Group activities, such as those aimed at making your family fitter, often sound like they can be dauntingly expensive, as things involving a lot of people tend to require large expenditures; however, unless you insist on premium gym memberships and/or high-end exercise gear for everyone, you don’t have to break the bank just to ensure that your family becomes more active.
Rather than joining a gym and face the risk of a gym membership being wasted through lack of use, try turning to the space you already have to promote a healthier lifestyle. If your backyard or garden is large enough, then you can play tag, soccer, or football. It’s easy to get everyone involved in such activity. In addition, you increase your heart rate almost instantly, and refreshments are only a few steps away. They are free to boot. If there isn’t any space, pack a picnic basket and head to the park.
Keeping active is easy when the great outdoors comes into play. Hiking and biking are the easiest way to involve the whole family; keep distances short if you’re just starting out, and work your way up from there.
It becomes easy to do more once you get outside, and it’s likely you’ll be planning a camping trip before long. Pitching tents and collecting fuel for the campfire will keep everyone moving. If there are rivers or lakes in the vicinity, then swimming is another activity the entire family can enjoy. Canoeing or kayaking are also available at such locations, and the cost is usually reasonable. If the weather is too cold for all of this, then you might want to try ice skating.
However, it can also become too cold to do anything outside comfortably. Chores are the answer in such a situation. No one has anywhere to run when it’s bitingly cold outside, and breaking tasks down based on rooms tends to make the time pass faster.
Why do chores to encourage family fitness? All that bending and stretching to pick things off the floor, not to mention doing so to ensure those hidden corners of a room are vacuumed thoroughly, will have you breaking a sweat more easily than you imagined. By the same token, shoveling fallen snow will have the same beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system.
