Family Fitness for Kids is Easy with a Bounce House!

Let’s be honest, guys: getting your kids to commit to exercise is a challenge, for most of us anyway. To avoid the huffs and the puffs, you pretty much need to dupe children into exercise by convincing them a healthy activity is fun.

Bike riding, jumping rope, hide and seek … these tried and true fitness games for kids and activities get the job done. And best of all, your child is having loavds of fun in the process.

We all know how fun a bounce house can be. But you may not realize your children are reaping the benefits of plyometric exercise while jumping and bouncing around in them. A bounce house lets your kids increase their heart rate and benefit from plyometric training while also enjoying some family fun.

If you own a bounce house or are considering buying one, here’s some family fun and fitness ideas that are easy and safe for children to try, and can help your kids bounce with purpose. These games offer fun family fitness challenges while providing kids with a great plyometrics workout. And as physical activity goes, your kids will likely enjoy this a whole lot more than most other forms of exercise.

Before we list our fun fitness games for kids, we first want to state that children should ALWAYS be monitored while using bounce houses, inflatable water slides, inflatable obstacle courses, and other large inflatables. Bounce houses aren’t designed for exercise, so please consider carefully whether your children can handle one of these exercises before having them try them. Every kid is different, and it’s okay if some children can’t do these exercises. Oh, and don’t forget to stretch, too!

Five Fun Fitness Games for Kids — Exercise #1: Squat Jumps

Let’s start with a classic exercise routine many of us are familiar with from gym class: squat thrusts. You know the drill. You put yourself into a squatting position, then thrust yourself into a pushup position, then move upward, fully extended, and land on your feet. Squat thrusts on flat ground provide excellent fitness for kids, but doing squat jumps in a bounce house elevates the value of this simple jump training to a whole new level. 

Bounce Lunges

Soccer players will know this exercise as a foot to foot drill called “lateral bounds.” You start by squatting onto your left leg while your right leg is extended outward, then burst yourself up from that left leg, landing in a squatting position on your right leg, and then bouncing like this back and forth. This exercise is great for improving leg strength and generally improving cardiovascular and cardiorespiratory health.

The Bouncy Box

There are two popular forms of box drills in plyometric training. One involves jumping onto a box and back off, But for our bounce house family fitness challenge, we’re going to try a four corner jumping game. 

Imagine a box on the floor. The point is to jump from one corner of the box to the next, hopping between those corners clockwise. As soon as you land, try to burst onto the next corner. 

This is a simple exercise for children of all ages. And if you trip or fall, you’ll land softly in the bounce house and not on the hard ground.

Bouncing Simon

Here’s a fun jumping game we made up here at Pogo that works not just your lower body, but your “upper body” too. And by that, we mean your brain! 

For “Bouncing Simon,” you’ll need four sheets of construction paper, each in a different color. Place one sheet of construction paper on each of the four walls of the bounce house. We suggest setting up the paper outside the bounce house so that it’s visible through the finger safe netting.

Next, you’ll want to make a ten point list of those colors, being sure to use each color at least twice. For instance, your list might read "blue, red, blue, green, yellow, yellow, red, green, yellow, blue."

Now, you’ll have a family member outside the bounce house shout out the colors sequentially. The person jumping inside the bounce house needs to jump upward, rotate, and land facing the correct color. You then add the second color, but repeat the first, and the player needs to land aiming at the first color, then the second color.

Here’s a brief example. You start with blue, so the jumper points to blue. The next color is red, so you’ll shout “blue, red” and the jumper points to blue then red. If the third color is green, you shout “blue, red, green,” and so on.

The game ends when the jumper gets a color incorrect or falls down. It’s sort of like the Simon electronic game, only better suited for physical fitness.

The Best of the Fitness Games for Kids: Good Ole’ Fashioned Bounce House Fun!

There’s all sorts of fun family fitness games for kids to enjoy in a bounce house.  But at the end of the day, there’s one form of fitness for kids that a bounce house provides that’s more fun than any other: just using the bounce house!

As soon as a kid steps foot inside a bounce house, they’re all but guaranteed a fun time. We’ve seen kids jump around inside a bounce house for hours on end without getting bored. And jumping in a bounce house is, in and of itself, a plyometrics workout that boosts fitness for kids.

Spending some time in a bounce house will help your kids get healthier. They’re exercising, taking in fresh air, and loving every minute of it too. The fact that you can create fun fitness games for kids inside a bounce house is a bonus. 

The best form of family fitness is the type that gets everyone moving together. Give our bounce house experts a call today at <512-743-5560>