Expert: Kim Farmer - 11/29/2007

Question
Our granddaughter is into her first week of Moo Duk Kwan. Tonight she was rebelling in a small way for warm up push ups. She is ten and must do ten. Mom just asked me how can we help Rhonda by making it a bit more fun??  She okayed me asked Allexperts.  How do you make push ups fun for anyone, right???!!!!  Mind you, Rhonda is at that pre teen age where she can be challenging and this class is good for her. Makes her tired so she can't fight us so readily!! Heck, I wouldn't trade her. Thanks for your input.

Answer
Hello-
I hope she is enjoying the class, and you are right..making pushups fun for anyone can be quite challenging.  Have you tried asking her what she doesn't like about the pushups?  If they are too hard for her to do, then there are lots of variations of pushups to help her get stronger like wall pushups, ball pushups, modified pushups (on hands and knees) to name a few.  Perhaps you could intermingle the pushups with jumping jacks or situps or something like that.  Or have her do the pushups to her favorite song.

Hope these ideas might help, thanks for the question.