Is your family active? Please help me get mine to be fitter

[Aquicknamechange2019]

My DH and I have 3 DC, aged 8, 5 and 3. DH and I have gym memberships but we are not as active a family as I'd like us to be. I want to change this. If you have an active family, what do you do? And how can I change things for my family?

It is sometimes hard to find things everyone will enjoy together. At that age we would take a football out to the park, go swimming as a family - a good way of getting everyone out in winter ('swimming was messing about in the water, playing with floats'). We also encouraged each child to do something active - older son joined the swimming club and also played rugby (he is still doing this at 17), younger son got into horse riding. So, very different activities - important for that point when doing things together (other than a walk) no longer works

We have a National Trust membership and go for a long-ish walk and a go on the swings every weekend and sometimes after school in the summer, and a few times a month in winter. DC might want to paint rocks to hide or follow one of the trails they put on if they're not used to walking and get whingy. It's about £11 per month for an annual membership.

We walk to and from school, it gets us all about a mile in each day, especially if we walk down to Aldi or somewhere after. We also go to the park after school weekly (usually 3 times a week in summer). DH walks 2.5 miles each way to work, so in the holidays we often meet him halfway on his way home. When we go to the shops we try and walk if it's at all feasible; going into town we park at a free car park a mile or so out and walk in.

Swimming, trampolining and soft play are good rainy day activities (although can be expensive). Most soft plays near us have offers on if you arrive before 10am. We occasionally go bowling, again before 10am or with a voucher code. To be honest we don't find the weather stops us often; we have good coats and wellies or washable trainers.

We all also like Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube.

It might be a bit of a slog introducing everything at once, especially in winter, but once it becomes "Just what we do" your kids will probably really enjoy it. Our DC are 8, 5, 3 and 1.

we definitely aren't the most active family but we do things like family bike rides at weekends, just dance competitions, and the 10 minute shake up games from Change4life. Watching this thread though because i could do with some more ideas

I wouldn’t say that we’re a really active family but I do think it’s important to be active and get fresh air most days, even in the rain.

Some things we do/have done with dc of a similar age difference (but now older) -
Long walks and days out
Parks for football, frisbee, scooters
Bike rides
Playing catch and chasing games with each other.

Sometimes I gave the dc a mission to make walks more interesting like find a really smooth stone, listen for the nicest bird or take a magnifying glass to look at insects and interesting thing.

Have a look at this list and see how many you can tick off over the next Year. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/50-things-to-do-before-youre-11--activity-list