Fitness for Kids - Jumping Rope

Margie Weiss: My name is Margie Weiss and this is kids cardio conditioning. One if the first things you can do, which is an activity that almost everybody does, anyway, is jump roping. Now, just because a child cant jump on a rope, doesnt mean that they cant do this action. So, you can start by just teaching them basic vertical jumping. For a child this may be two or three, thats a challenge in itself. Then if they cant get the objective over the top, its not a failure, because what you can do is what Olivia is going to do, where she just tries to go underneath, and it doesnt matter how many times you miss. The idea is to just keep moving because in fitness, again, its not the success of whether you look like youre doing it right, but just the movement that works.

Obviously, if you can do that and you want to get into jump roping, you would go regular jump roping over the top. A lot of times, kids cant jump, we can start it if you want. A lot of times kids cant jump rope because they dont have the hand coordination. Its not necessarily the legs, but its the hand snap, going up and down, that they dont quite get. That whats going to make the rope go over the top. So, what you can do, before you get a jump rope, is you can just have them practice your arm action, because its the slapping downwards thats going to take that rope around the back side. You can also, rather than doing it on two feet, you can also jump on one foot and then the other foot. You want to give that one a try?

So, one leg is going over, and then the other. She can do it all the time on one leg, she can alternate, she can do two or three on one side, two or three on the other, you tend not want to do more than eight or ten hops on one foot, before you switch to the other one, unless you are doing ply metrics, unless youre an athlete, and youre trying to work for explosion, then it would be a little bit longer. But jump roping is something that everybody can do, you can also make it a game, if you want, by taking the jump rope, and just lazing on the floor and all we are going to do, is slide the jump rope side-to-side and she just is going to jump over it. when it goes around Raitte (ph), I want you to stand right on your -- yeah, a little bit, so as it goes by her, she is going to jump over it, when it come by Olivia, she is going to jump over it. So, when its just slide, and the slide, right, obviously the person doing it, if you want, you can go around in a circle, but it makes you dizzy, so you may want to just do a little one foot, and the other guy here, and then we can come back the same way from this side to this side. You can make this a game. How many times can the kids as a team, make it over the jump rope, without missing. So that way, youre encouraging positive, reinforcement, rather than negative. How many as a group, can they get over, so that somebody misses, its not on only that one child, its the whole group. So, it dissipates the success or the failure. So, jump roping is a basic thing that every child can do. Moms and dads can do it too. Its great for your heart. Cardio is for your heart, and so thats why we are doing this for.