Every parent wants their family to be as healthy and fit as possible, but how do you make that happen? You could just encourage each member of the family to work out in their own way, or you could find a type of exercise that you can all enjoy together. When it comes to working out, you want to have a deep bench: a variety of exercises so your family doesn’t get bored and slack on their workouts altogether.
One type of workout that should be on every family’s to-do list is yoga. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, or you’ve flowed along with some videos, but have you tried a family yoga session? Here’s why it can be a great way to help your entire household become more fit.
Building Full-Body Fitness
Yoga is a very comprehensive full-body workout. Depending on the combination of poses and how you flow with them in your yoga session, you can work muscles in every area of your body from head to toe. It’s easy to pack a lot of muscle toning into even a 30-minute session.
Enhancing Flexibility and Balance
When we think about fitness, we usually think about cardio fitness and muscle tone, but those aren’t the only factors involved in having a healthy body. Flexibility, balance, and range of motion are important too, and yoga can improve all of these skills. This can help your family lower their risk of a future injury.
Accommodating All Ability Levels
One of the challenges in family-focused fitness is finding a type of exercise that the entire family can do together because in most cases, everyone in your family has a different ability level. That’s one of the benefits of yoga – it’s easy to modify any part of a yoga flow so that it’s easier for beginners or more challenging for experts.
As a low-impact workout, yoga is also gentler on injuries and physical limitations compared to workouts like running or interval training. Because of this, everyone in the family can push themselves to the particular level of challenge they need, so everyone’s fitness improves.
Fostering Family Bonding with Healthy Habits
Part of helping your family get healthier is making exe
rcise a part of their normal routine. If your kids grow up getting used to regular exercise, they’re more like to keep working out in the future, so they’ll be healthier throughout their adult lives.
When you do yoga as a family, you’re not just setting healthy habits for everyone but you’re building a shared interest among the family. You’re all in it together, so you can share tips you’ve found, push each other to reach new goals, and otherwise hold each other accountable for keeping up with their fitness.
Yoga is a great way for your family to enjoy healthy, fun exercise together, but it’s one of many! For more ideas on how to promote family fitness in your household, learn more about the Mommy and Me family fitness program. Remember to follow us on Instagram too for Fit Tip Fridays and more fitness advice!