How to Get Fit For Kids: Top 15 Quick Tips

Staying fit has numerous benefits for kids. It helps them build strong muscles, maintain a healthy body weight, develop enhanced interpersonal skills, have a healthy sleep routine, and much more.

Still, limiting kids to 60 minutes of daily physical activity might not be enough to help them get and stay. Therefore, in this blog, we’ve aimed to explain how you can keep your kids active every day.

Throughout the blog, we will be exploring all the tips and recommendations that will help you get your kids fit and maintain a healthier lifestyle. Let’s get started!

How to Get Fit for Kids: The Best Tips & Ways

Most of us think that staying fit is all about exercising, which is not the whole picture. Being fit means following a healthy diet, getting a lot of physical activity, and maintaining a healthier body weight and lifestyle. Thus, to get fit and preserve their fitness, kids need to adopt healthy habits in their everyday lives.

Here are all the tips that will help your kids adopt healthy habits, get fit, and maintain their fitness.

1. Maintaining a Healthy Diet

If you want to support your kids to get fit, first things first, you should check if they are maintaining a healthy diet.

A healthy diet means having a balanced diet including a variety of nutritional foods, like vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy products, and healthy carbs. This kind of diet can improve your kids' overall health, help them get fit faster, and provide them with adequate energy to stay active.

2. Exercising with MentalUP Fitness

Exercising has a significant role in supporting kids' fitness, yet most kids find exercising daunting. So, giving kids physical education is essential to helping them enjoy the concept of exercising.

As one of the most trusted learning apps for kids, MentalUP offers more than 240 physical education games and activities to help you get your kids fit and healthy faster. From morning workouts and before-sleep workouts to balance and cardio games, every activity you need to support your kids' fitness is included in the app.

3. Practicing Mindfulness Exercises

While looking for ways how to get fit fast at home for kids, you might not encounter mindfulness practices. Still, as mindfulness activities, like meditation and yoga, are quite beneficial for supporting kids’ physical and mental development, we think that it is worth adding to our list.

Mindfulness activities help kids regulate their thoughts and emotions with greater balance and acceptance. It also improves their attention, sleep routines, and diabetes control, which in turn gives them a chance to follow healthier habits and maintain their fitness.

Plus, practicing yoga provides kids with additional exercise in which they can both relax and strengthen their muscles.

4. Playing With Toys That Promote Active Play

Not every toy on the market is the same. Some of them are designed to reinforce kids' mental and physical skills, while others are designed to entertain. Therefore, to help your kids get fit, it is important to choose from toys that promote active play.

You can check for indoor and outdoor toys that will help your kids stay active, like trampolines, jump ropes, balance boards, rollerblades, and riding toys. Whatever your kid's age is, they will enjoy playing with these toys and exercising while playing.

5. Organizing Family Bike Rides

If you are looking for a family bonding physical activity that will help your kids get fit and spend quality time with your family members, family bike rides are a great option.

You can organize family bike ride activities up to two days a week and wake up super early to spend all day exercising and having fun with your family. This activity will also be your best choice for how to improve balance and strength.

When you feel that your kids are reluctant to participate, you can include a cool ride day with a reward after to keep them motivated, like a piece of healthy cake or one hour of free play time.

6. Having a Weekly Exercise Plan

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are three types of physical activity that kids need to practice regularly to stay physically fit. These are aerobics, bone-strengthening exercises, and muscle-strengthening activities.

By collaborating with your kids to prepare a weekly exercise plan, you can ensure that your kids are practicing these activities in adequate time and frequency. This way, you can observe their time spent exercising and additional activities that support your kids’ fitness.

While creating weekly exercise plans for your kids, keep in mind that you should diversify their plans with physical activities that are enjoyable, age-appropriate, and exercise the whole body.

7. Playing Team Sports

Team sports enable kids to exercise for a longer period with practices and games. Team sports like basketball, soccer, baseball, and volleyball strengthen kids' body muscles and build endurance and confidence. All these benefits add up to helping kids get physically fit.

Team sports spark kids' interest in exercising and turn physical activity into an enjoyable time for them. Additionally, the team enhances kids’ muscle and bone strength, improves their cardiovascular fitness, and helps them to build better social skills and confidence.

So when your kid's plans are tight, and they get bored with regular physical activities, you can motivate them to stay active by participating in team sports.

8. Turning Commercial Breaks Into Fitness Breaks

If you are googling “how to get fit fast at home for kids,” this one is for you. Turning commercial breaks into fitness breaks is both a fun and beneficial trick to help your kids get physically fit faster.

While watching TV as a family, you can utilize commercial breaks to do short physical activities with your kids. You can go with dancing, quick jumping jacks, mini-squat challenges, playing warm up games, basic stretching activities, or anything your kid would like!

9. Using Exercise As Transportation

This one is a simple and efficient tip to follow. You can choose to walk your kids to school and encourage them to use their bikes to visit friends or go to the park.

You can also walk to the grocery store with them and try to replace car transportation with physical activities, like walking and riding.

This shift will help you and your kids get more active, become physically fit, and have healthier habits. In addition to that, as these activities are good for consuming kids’ energy, they will also support their sleep routines.

10. Challenging Family Members to Stay Active

Getting kids physically fit is a two-way street. Both kids and parents should be able to collaborate, spend time exercising, and pay attention to keeping healthy habits.

Challenging all of the family members to stay active is great for supporting kids’ physical fitness.

Challenging the whole family to move with soccer games, dance challenges, gymnastic games, scavenger hunts, swimming races, running games for kids, and weekly activity goals are great ways to encourage children to stay active and exercise regularly.

These small challenging activities will both support your family's physical fitness and create happy memories to remember and laugh about.

How to Get Started: Recommendations for Parents

So far, we have explained all the tricks that will help you support your kids in getting physically fit. If you still don’t know where to start, you can follow the recommendations that we’ve shared below and build a plan accordingly.

1. Talk to Your Child’s Doctor

You might have some questions and concerns about your kid’s health or fitness. In this case, you should consult a doctor before making any change in your kid's eating and exercise habits.

Consulting a pediatrician is a great first step to helping kids get physically fit. Your pediatrician will explain why physical activity is significant for your child and help you identify sports or activities that suit your child's age, abilities, and needs.

Also, your pediatrician will be informing you about how you should balance your kid’s diet and what kind of foods are better for improving your kid’s health and fitness.

2. Limit Screen Time

Kids enjoy playing video games and watching cartoons and movies. Most of these activities help them learn new things, discover new concepts, and spark their interest in subjects like biology, mathematics, or history.

Still, having too much screen time can create problems like poor concentration, sleeping routines, and a higher risk of obesity. To balance things out and help your kids utilize the benefits of technology, you can provide them with beneficial learning apps that limit screen time. This way, you can both help your kids to stay more active and improve their cognitive skills.

3. Be a Role Model

Kids watch and mimic their parent's habits, actions, and values. And when they recognize good behavior, they tend to imitate and absorb these behaviors.

Therefore, if you want to guide your kids to maintain a healthier lifestyle and stay fit, you should be a role model for them. This means that you should also make healthy eating choices, participate in exercising activities and inspire them to have a fulfilling future.

Let your kids see what a healthy lifestyle looks like by packing healthy lunches together, going on morning walks, or participating in afternoon yoga classes.

4. Check On Your Kid’s Daily Active Time

Before planning a weekly or monthly physical activity program for your kid, you can check how much time they are spending on activities that promote their fitness.

There are lots of great tools for you to check your kids' daily active time and help you prepare plans for getting your kids fit. No matter what you use to check your children’s activity time, you should be sure that your kid reaches 60 minutes of daily activity time and stay more active.

5. Plan Vacations to Diversify Types of Exercises

If your kids are not as physically active as they should be, changing their daily routines suddenly can be intimidating and detract them from following healthy eating habits and exercise routines.

To ease the transition, you start organizing fun vacations in which you enjoy physical activities like cycling, kayaking, camping, or snorkeling. The vacations will both spark your kid’s interest in exercising and help them explore new places and appreciate nature.

Simple Ways to Encourage Your Child to Be Physically Active

So far, we have explained all the tricks that will help you get your kids active and shared our recommendations to help you start this health journey. We also have some simple suggestions for you to encourage your kids to be physically active.

Here are some tips to encourage kids to have a healthier lifestyle:

• If you have the opportunity to involve the whole family, try to do physical activities together to motivate your kids.
• Choose developmentally appropriate activities and exercises to boost their confidence.
• Use competition as a motivator to spark your kids’ interest in exercising.
• Include your kids in household chores, like cleaning a room, walking the dog, or sweeping, to sneak in some physical activities. So if you are wondering how to get fit for kids while doing jobs, this is your answer.
• Organize social and physical activities to motivate your kids to stick to staying active.
• Check if your kids have overscheduled daily plans and balance things out to make time for exercise.
• Emphasize fun and avoid overdoing any activity to keep your kids motivated toward physical activities.
• Foster your kid's interest in physical activities by allowing them to choose their sports gear.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you still have some questions on your mind, here are commonly asked questions about how to get fit for kids!