Body Moving for Toddlers

Most of you probably already know a lot of the benefits of babywearing for both Mama (or other wearer) and Baby.

If you are like me you probably wear your baby/toddler a lot of the time which makes it easy to incorporate exercise into your daily routine. I mean, just wearing them while you are doing the dishes or folding the laundry will give your core a good strength building workout (and while your at it why not through in a few squats and leg lifts here and there). Going up and down the stairs of your 4th floor walk up apartment a few times a day will also burn off more of those extra calories than you would if you weren’t wearing your little one. Taking a walk to to the park while wearing your baby or toddler is a much more intense workout for your body than if you were simply rolling them along in a stroller.

Now that Kayla is a toddler she truly has become a fan of moving her body…not just running around like most children do but from the moment we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night there are many requests to do the “DD” (DVD) or “Yo-iee Ga Ga (Yoga). When I do put one of these on she jumps right up, while dragging my yoga mat into place, and starts doing many of the moves. She loves it! And so do I….it’s such a joy to see her using her body and figuring out how it all works. Each day it seems like she miraculously has a new move down pat. But I’m sure her little brain was working on it all night long which is why we might be losing a little more sleep lately.

Many of the Mama’s that are using The Babywearing Workout™ have told me that their toddlers love to do it right along side of them. Even pointing to the DVD player, TV or Computer and requesting Mama get to work and start doing her “Mama Bop”. And so we are creating Mama’s “Little” Personal Trainers….for now. But in the long run they will be their own little personal trainers with an ingrained love of moving their bodies.

So what I’m getting at here is that in addition to all of the other amazing benefits of babywearing this is teaching them an invaluable lesson about healthy living. They are learning, by example and participation, that incorporating exercises into their daily routines can be easy and fun at the same time. Learning this kind of a lesson long before they are even crawling, I would have to say, is one way to help keep them from joining the staggering and heartbreaking statistics of childhood obesity that we are struggling to fight here in the USA. What better way to help ensure that our next generation won’t be part of those other horrifying statistics that they may not outlive their own parents than by babywearing!

What kind of exercises or “Body Moving” does your Little One like to do?