Treadmills Can’t Keep Pace with Outdoor Physical Education for Children
Play beats work. If you can agree with that, you can agree with this entire article.
When I was a kid, I did almost everything in my power to avoid household chores. I remember at the small, summer lake cottage we had, the wind would always blow sticks around the yard. We couldn’t mow the lawn until all the sticks were picked up.
It was May. There was a giant body of water. And I had water wings. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a morning picking up hundreds of little twigs.
“Make a game of it,” my mother always said.
A-ha.
It’s been well over twenty years since I’ve spent mornings picking up sticks, but that one lesson carries with me today.
“Make a game of it.”
The same can be said about physical education in children. Play beats work. Indoor options, like treadmills and other gym equipment, suffice in terms of improving physical health. But children need to develop more than just cardiovascular health. Outdoor physical education that includes play opens the imagination, improves communication between children and increases heart rate.
Play beats work. To take that a step further, playgrounds beat workouts.
The wonderful thing about playgrounds is that you don’t need to sacrifice physical fitness for fun. Playgrounds make a game of fitness. Unlike fitness machines, like treadmills, playgrounds offer opportunities to develop several fitness elements at once.
If a child has to climb a ladder and cross a bridge in order to go down a slide, that child just addressed all five fitness elements for developing children. Large muscle groups and hand-eye coordination were promoted through the climbing apparatus. Improved dexterity, balance and cardiovascular health were achieved as the child ran across the bridge. If fun matters in outdoor physical eduction, and I sincerely believe it does, then the slide satisfied the desire for fun. That’s everything you could ask for in a playground.
Maybe the biggest difference between outdoor playground education and indoor gym equipment is repeat use. Children enjoy playing. Providing a place to that can encourage physical activity but is inviting to use over and over again increases the likelihood children will go back outside and continue to stay engaged and involved.
So why is it our society has invested so many resources in developing physical education programs that don’t encourage fun and therefore don’t encourage repeat use? Perhaps we’re too caught up in the tangible metrics. Maybe we’re looking too closely at heart rates and not looking close enough at smiles. Or maybe, we’ve lost the kid in us.
Luckily, there are people who believe like I believe and make playgrounds with a healthy balance of fun and fitness. People who design playgrounds with a sense of working multiple areas of fitness at the same time rather than designing isolated circut programs. All you have to do is take one look at the School Daz, Inc. themed playgrounds and you’ll understand what I mean.
We don’t make children workout.
We make a game of it.
