Fun Family Fitness

I will admit, I am usually pretty selfish when it comes to my workouts. It is my time and I like to be able to go as hard (or sometimes as easy) as I want to. But this past long weekend when I was at my Mom's she asked me to please help her exercise more. During her school year she is so frantically busy that she stopped exercising and now she is having a hard time getting back into it. We also had my little cousins visiting and nine year old boys have a lot of energy and want to be involved in everything. So my challenge was to think of ways to include the family in my workouts so that we all had fun and  I still got a good workout.

One morning I brought everyone with me to one of the Boothbay Land Trust's trails. I ran, my Mom and Aunt walked, and the boys did a little of both. It was a hot day, so it was nice to be on the shady trail with the ocean breeze. The trail was pretty muddy from all the recent rain, which added an extra challenge to my run, and some extra messy fun for the boys!

Oven's Mouth Trail

On the 4th of July I came up with a circuit style bootcamp. It worked well because each of the adults could work at their own pace while the boys played and then joined in for the running between rounds.

And another day I ran while my Mom and the boys biked. They were a little faster than me, so I had them stop at all the side streets and do jumping jacks until I caught up. 

I never felt like I sacrificed the quality of my workout and it was a lot of fun to include the family. 

How do you include others with different levels of fitness in your workouts?