I’ve seen so many commercials for the the NFL Play 60 and First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaigns that it has me wondering, “how many minutes of active play do we get a day?” The number of commercials I’ve seen for these campaigns may be an indication that it’s time to turn the tv off and get moving.
In my defense, it’s been freezing outside, the kids we’re sick and we’ve had like a zillion snow days, which is highly unusual in Tennessee. So we’ve formed some bad habits over the last three or four weeks and it’s time to break them.
They say it takes two weeks to form a new habit, so for the next 14 days I’m going to track our minutes of active play. It often seems like we’re really busy and spend a lot of time moving and playing, but when I calculated the minutes from yesterday we barely made 60.
Here’s what we did:
- 10 minutes playing chase, soccer and baseball in the backyard (then everyone got cold)
- 30 minutes walking around the neighborhood (we bundled up more)
- 15 minutes playing Wii active games like snowboarding and Sports Resort
The kids also ran around the house a lot playing vikings and dragons so I’m sure they hit 60…I may have missed the mark by a few minutes and to be honest some of the activities I did with the kids didn’t really get my heart rate up. I could definitely do more. I don’t want to be obsessive about play time, but I do want to get an accurate feel for how much we’re getting and make a conscious effort to move a little more each day.
On that note…I’m off to burn some calories on the mat with Jillian Michael’s Yoga Meltdown.
If you counted up your active minutes each day would you have more or less than 60? How do you stay active with the kids during the cold winter months?
