Fitness for Kids - Hopping Exercises

My name is Margie Weiss and this is Kids Cardio Conditioning. One of the things kids love to do and they do it naturally and they do it easily is hopping on one foot. They play hopscotch, all of that kind of stuff, they are naturally used to doing this. So, we can put that to use as an exercise. We can have the girls do, is hop on one foot for eight times then switch to the other foot. Now, if you are an athlete, you may want to go longer, but for a normal child about eight on each side works. And you can time them, you can do it from 30 seconds to 50 seconds to a minute, whatever, you can build up, so that the child gains cardio fitness. Its also gaining them strength in the major muscle groups of the legs which helps them in their metabolism because when the main muscle groups work you are using more calories, you are burning more calories, so that you tend to take off a little bit of weight, if you have got some excess. So what we are going to do here for the girls is we are just going to have them hop. They're going to face each other, because first we are just going to have them hop, so they're just going to hop right foot like eight times then they switch to the left side. Right, so this is going to go back and forth, but you can make it a little bit more of the fun game because girls especially also like to do these little hand games where you clap. So, what the girls are going to do -- and its going to distract them from what they are doing on their legs is we are going to let them do some hand action, so theyre going to clap and touch each others hands and see if they can co-ordinate their jumps and again for feet they can do whatever they want. They can hop on one foot, they can switch to the other, they can alternate them, but you can see just by adding something just a little bit different, you can make an exercise -- normally is not super fun, a little bit more fun. If they want to get more complicated they can do more complicated hand actions or even more complicated feet actions by moving in circles or in stars. Okay got you. So, thats basic hoping with a little bit of a twist.