Tag Archive for 'attivi'

Physical activity benefits for adults and older adults

Be Active, Sit Less, Build Strength, Improve Balance

From Now

Winter will start: keep children active indoors

Child care providers often dread those days when the weather is bad and the children can’t get outdoors to play. But children need to have active times every day to use up energy, learn new things, and be healthy. Luckily, active play can happen indoors as well as outdoors. With a little imagination and creativity, child care providers can come up with activities that use large muscles and burn energy, but can be done indoors. Here are some ideas to try:

  • Put on some music and have a dance party. Move back the furniture if you need to make more room to dance.Let children suggest their favorite songs.
  • Give children a scarf, ribbon or some paper streamers to wave in time to music. Encourage them to find as many different ways to move the scarf or ribbon as they can.
  • Encourage children to dress up as a favorite character from a book and act out the story
  • Plan a “work out” time to do simple exercises with children. Keep them age-appropriate. Exercises can be done to music, or you can borrow simple exercise tapes from the public library
  • Play circle games such as Simon Says, Follow the Leader, or Duck, Duck Goose to keep children active
  • Have children pretend to ice skate wearing socks on a smooth floor
  • Children love pretending to be animals by making their sounds and movements.
  • Set up an indoor basketball game with crumpled up newspaper balls thrown into a laundry basket or cardboard box
  • Pile up old blankets and pillows for soft indoor climbing fun

Active play is an essential part of young children’s lives. Effective child care programs give children ways to be active indoors as well as outside. With imagination and creativity, you can come up with other fun ideas for active play.

(Some ideas from eXtension.org)

Family builds the young sedentarity

Often to explain the high percentage of young Italian sedentary it’s said that it’s the fault of the school that does not promote program of physical activity, not by stimulating their participation in the world of sports. Certainly this is one of the explanations of the reduced athletic involvement of adolescents. But there is another important issue to keep in mind and directly affects families. Let’s just say that most of the Italian families do not conduct a lifestyle physically active, even adults aged 25 to 65 years practice rarely sport and are often overweight:

  • 32% of adults are overweight and 11% are obese.
  • 20% of adults are physically active on a continuous basis, the remaining 80%  occasionally practice or it’s completely sedentary.

Many of these adults are parents and their daily example  teachto their children their own life style. So it is not a coincidence that, in Italy, the peak of sporting activities for girls is around 11 years while for boys to 14 years. In the following ages abandoning sports is a constant, characterizing the rest of adolescence and early adulthood.

I heard that instead we should be glad, because these percentages indicate a considerable increase of the sport of adults and young people in the last 30 years. This reasoning is wrong, however, because at that time the adults were much more physically active because they walked more often and for longer distances and the obesity had not yet become a national health problem. Moreover, even if the young at school did little physical activity, they could play in the street and go to the oratory and this made them more active. And they were not chased by parents with their snacks. Today this is impossible, there is no more free  and spontaneous play, and there are other forms of entertainment that take them away from the sport.

Finally, the parents are a decisive issue for the development of a physically active lifestyle and they should be sensitized and helped to make the right choices for themselves and for their children.