Lead children on to correct exercise path

It is important to get your children into physical activity and healthy eating habits from an early age. The benefits are huge. Feeling fit and healthy builds self-confidence and helps set a platform for an exciting future. Fitness trainer Gary Dawkins offers some tips.

Motivation strategies ...
1. Empower the child to be active. Parents, guardians and teachers need to lead. This means providing the environment to make activity easily accessible, fun and rewarding

Exercise cannot be seen as a chore. It needs to be seen as a reward. So start designing some fun, active games for your children.

Exercise is often used as a punishment (for example, "for doing that you can go and run three times around the park!). This needs to stop.

Children need to relate exercise to positive experiences. Find out what motivates them and use this to your advantage.

For example, being the captain of the game of football the next time the family goes to the park can be a major reward for a child.

2. Lead by example. As role models we need to walk the talk. It is easy to take a ball out to the park and kick it around.

It is easy to stop the car a couple of kms from school and walk the rest of the way with your child. It just requires some forward planning and discipline.

Your opinion of exercise will translate to the child and help shape the child's active future.

Even if you do not like exercising, it is a good idea to communicate the benefits of keeping active.

Listen with interest and encouragement as your child tells of activities at school.

3. Adapt the habits of the child to suit. OK, so watching television is a major pastime for your children. Tune to a sports channel and make it interesting to watch.

You could count how many players are in the blue team; how many times did the yellow team drop the ball? It's about making small changes in the child's habits.

It is about making these changes fun.

In time, these small changes will transfer into habits that will last a lifetime.

4. This Christmas, for every sedentary purchase (DVD or computer gadget), buy a product that promotes physical activity.

5. Start setting fun goals with your child. Which summer sport will we play next year?What will we start doing in the weekends together to get us ready for this? What will we need to buy at Christmas so we can practise on holiday? How many days next week will we walk to school? You can get creative and have heaps of fun doing this with children.

6. Have some fun completing a food log with your child Sit down together at the end of the day and write down everything your child ate.

Compare this to the healthy food pyramid. Have some rewards ready. It's all about conditioning your child from a young age. Healthy eating now will shape their future. Have your children help prepare the meals.

Let them have ownership of their lunch box ... . this way they will feel empowered to prepare healthy options (especially since they are sitting down with you later to go over their daily food log).

Factors to be aware of:
1. Children should not be doing weight training exercises as their bones, joints, and muscles are still growing and cannot handle the extra load.

2. Make small changes daily rather than trying to change an entire habit overnight. Be patient and make it fun.

3. If it's hard it will not be liked. So the effort level needs to be low to moderate.

4. Everyone likes rewards. Make exercise a reward.

5. Most children love lollies, chocolates, fries. The key is to moderate these foods and make a fun process out of following the healthy food pyramid.

Gary Dawkins is a director of Creative Conditioning in Dunedin.