How to play video games with your kids and stay active
The pandemic lock downs had brought us a sedentary shock to our family. It was good in some ways, but so terrible in others. As a fairly busy family with a lot of activities going on with my kids it was a hard adaptation to staying fit while everyone stayed home at the same time. Screen times where thrown out the window like many other parents also did. The real question was how to stay active when at home, going outside was good, however it is not always possible. I bought a few kettlebells for the home, and that helped me… not my kids, whom are all under 10 (age inappropriate for weights). From all my years of training myself, training friends, and youth coaching I managed to make a few changes, while allowing my kids to play video games and get a good amount of exercise when not able to go outside. I am NOT saying to NOT get your kids outside to play sports, run, bike, or hike THIS should be done with them also going outside. We switched to this strategy during the summer morning when we are home and low incentive days or the kids are dying to play a video game. Understand that this does not work with all video games, but can be used with most. Two great games for this are Plants vs Zombies battle for Neighborville, and Fornite. This protocol needs to be adapted to the games and level of fitness on your kids, but this work pretty well and especially for those Saturday and Sunday morning when there are not sports going on.
For this type of game, which I participate with my kids, we do a split screen where we are both playing on the XBOX One. We launch the game early in the morning and play the Turf Take Over (TTO), where every time we die we do 3 (sometimes 5) repetitions (reps) of a given exercise, we are not great and we die a lot so during one match we might die anywhere from 8 to 20 times… which makes it usually 30 reps or more. This number has to be adjusted to the skill and death number of times, and you want to hit a total of around 60 to 100 total push ups (or any exercise). That means you might want to play those rounds a few times, and to reduce burn out we alternate. So how do we alternate? If you know calisthenics we want to also hit all body parts and by applying some lifting strategies you can do do a full body; upper and lower routine; or a pull, push, and legs routine. What has work best for me and the kids it has been full body simple routines. What does that look like? Well I will lay out a sample easy routine to follow:
- First round: every death = 3–5 pushups (depends on ability and shape, can start at 5 and drop to 3 if too much)
- Second round: every death = 5–7 squats (easiest) / single leg reverse lunges (each leg — best one, but takes a tad longer)
- Third round: every death = 5 mountain climbers (each leg — best) / sit ups / leg raises / Russian twists
This routine we repeat twice, that makes it for 6 games of TTO, you can always not do the abs, if you do have a way for the kids to do reverse rows that would be great… but most people do not have the setup. You can always do a round of burpees (with pushups) as a finisher for the last round or warm up. This might not sound like much, but it is simple, easy to do anywhere, and most importantly it works good enough. If your kid plays the game every morning Monday — Friday, that is going to be a week of 300 pushups if he/she hits 10 deaths a round and only plays two rounds.
On the Fornite style protocol, we have to change a few things. Winning a match can be fairly hard, and does not always happen. I play Fortnite with my kids, we are all on different devices and so we play cross device! So as a goal for us, when we win we skip the workout. However, when we lose we will do 10–20 reps of a given exercise. Unlike the Plant vs Zombie protocol, we hit one body part at a time. We do 3–5 rounds with pushups, then we do 3–5 rounds with squats, and finally 3–5 rounds targeting abs or burpees for conditioning.
At this point you should have a clear idea on how to use our beloved games to help your kid get and stay in shape. This is not to replace going outside and playing a sport, bike, run, swim, or even yard play, however this gives you a tool to help your kid stay in shape through a goal driven protocol and at times they will want to stop the losing penalties and stop playing the game for as long as they could have played (all morning or longer). These protocols have been designed from kettlebell certifications and coaching knowledge. A main driver for these was reading a lot of Pavel Tsatsouline’s books, especially “Simple and Sinister” and “The Quick and the Dead”.
Hope this helps you as much as it has helped me and my kids!
