Fitness games for kids

Why the game comes last

It is the best idea in children's fitness and it is not ours: a session should end with fun that nobody is scoring. A child who finishes on a game remembers the game, comes back tomorrow, and never learns to think of moving as a thing to get through. So in this Gym a workout for anyone under 4th grade must name a game, and our own tests refuse one that does not.

For a whole class

Freeze Dance, Animal Tag, Jump the River, Simon Says Moves, Traffic Lights, Hold It Till It Comes Back, Roll an Animal, Everybody's It, The Relay With No Queue, Captain's Coming and Pass the Pose work with a hall full of children. The rules that make them work in a class are the same ones that make them kind: everybody moves at once rather than queueing for a turn, nobody is eliminated, and a team may race a clock or a task but a child is never ranked against another child.

Three that are really tools

Dice Workout and Card Deck Workout turn a dice or a deck of cards into a different workout every single time — the suit picks the move, the number picks the reps. Beat Your Own Time is the one that teaches the only comparison worth making: a child against their own last go.

Brain breaks, and games for indoors

Beat Your Own Time, Mirror Me, Copy the Pose, Keep It Up, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Squats, Freeze Dance, Simon Says Moves, Shadow Me, Hold It Till It Comes Back, Roll an Animal, Balloon Keep-Up, Steal the Sock, Wheelbarrow Walk, Two Balls at Once, Everybody's It and Pass the Pose are quiet and short enough for a classroom between lessons or a flat with somebody below. The Gym also has a Three Minutes, No Gear shelf of workouts built for exactly that.

Is this safe?

There is no barbell, dumbbell, kettlebell, bench or bar anywhere in the Gym — the words are not even in its data, so a future workout cannot reach for one. The heaviest thing a child ever picks up is a ball, a towel, or a backpack with a book or two in it, and only from 3rd grade; nothing goes overhead with anything in the hands below 4th grade, and nothing anywhere puts weight on a head or a neck. The two youngest levels have no clock to race. Every workout that leaves the ground teaches landing first, in its own warm-up, and every workout page carries the same five stop signals — dizzy, chest hurts, can't catch your breath, a sharp pain in one spot, feeling sick — read aloud before any clock starts.

Questions

What makes a good fitness game for kids?

Everybody moving at the same time rather than waiting in a line; no elimination, so the child who most needs the exercise is not the first one sitting down; a rule simple enough to say in one sentence; and something to change when it gets easy. Every game here lists three ways to change it.

Do games count as exercise?

Yes, and each game page says which movements it secretly trains and which of the ten parts of fitness those build. A game of animal tag is a set of crawls; freeze dance is balance practice with music on.

Where do these games come from?

The way this section thinks about fitness — ten general physical skills, three ways to move, "do it right, do it right every time, then do it fast", and ending a session with a game — comes from CrossFit's published training model and its CrossFit Kids program. Peabody is not affiliated with them. The safety rules here are our own, and in several places stricter.

Nothing is sent anywhere

The Gym is free, with no ads and no sign-up. There is no camera, no pose detection and no leaderboard. What your child has done and their own best times stay on their own device and are never sent anywhere, so there is nothing to lose and no account to make.