Playful Exercise

I was out walking around a field when I saw a big playground that had all kinds of bars and tunnels in it. Kids were running all around it doing fun things so I decided to jump on. There were monkey bars and those rings that you hang on and “walk” forward from. 

I jumped up on the monkey bars and started hanging upside down, and resting my weight from my arms and legs. I noticed that it was hard for me to do, and that if I kept hanging there, my body would relax.

There are all kinds of games to play on those big jungle gyms. You can swing, slide on a slide or through a tunnel, hang from the bars, walk along the bars with your arm strength. As we get older our flexibility and ability to do those things gets less. The more we move our bodies and try things like this, the better we get at it. It might even help us regain our flexibility. 

I also noticed that the whole play area consisted of many different levels of playing, high up, low, moving around a lot. You can act like a squirrel and run from one height to the next and change your spatial relationships a lot. Another occurrence of aging is that we lose our balance more easily because we are not challenged spatially in that way.

It made me decide to go out and find a playground more often to exercise my inner child and help my body be more youthful.