Childhood and Exercise

[jimmie 48]

What are your favorite memories of physical activity during your childhood?

i remember riding bikes almost daily. i still remember the first time i hopped on a twe wheeler. i also remember the ditches............ ouch

we also:
played kick the can with lots of the neighborhood kids.
walked the streets to friends houses
played baseball in the backyard

[Richt]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

I would play either cricket or soccer nearly every day, depending on the time of year. And like you Jimmie I would be on my bike nearly all the time also. I was a very active child.

[sadie147]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

We had a neighbourhood pool that opened at 8 a.m.. we were there every morning waiting at the gate for the pool to open, spent the whole day swimming. My mom used to have a hard time getting me to come home for lunch! I remember being in the water so long my skin would prune.

We also had a forest near us, we spent alot of time climbing trees and playing tag and hide and seek there.

nowadays it's all about MSN and Xboxes I have a 14 yr old stepdaughter that would sleep till 3 p.m. if we let her

One thing that really stood out to me this year...I run everyday in the early afternoon, rarely did i see kids on the street playing. I even run around a school with a playground and on most days there was only 1 or 2 kids playing there. when i was a kid you couldn't pay me to stay inside..

[jimmie 48]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

same here, sadie, with staying inside. back then i didn't want any part of being indoors. even in winter, we were out making snow creatures in the yard. we made igloos every winter! mom never had to look too far, she would just holler in the door of the igloo.

we climbed trees too. i had forgotten that! mom had some a pretty big walnut tree in her back yard that had a rope swing. we wore out the ropes many many times!

rich, we were very active! who knew we were exericising back them? who cared! we were having too much fun!

[ladyinred]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

We used to skip rope at recess (although I never got the hang of double-dutch) and play hopscotch. We were on our bikes all the time too. When we first moved to Toronto there were 6 of us in a tiny 2 bedroom bungalow with no finished basement. We had to go outside all the time or my mom would have killed us. lol

One of our politicians has now made a new rule, starting this week. Since childhood obesity is on the rise he is demanding that, in addition to regularly scheduled phys ed classes, kids have to do 20 minutes of activity a day, in school. At our PTA meeting last night we were discussing things the kids could do in class if it's raining or snowing outside. This is for kids from kindergarten to grade 8. They've already banned soft drinks in schools. Now if they can get the advertisers to stop marketing junk to kids....where am I? Oh yes, we also used to play tag a lot when I was a kid. Being "IT" probably burned a lot of calories.

[ttdriver]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Oh my goodness, I was an extremely active child .. like jimmie, I played kick the can for HOURS with my neighborhood friends .. when we weren't doing that, we were riding bikes ALL DAY LONG .. or at the park playing on all the equipment, or jumping rope for hours on end ... you name it, I was doing it CONSTANTLY .. most days I'd forget to go home and eat lunch and/or dinner .. playing was too much fun!

Is it any wonder that as adulthood came, life became much more sedentary and the weight piled up? Add to that the increased weight from every decade of slower and slower metabolism .. and YIKES, 40 pounds were pretty easy to pack on.

Thank God for Dr. Atkins and exercise is all I can say!!!

Betty

[sadie147]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Funny you don't see girls with skipping ropes anymore? And 'jumpsies' remember that? where you knotted all the elastics together and made a 'jumpsie rope' or maybe that was just a local thing here? we loved it

and LIR i forgot hopscotch (and i couldn't double dutch either LOL)!

[ladyinred]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Jumpsie rope? I've never heard of that, but we had "footsies" which made a comeback a few years ago. It was like a little hula hoop for your ankle and there was a rope or rod sticking out of it with a flower or something attached to the end. the idea was to make the thing spin around your ankle while hopping from one foot to the other keeping the flower thing moving so you'd jump over it with your other foot. Gee.....that sounds complicated. Kind of like one-footed jump rope. Heee. Well, it was fun anyway - anyone who was anyone had a footsie. lol

[jimmie 48]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

oh i just remembered, when i learned to cart wheel, i would go all over the yard doing those and tumbling too. when we found a grassy hill we would lay flat and roll down that. played in rain alot too. mom's front yard has a dip in it out by the road and when a very hard rain would come, the dip would fill up and i'd run like the dickin's through that splashing water everwhere!

[ladyinred]

Re: Childhood and Exercise


This isn't an original from the '60's. It's an updated version that was made during the eighties. They called it a Skip-It, but it's the same idea as a footsie. I wish I still had it. It was lots of fun. No reason why I couldn't still do it, right?

[not2late]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Bike riding: every summer I would spend at least 3 hours on my bike riding around the neighborhood, visiting friends, etc. I never thought of it as "exercise" but more like transportation!

Jump rope: I loved jumping rope. We used to have little competitions during recess. Of course, that meant you had to practice at home.

Hopscotch: That was exercise too!

Running from my neighbor's dog: Yet another form of exercise. It would never bite anyone, but it was a BIG dog that thought it was fun chasing me.

[ttdriver]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Ah the good old days before computers and video games!!! When you actually had to MOVE to have fun!



Betty

[Lisa M]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Anything to avoid having to go inside the house...

Bike riding was the main one for me.
Cul de sac soccer
and Hide and Go seek in the neighborhood...we had mostly boys on the street where I grew up. Nice when you're a TomBoy and wouldn't be caught dead in a dress.

LOL..Betty's right... we didn't know what Pac Man was until my brother brought it home from his friends house. Until that night we lived outside because me and 4 teenagers running around the house was not a good thing for mom.

[not2late]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

Ah the good old days before computers and video games!!! When you actually had to MOVE to have fun!



Betty

You know, I would NEVER had asked my mom to drive me to the 7 Eleven or the park. I used to tell her where I was going, hopped on my bike and went. But I guess these days, some places aren't safe enough to pedal that block and a half...

Anything to avoid having to go inside the house...

Funny you mention that. We had the only house with central air conditioning in the neighborhood. And beleive me....it still didn't cool the house enough. The upper floor remained a "cool" 85 degrees by day and dropped to 80 degrees at night! The ground floor was cooler by 5 degrees.

The other houses had window air conditioner units, window fans (remember those?) or plain windows to cool off the interior.

So maybe kids nowadays stay indoors because the temperature inside is better than outside? Let's face it, there's no need to sit on the porch to catch a cool breeze if the house is significantly cooler than outdoors...

[quotidianlight]

Re: Childhood and Exercise

I agree that I was a very active child. Much more than now days. In are neighborhood I didn't realize there WERE other kids until we lived her for a few months. None of the kids play outside. Part of the problem is TV and Video games but I see a bigger problems, around here the parents are so over protective that kids don't even play together without play dates pre-arranged days before hand and completely supervised. The neighbors looked at me like I was abusive when my kids walked to school! It's so bad, that now my kids don't want to play outside because, "there's no one to play with." Not that it matters much during the week with homework three times what I had as a kid they get home do homework eat a late dinner and go to bed They're school work may not get left behind but they're childhood sure is *sigh*

My best memory was playing at the creak for hours. We tried sear fishing minnos and making rafts out of bamboo (came home really wet that time). I rode my bike all over town for hours on end. Jumping ropes both with the elastics or actually jumping. All the sidewalk games. Its sad to see my kids missing that but they do go explore the creek when I kick em out and come back soaked.