By Joan and James O’Keefe
The seasons are changing, and the cold weather can often bring a lack of motivation to those seeking to maintain a certain level of fitness. Just because the winter months are around the corner, does not mean that your regimen is doomed.
When the snow flies in Kansas City, we head to the hills-to sled. As a child growing up in the extreme northeast corner of North Dakota (the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight states), James learned to have fun in the snow. Now, when the snow covers the grass completely, we have a blizzard party. We bundle up, grab the sleds and snowboards, and hurry over to a long, steep grass-covered slope the kids call Suicide Hill. For an hour or two we careen down, and scramble back up the hill, over and over again. Later, we sit around the fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa and though we are physically exhausted and a little bruised, we are a happy and relaxed bunch.
Play is perhaps the most underrated element in physical fitness-its benefits are unparalleled. Active playing will confer the same or better benefits as laborious exercise: enhanced cardiopulmonary fitness, better strength and endurance, more flexibility, and improved balance and coordination. But play also bestows a sense of joy and delight-something that even an exercise addict like James would not associate with a mind-numbing forty-minute slog on a treadmill or stationary bicycle.
The workaholic American motto tells us: Work is for adults; play is for kids. Don’t buy into it. Play is one of the real joys of life, and you can be playful no matter what your age. In his enlightened book Play as If Your Life Depends on It, Frank Forencich writes, “Because so many of our exercise programs are inherently monotonous, many exercisers go looking for motivation. It’s curious that we should need so much stimulation for something that is supposedly natural. We need external motivation because the common exercise program consists of dull laborious, repetitions; in other words, work. Imagine if our exercise programs were more play-centric. The power of play lies in the fact that it give us instant pleasurable feedback. We play because it feels good and because it feels good, we want to play more.”
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