With the busy schedule of a mother, workouts are hard to come by. So finding the time to workout has to be strategic. Last month I created a playground workout for ForwardFit that required no equipment – just the use of the local playground. With the popularity of this workout I thought, let’s do something fun and creative that will require no equipment, plus the imagination of your child.
What’s a better way to get a workout in then when your child is only 10 feet away from you, playing with chalk and being creative? Let them help create your workout!
Perform the following workout and not only will you get a great calorie burn but you will not have to worry about paying daycare to get your sweat on.
“The Chalk Game”
Start out by writing the following words on the ground and outline them each in their own box:
- Pushups
- Squats
- Jumping Jacks
- Planks to Pushups
- Lunges
Draw another set of squares that say the following:
- 10 reps
- 15 reps
- 20 reps
After the squares are drawn, ask your child to step in any one of the exercise squares to pick your move (they get to pick, not you). Once they are standing in the exercise square, yell “go” and have them run to the set of rep squares. Once they pick the rep square you can start. So, for example, maybe they first stood in the “pushups” square, then they ran to the “20 reps” square. You would have to complete 20 pushups. Once all the reps are completed, call out to your child to run to the next square and repeat the process. If they are old enough they can join you in the workout as well.
They key is to make it a game. At the very least if they get too bored they can just draw with the chalk and you can pick at random the exercises and time.
Continue the workout for a total of 30 minutes.
By Bill Waltzek – CPT