3 Warm-up Games For Children – Being Parents

Warming up is a very important phase that should not be neglected before playing sports. In this article, we will present some warm-up games for children that will be very useful for them before training or performing a physical activity.

In reality,  for children, warming up is not as important as it is for adults. Ultimately, the youngest are generally active by nature. They even start playing and moving before they get to the track or playground.

So why do children need to warm up before exercising? And why is it necessary to carry out a warm-up based on games?

The keys to warming up in children’s sport

There are many reasons why children should warm up before playing sports,  but they are not the same as adults. The most important reasons are:

• Get in the habit of warming up before training. One of the goals of sport in childhood is to develop habits for the future of adulthood. If children accept early on that warming up is essential before engaging in any physical activity, they will stay in the habit for the rest of their lives.
• Calm down to better devote to training. It sounds ironic, but it’s true. Warming up helps children calm down and start to focus on what they are doing. Indeed, they tend to be quite anxious when they arrive at workouts, because they really want to be with other children and because they also need to move. Warming up helps them slow down these impulses.

• Mobilize the body in a controlled manner. Thanks to the warm-up, children achieve better controlled and more specific movements in preparation for training. It works very well, for example, to work the range of movements or perform dynamic stretches.

Why do warm-up games?

Warm-up games are a much more interesting option for children  than a standard warm-up, like the one adults are used to doing. This can be explained in different ways:

• When playing, children do not drastically disrupt their natural activity. This makes it easier to get them to start training and get them involved.
• Warm-up games allow you to work on general and specific skills. While playing, we can train general skills, and even those that we do not use for a specific sport. It also allows you to work on other skills required during training, in a basic way.

• Warming up is more fun when done while playing. It improves children’s behavior and engagement with sport.
• The game helps to establish rules and to develop teamwork. Through games, children learn to respect the rules and value teamwork.
• Games stimulate creativity. By playing, we help children to go beyond the sport itself, by stimulating their creative thinking.

Warm-up games for children

There are many possibilities for warm-up games for children. The main thing is that they involve continuous movements and include general mobilization of the body. Here are some ideas for warming up with games before exercising:

Donkey tails

For this game, you need a strip of fabric (or other) of about 10-15 centimeters for each child. Each will place this piece of fabric on the waistband of his pants, as if it were a donkey tail. The goal is to catch the other children’s tails while preventing them from catching his!

After a while, the monitor will indicate the end of the game.  Whoever has collected the most donkey tails will have won. In reality, this is not a competitive game but it does allow children to be applauded for their good work.

You can also adapt this game. For example, crawling on the ground, moving like crabs, walking or running backwards, using one hand (perfect for working the non-dominant hand), etc.

Traffic light race

The traffic light game consists of moving inside the playing area at a certain speed,  according to the indications of the traffic light. Here you have to be able to benefit from a good distance to cover during the race.

For this game, you can use signs with the colors of the traffic light or oral indications. In all cases, we will use three colors:  green to go fast, orange to move slowly and red to stop.

It is a game of reaction speed, in which we work a lot on attention. The child who makes a mistake will have to start over. The game ends when someone comes to the end. You can also start over and turn the finish line into a starting line.

As in the previous case,  we can introduce variations in the movements:  hopping, backing, crawling, moving in crabs, etc.

Puppet in the mirror

The mirror puppet game  can be used at the end of the warm-up to capture the children’s attention,  to calm them down a bit and, at the same time, to do dynamic stretches and exercises. balanced. It is also a very good game for working on body expression and creativity.

The instructor or one of the children will be the puppet and the others the mirror. The puppet will make slow movements that the mirror (ie the group) should reproduce. Here, you have to give free rein to your imagination so that the children do not get bored, play with facial expressions and look for funny positions. This game can also be done in small groups or in pairs.

Ultimately, for children, play is a natural form of physical activity. Using play as a warm-up is a great way to get kids where we want to go and give them a chance to have fun.

This is especially important for children who have problems integrating into the group and for those who do not have a natural positive predisposition for physical exercise.