learn to trust and rely on each other, and make some memorable moments along the way. Quality time creates quality bonds.

Healthy Habits for Life

Beyond living a more well-balanced life, a family fitness routine helps children create healthy habits in all aspects of their lives. Setting goals and following through with smaller day-to-day activities establishes healthy habits for life.

Regular family fitness is just one way to create a healthy, balanced, and fun environment for your loved ones. What other ways do you enhance your family life as a team?

Healthy Cove

Staying Physically Active this Winter

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9841231331358When it comes to physical fitness, winter is the season of excuses. It’s too cold to exercise outside. Who’s going to watch my kids so I can go to the gym? I don’t have the room, equipment, or time to work out at home. Fitness isn’t seasonal, it’s a lifestyle and your waistline doesn’t go into hibernation because the weather outside is frightful. This year, don’t let that winter coat expand with empty promises that you’ll resume exercising on January 1; use the cold weather as inspiration to change up your routine and get your entire family involved.

Become a lifestyle Role Model

As a parent, one of your most important responsibilities is as a lifestyle role model to your children. Studies show that physical activity habits are developed very early in life, with the primary factor being the habits modeled by their parents (Hinkley et al.). Parents who exercise on a regular basis raise children who are more likely to have an active lifestyle, have a healthy weight status, are sick less, and even perform better in school (Jago et al.). Exercising with your children instills in them the idea that physical activity is an integral part of daily life and that a sedentary lifestyle is not normal. The doldrums of winter are the perfect opportunity to be creative, have fun, bond, and model to your children how important daily exercise is.

Exercising At Home

Exercising indoors doesn’t require a room full of expensive equipment or a lot of time. Most importantly, it can be effective. When developing any exercise program, there are a few fundamentals to keep in mind. According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine, the first principle of effective exercise is overload—an effective exercise program must impose demands on the human movement system that force the body to adapt (National Academy of Sports Medicine). Unless you push your body harder or in a different manner than it ever has before, it has no reason to progress. This overload can be achieved through an unfamiliar movement (a new exercise), increased volume (more exercise), or increased resistance (a load, such as your child). Lastly, all exercises are variations of pushing, pulling, squatting, or core stability; once you understand the basic movements, the variations are only limited by your imagination.

Involving Your Children

An easy way to get the heart pumping, your muscles burning, and your children involved in a fun exercise routine is through a simple peripheral heart action circuit. Peripheral heart action uses several basic compound movements (exercises that engage two or more joints to stimulate multiple muscles) in an alternating circuit for a fast, effective, and functional full-body workout. With knowledge of the four basic movements, you can get a great full-body, indoor workout, with little or no equipment, that is simple enough to teach a toddler, but that you can do with an infant strapped to your chest as added resistance. Even better, as your child grows, their increased weight can be the overloading resistance factor that your body needs to continue to progress.

Physical fitness doesn’t halt when the weather gets cold and resume with another New Year’s resolution. Use the cold weather as an opportunity to bring your workout routine into the home, where you can try something new, get re-energized about exercise, and involve your children.

What You’ll Need

  • Your preworkout Mito2Max® and a quick inhalation of your favorite uplifting CPTG essential oil
  • Motivation
  • A (small) workout partner(s)
  • Stopwatch (optional)

The Plan

  1. Complete 10–15 repetitions of each movement
  2. Move on to the next movement with as little rest as possible
  3. Complete all four movements of the cycle and rest 30–60 seconds before repeating
  4. Complete as many cycles as possible in 30 minutes

Pushup (Push) Variations: Alter hand or foot positions to vary difficulty or emphasize specific muscle groups, increase load via a weight vest or a child on your back.

Freestanding Squat (Squat) Variations: Alter foot positions to vary difficulty or emphasize specific muscle groups, increase load via a weight vest or a child on your back (or chest).

Upright Row (Pull) Variations: Pull-ups, bent-over rows using a band or other resistance tools, alter grip to emphasize specific muscle groups.

Tabletop Bridge (Stability) Variations: Plank, side bridge, increase load via a weight vest or a child on your back (or chest)

You can still be fit and not even leave home.   It does take discipline, but as you can see, it can also be fun.  Make a commitment and stick with it.

Do you want to learn more about oils, pop on over to our East Coast Life Solutions Essential Oils page to pick up useful information and tips on essential oils.  Please feel free to message us to talk, one on one, about how oils can be easily incorporated into you and your family’s life.