How to play fitness games with children (when you're an adult)
Playing fitness and movement games with children is a great way to keep them active and help them to learn valuable life lessons like dealing with adversity and a growth mindset.
However, as the adult playing these games you are going to come up against a problem. Simply because you are probably bigger, stronger and possibly faster than the children that you're playing with, you're probably going to win most of the games. That's not so much of a problem for you, but if you want children to play with you for more than a few minutes you probably don't want to deliver them crushing defeats each time round. You need an alternative!
One solution is to simply go easy on the children that you're playing with, but that's not ideal. Many children will figure out pretty quickly that's you're going easy on them and loose interest. You need a solution that allows you to genuinely play hard, while not crushing your opponent... I mean, loving son or daughter!
Here are two options:
The first option is to build handicapping into games as an automatic part of the game. In the gym we play a game of running naughts and crosses. It's just like normal naughts and crosses except you have to run to earn your turn. The way we integrate handicapping is that after each game, if there was a winner, then the other person sets the winner a challenge for the following game. These challenges typically come in the form of an obstacle to move through during the running portion of the game. This slows the winner down for the next game. The challenges can accrue from game to game, resulting in quite elaborate obstacle courses.
The way this typically plays out is that I, as coach, win the first few games, accrue a couple of difficult obstacles set by the child that I'm playing with, and then the game proceeds fairly from there.
The second option has to do with choosing when to go easy and when to go hard. At the time of writing this I just finished coaching a session with a boy. To conclude the session we played a game of beam wrestling; a game where essentially we each stand on the same balance beam and try to knock each other off. In this particular instance we were playing 'first to 10, wins". In this particular instance I choose to play the first two games hard, thus winning then (score 2:0 to me). I then alternated between playing hard and backing off just enough not to win. The score moved through:
2:1
3:1
3:2
3:3
4:3
5:3
5:4
6:4 and so on until
7:7
In this way, the boy that I was playing with began by facing adversity, but not so much so as to become discouraged. He was able to continually chase down my lead only to see it open up again. Critically I made sure that he still had to work for the points that he won, even though I was taking it a little bit easier on him.
At this point we're at 7:7. Here I deliberately lost the next two games (but only after a struggle), giving the boy a lead of 9:7. I then made sure to win the next two games. Now it's 9:9. He could nearly taste the victory, but now the pressure's back on. Finally I made sure to play as close to his level as possible for the final game. If he made a critical mistake, I would win, but if not, he would get to victory and a sense that he earned it, which he did.
By playing the game in this manner (early lead for me, tough chase in the middle, late game lead for him and a pretty fair last game) it validated his win as best as possible given that I was, by the very nature of the game, having to take it a little easy on him. He faced adversity, held it together, and had to perform well to finally snag the victory.
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