Why play is an important part of fitness for adults and children alike
In this blog post I'm going to talk about why play is an important part of fitness for both adults and children.
Before I start though, I just want to give some credit where credit is due. I was first introduced to these concepts by Matt and Amelia at Stage 6 health and fitness. I'm sure they were inspired both others as well, but I'd like to give them credit for what they taught me.
By the end of this blog post I'm going to try and paint a picture of why play is a really important part of fitness for adults, but we're going to start with children. Ultimately it's important for both for the same reasons, but we're used to the concept of children playing so let's start there.
And let's start with a question...
"Why do children play?"
And when I ask that, I'm not looking for superficial answers like "it's fun". Instead I'm looking for the deeper "what benefit does it provide them in the long term" type answers.
I'll give you a minute.
There's an argument to be made that the reason that children play is that play is how they learn the skills they will need as adults, but without the consequences of actually doing what adults do. This is probably easiest to understand if we think about our hunter gatherer ancestors (sometimes a bit of perspective helps).
The game of tiggy is practice for hunting and avoiding being hunted.
The game of dodgeball is practice for hunting with a throwing object like a spear or boomerang.
The game of capture the flag is cooperative teamwork towards a common goal.
Bringing this to a modern context, playing tea parties is practice for the social norms of mealtime and interacting with others.
Can you see how in all of these examples, the game has the key elements of the adult activity, but without the risk. Dodgeball for example allows kids to learn important skills for hunting without accidentally spearing their sibling. A tea party allows a child to practice their manners without driving their parents up the wall because they won't sit still in the coffee shop.
I'm guessing you're with me at this point. It's pretty easy to see why kids play when it's explained like this. It's pretty easy to extrapolate to why they should therefore play for health and fitness.
... but what about adults?
Why should adults play for health and fitness?
This is a little harder to see, just because as adults, we don't have very good perspective on it. We're too close to things to see what's going on, because we are the adults in question.
Never fear, I'll explain?
Did you notice how all of the kids games were highly integrated. When learning to hunt, children might be taught how to throw a spear, but they're also practising throwing in the chaotic situation of a game of dodgeball.
All these games, and play in general, integrate many skills together, allowing children to practice those skills in real time in a situation that resembles (but isn't actually) the real world.
Compare this to the fitness industry. Almost everything is isolated from it's life like use. We lift weights because we want to be strong in life, but we never practice putting that strength to work in lifelike situations. This is where play becomes so important in adult fitness. It's the way that we practise integrating our physical attributes like strength with skills to make them useful in the real world.
I have lost track of the number of times that I have seen an incredibly "gym strong" person come to a real world situation and perform poorly simply because they didn't know how to apply their strength to the situation.
That's why we need to play as a part of our fitness as adults. It will make the fitness we already have, and hope to develop more of in the future, much more applicable in the real world.
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