Get Healthy: Family Ice Skating
Families that play together stay together, or at least that’s how the saying goes. If you take some time to have fun together it can reduce stress among family members. You could choose an activity everyone can enjoy. Have you considered the health benefits of ice skating for the whole family?
Most people only think of ice skating as a sport when the winter Olympics rolls around. However, indoor ice skating rinks allow for year-round skating. In fact, what could be better during a hot summer day than going into an ice-cold rink and enjoying yourself for a few hours?
Ice skating is great exercise. With this one activity you can stretch and strengthen your muscles, and it provides excellent aerobic training. Besides being such wonderful exercise, ice skating is also a lot of fun!
Finding an activity that you enjoy makes it more likely you’ll actually do it regularly. The more often you go ice skating, the better it is for your family. Think about going ice skating twice a week and then doing some other form of exercise during other parts of the week.
Are the members of your family stressed from day-to-day living? Ice skating as well as other exercise releases chemicals within your body which helps reduce stress hormones. This means ice skating is an activity to help relieve stress and allow you to relax a little more.
Even though ice skating takes some practice, it is something everyone in your family except infants can enjoy. Ice skating rinks have skates of every size to rent. If you go ice skating very often, however, you may save money by purchasing a pair for each family member whose feet are finished growing. Toddlers or children’s feet grow so quickly, however, that buying them their own ice skates may not be cost-effective.
An added benefit of ice skating as a family is that the activity can help keep you connected. You can also use ice skating as an activity your children may invite their friends to. This means you’ll get to meet and get to know your children’s friends.
Not everyone lives close enough to an ice skating rink to use this activity as their major form of exercise so they do other exercise primarily. If you’re used to running, bicycling or playing tennis outdoors, you can’t do that when there is very much snow and ice on the ground. Perhaps you can use ice skating as an alternative exercise when the weather is bad.
There are many health benefits of ice skating for the whole family. It provides the body with much-needed exercise and helps reduce stress. If you haven’t considered ice skating as a family activity, what are you waiting for? Even if you don’t know how to ice skate there’s no time like the present to learn.
