By James Helliwell

For parents, a great way to ensure that your children are keeping fit and exercising weekly, is to lead by example and exercise regularly yourself. There’s no point suggesting to your beautiful but slightly overweight offspring that they need to get into regular exercise and referring them to a local leisure center’s activity day, if you could do with shifting a few pounds yourself. You are someone they look up to, and setting a good example yourself can do wonders for the natural progression of your child’s fitness levels.

While fitness is a personal journey, surrounding yourself with professionals who understand the science behind fitness can help you reach your goals. The team at Heroic Fitness believes that fitness routines centered around the individual will help you achieve success, and with that in mind, let’s look at four fantastic exercise styles to set you on the right path to being a shining example of health and fitness for your children.

Yoga

Kicking off with one of the finest and most graceful (when done perfectly) forms of exercise, the ancient spiritual art of Yoga. Yoga unifies the body and mind through the practice of physical poses that are known as ‘Asanas’. This in short sounds simple and easy, but in reality they push your body to its limits, make you sweat and tone you up completely. Doing Yoga often releases the tensions of the body and can make you stronger, have more stamina and achieve much greater flexibility. They also help your mind, giving a great boost of mental clarity and general feelings of well-being. All very useful when you are a stressed, over worked, and time-stretched parent of young children!

Boxercise

Boxercise is an on-trend new exercise that is rapidly gaining in popularity. It is boxing for fitness and is the perfect exercise to release your tensions that unavoidably build up when looking after your children. You can smash and bash your way to a calmer being and a fitter body with increased stamina. As you can imagine, it is based on the fitness routines that boxers use.A session can take different formats, but could include skipping, hitting pads, kicking pads, shadow-boxing, shuttle runs and the classic press-ups and sit-ups. It’s worth noting that this covers all fitness bases and you will not be punching each other! Boxercise is extremely fun and a real challenge, so give it a go.

Weight Training

Weight Training is the father of all exercise. Lifting weights will make you strong and develop your muscle structure better than anything. If lifting weights is included in your fitness routine you can be sure that you will be getting a proper work out every session with a variety of different exercise to do. You can literally work every muscle in your body! Weight Training works by undergoing morphological muscle changes to get stronger. Any muscle asked to do more that it is used to, will grow using the proteins in your body. Remember not to overwork your body and train in an appropriate way so that you avoid hurting yourself.

Running

Running is a perfect way to lose weight and gain stamina. Top fitness centers will have running machines that you can use to track progress and give you some great runs. You can always try setting a long term objective to aim for. Training to participate in a marathon or half-marathon is a great long-term goal. This may sound like a hard target to reach, but with a proper disciplined training routine, and personal motivation, you can set up a fitness routine that can help you complete this goal. Remember, however, that this goal doesn’t have to be about finishing in a certain time unless you’re an experienced runner; if you’re a beginner simply completing the event can be your goal.

Healthy Living

As an additional note, it is advisable that you also look at your diet in tandem with your exercise routine. Here are two big changes you can make:

Give Up Processed Foods

Processed foods play a large role in obesity rates and contain a lot of empty calories. If you know that you consume a lot of processed foods throughout a week, set a goal to give them up for different periods of time. Start by going a week without processed foods and then increase it until they’re mostly gone from your diet.

Eat a Fruit or Vegetable with Each Meal

In a similar way to the processed foods goal, you should try to add at least one fruit or vegetable to each one of your daily meals and snacks. It has been reported in medical journals that you should eat anywhere from five to ten fruits and vegetable servings each day for a healthy diet, so try to aim for this goal.

So remember mums and dads, all this should be great motivation to get active and increase your fitness levels. Make sure you set a shining example to the little people in your life!