Stepping up Family Fitness

Celebrate the nice weather and play balloon toss. Balloons can be filled with air or water, or you can toss different sized or textured balls, or other soft objects—including a (clean) wet sponge!

Design your own obstacle course using household items such as sheets, empty boxes, chairs and sticks that can create tunnels, hurdles and mazes. Create teams: parents vs. kids or sibling vs. sibling.

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Ask each family member to “invent” a dance move and give it a funny name. Ask each family member to teach his or her dance to the rest of the family.

Ask family members to raid their closets and create costumes. Next, blare (or sing) your favorite songs and use a video camera to film your adaptations. Plan a family movie night to watch your music video debuts, or upload your videos to YouTube.

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Create hours of fun by making your own Twister-style game. Using duct tape or colored chalk, make outlines of shapes on your floor or patio. Ask a family member to call out commands such as, “Place your right foot in the square. Place your left knee in the circle.”

Imagine laser tag—but with squirt guns.

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Time the event to encourage participants to walk briskly or jog to find the objects. The person who finds the most items in the least amount of time is the winner.

Reenact Wimbledon using homemade rackets. Bend a wire hanger into an oval, cover the oval using old pantyhose, and then duct tape a wooden paint stirrer to create a handle. Crumple a used piece of paper to create the “ball” or “birdie,” and play tennis in your own yard.

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Go bowling in your yard or hallway. Before you recycle, gather empty water or juice bottles to use as pins. Add a ball, and you’ve created a personal bowling alley!

Play baseball using a homemade bat. Wash and dry an empty 2-liter bottle. To make the bat more durable, use an 18-inch wooden rod or a stick. Place the rod in the bottle, and duct tape the remaining portion of the rod to the bottle opening. Use with Wiffle balls, wadded socks, crumpled paper—anything you can imagine!