Enough of the old guy stuff!

What about the young folks in the room?” OK.  Fair enough. Same advice: Movement is everything.

Sir Isaac Newton figured it out a long time ago. A body in motion tends to stay in motion (unless acted on by outside forces). A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

This covers a whole lot of what I’ve been writing about for the past couple of months. The job is the same—being healthier. The basic concepts are the same. Move!

Active adults create active kids. That doesn’t mean to simply send your kids outside to play. Kids don’t have the same opportunities for “play” that you and I did. There is simply too much demand on their time. 

You are their role model. If your lifestyle is sedentary, theirs will be too. If you hit the couch and watch TV, they’ll hide in their room on some sort of electronic device too.

Playing everything when you’re young makes you a better athlete when you’re older. It’s all about learning to move. Run, throw, kick. Balance, coordination, understanding how your body moves.

That’s what will make your child a better athlete when it really counts. Those basic skills are the foundation for a life of sports performance.

No sport specialization until high school. Never.

Two of the most successful college football coaches in the country are Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Alabama’s Nick Saban. A lot of people speculate about what makes these two very different coaches so successful. I happen to believe that what they have most in common is the ability to identify talent and then develop it.

And I guarantee you, they’re not looking at Little League games or AAU tournaments to identify talent. No one knows at 10 that your child is destined to stardom.

Ace pitcher at 12? Winning races at 10? Means little. Can they move their body? Can they control that movement? Means everything.

You can give your child only two things: Your gene pool and the love of a game. Yeah, that one was a couple of weeks ago. Give me a kid that is passionate about a sport and I’ll show you a kid that will be successful, at some level, in that sport.

Childhood obesity a problem?  Move! Juvenile onset Diabetes?  Move!

That has really gotten more difficult. When I was a kid, summers were filled with activity that we created on our own. I would leave the house in the morning on my bike with the only admonition being that I be home for supper.

That’s not the world we live in anymore. Play dates have to be manufactured. Sports participation is the main avenue for activity for a lot of kids. But what if sports just aren’t what works for your child? That puts it back on you, Mom and Dad.

Movement is life. Movement gives us life. Movement makes our life better.