remember that children don’t exercise like adults
one thing that's important for parents, teachers and coaches to understand is that kids don't manage heat as efficiently as adults do.
4 minute read
"understanding why kids play the way they do and what kind of exercise best suits their growing bodies keeps sports and structured active play fun," jill barker writes.
amr abdallah dalsh
/
reuters
by: jill barker
it’s easy to fall into the trap of treating kids like small adults, especially when it comes to sports and physical activity. but not only do kids approach exercise differently than adults, their smaller stature and underdeveloped bodies have a unique physiology that means they don’t respond to exercise the same way as adults do. from the age of six until puberty, kids require more than just smaller playing surfaces and child-sized equipment. they need coaches, teachers and parents who understand how to modify physical activity to suit how their bodies work.
“there are quantitative differences between children and adults,” said james skinner, professor emeritus in the department of kinesiology at indiana university in an article published in the american college of sport medicine, health and fitness journal. “some of these differences are associated with body size, whereas others are associated with biological maturation.”
one of the differences between children and adults is their muscles don’t have the same capacity to store the type of energy that powers high intensity exercise. not only are they unable to sustain high energy efforts as long as adults can, kids reach peak exercise capacity faster and have a lower perception of effort, meaning they go from 0-100 per cent intensity more quickly than adults and with greater ease. they also recover faster, with studies showing that children recuperate from a 30-second bout of high-intensity exercise in two to three minutes, versus the 10 minutes it takes a young adult to recover from the same workout.
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another difference between children and adults is that biological sex has little impact on exercise performance, as the differences in testosterone levels, stature and body fat only occur after puberty. as such, girls and boys can play and compete at the same level with little concern about physiological advantage. children also don’t display any unique athletic traits that differentiate them from their peers, such as a tendency to excel at endurance or power events, so there is little reason to push children toward a specific sport or to promote sport specialization before they hit puberty. identifying athletic potential is best left until after their bodies start maturing.
also important is that kids don’t manage heat as efficiently as adults. adult bodies sweat earlier and in greater quantity than do kids’, which is one of the primary ways the body cools itself during exercise. and due to their larger bodies, adults have more skin surface area from which to release heat. adults also take less time to acclimatize to heat, meaning children will have a harder time adjusting to a sudden heat wave. in short, compared to adults, children get hotter more quickly, without the same efficiency at cooling themselves.
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given these distinct physiological differences, coaches, teachers and parents should adjust their expectations and training practices accordingly. that means limiting high intensity activities to durations of less than 30 seconds and adjusting any endurance activities to respect the difficulty children have in cooling a body overheated by long exercise bouts, especially when the temperature spikes.
interestingly, children’s spontaneous and unstructured play matches their physiology, something most adults fail to notice. studies observing kids at play noted that within a 12-hour period, children accumulated only 22 minutes of high intensity activity, with about 95 per cent of each intense exercise session lasting less than 15 seconds. as such, kids naturally gravitate toward short bursts of high energy activity followed by varying intervals of low-to moderate-intensity exercise.
too often, coaches of children new to sport structure their practices the same way they do for adults and youth, with allowances for their young athletes largely in the form of spending extra time learning new and emerging skills. yet, the structure of the practice should be designed with a child’s unique physiology in mind, with a nod toward how they play in a non-structured setting. this is especially true on hot days when kids need extra breaks to grab a drink of water and a slice of shade before heading back out into the sun
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given kids’ ability to recover quickly from high intensity exercise, lots of short bursts of activity followed by a few minutes of low or moderate intensity recovery are ideal for keeping children engaged and successful. get kids to skate, dribble, run or hop though a course of strategically placed cones and follow up with a lower intensity drill designed to improve athletic or movement-based skills. spend very little time at one intensity, letting kids lead when it comes to energy output and taking cues from their body language when it comes to rest.
parents and grade school physical education teachers should follow the same structure, keeping exercise bouts short and energy high, followed by plenty of time to rest. and be sure to adjust the intensity downward on hot days. understanding why kids play the way they do and what kind of exercise best suits their growing bodies keeps sports and structured active play fun — which is the first and very important step in creating a lifelong love of being active.
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