HIIT for kids? Is this possible? Especially in your PE class? Well of course it is! HIIT for kids is exactly the same, but now you have to figure out how to get the benefits across to them, while making it enjoyable. HIIT taught to kids can be really exciting with all the energy they have!

You’ve heard that HIIT was a great workout to help you get fit so you tried it…and you loved it.

Now you want to incorporate it into your Physical Education classes, but you’re not sure how to go about it. I found the perfect way to get your students excited about working out hard.

Overweight and Obesity on the Rise

The American Heart Association reports that 1 in 3 kids or teens in the U.S. are overweight or obese. These statistics have tripled since 1963. Just think about all the health risks that come along with overweight and obesity. Examples include; type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, certain types of cancers. The list goes on and on.

Now imagine being a child and you have no control over your weight. Your parents cook for you, and you have never been taught that physical activity is important.

That’s where us PE teachers come in. It is our job to teach the youth how to live healthy lifestyles and to prevent health problems in their future..

There are so many different resources online telling us how to keep our students active and engaged, but this article is going to narrow in on how to make a HIIT workout fun for your students.

HIIT Workouts For Kids

When I got into HIIT workouts last year I thought “oh my god I need to teach my students about this”. My body started to feel really strong. I was building muscle while burning so many more calories than I would have if I went for a run.

I picked really simple exercises that my students knew or could learn quickly to start, and then talked about the benefits of HIIT, especially for kids their age.

So many of my middle schoolers would rather have “free play” where the boys could play basketball and the girls could either dance, or play volleyball (I am super lucky my students are so active). But it’s hard to spend a class period on fitness concepts vs. game play.

The first thing I did was figure out why this is going to benefit them.

1. Game play isn’t for everyone. Some individuals would rather work out.
2. I only have 30 minutes with every class. HIIT workouts can be done, with extra time for my students to cool down before their next class.
3. Overweight and Obesity. None of my classes have 100% physically fit kids. I wanted to show EVERYONE that there are other options for them to lose weight or build muscle that they might not have even realized.
4. STANDARD 3: you can tie HIIT into so many of the SHAPE National Standards, and tailor your class to expand on a lot of the grade level outcomes by getting creative with your lessons. The possibilities are endless.

Now that my kids understand the WHY as to them doing HIIT workouts, and my lessons follow the Physical Education National Standards I have to teach, I needed to make a game plan as to how I am going to execute this within their class periods.

How Do I Teach This?

If you’ve ever taught aerobics or work out classes than this might be easy for you to demonstrate. Correct form, manage behavior, keep engagement high and do the workout with your students.

But for those who don’t want to be doing HIIT all day with all of their kids and classes, there is an easier way.

I found the website Heavy Set that lets you choose the type of workout you want to do. You create a timer so you will know when to change exercises, or rest.

For those of us who are lucky enough to have a projector, just plug this website in, and you’ll be able to display the workout you created for your students.

I would pick 4 exercises, and set a specific amount of time they needed to perform them and color them green. When you display this for your students they will see the name of the exercise and a backwards running countdown so they can visually see how much time they have left.

Example of Timer:

After every exercise I built in a rest period. I set the time for whatever I felt was appropriate for their class, and colored it red. This was the students time to walk in place, or practice their breathing.

You are also able to set up a warm up and cool down on the app which I just had my kids walking/jogging laps until the time counted down to zero.

The great thing about displaying this timer up on the wall for everyone to see is that there is a loud buzzer sound after each interval that tells the kids when to begin or stop.

What WIll Your Students See?

That leaves more room for you to walk around your gym to monitor, correct form, and to make sure everyone is following along. I always join in and do at least one circuit with the kids to let them know I enjoy it. They shouldn’t have to do something I hated.

Is every student going to like it? Absolutely not. But just think of all the possibilities for the four kids that secretly struggle with their weight. It might not even be visible. But now they fell in love with a new form of physical activity. It’s not just about losing weight. It’s about being healthy. HIIT is a great avenue for people to experiment with different forms of being physically active.

How Do I Make HIIT fun For My Kids

This was my favorite part of introducing HIIT. I didn’t want my students doing these workouts more than once a week.

So I decided we are going to do HIIT Mondays. We do no more than a 16 minute work out (warm up and cool down included), and they would have the remaining class period (14 minutes) to do almost whatever they wanted. I would tell them “give me 16 minutes of work, and I’ll give you 14 minutes of freedom”

This worked SOOOO well. They understood that Mondays was a give and take type deal, and it benefited all the students who loved HIITs, but also benefited the students who just wanted to play basketball or volleyball, because they were able to do this once the workout was completed.

So now that we have established a schedule of when we are doing HIIT no one was surprised when it was time to get to work Monday afternoons.

Detroit Living

Now I teach right outside of Detroit where rap music is a hit (see what I did there 😉 ). Lucky for me, I am a huge rap fan. I enjoy Meek Mill, Rick Ross, and all the heavy hitters of the rap game. During most of my lessons music for me and my students is a MUST. I don’t make my students run laps often. But when I do (check out that one 6th grade class I talked about who love running laps), they absolutely are listening to a fast paced songs with a beat to motivate them. It doesn’t have to be rap either. I play top hits with an explicit content setting turned on to keep it clean. For my younger kids I play their favorite Disney shows or kid appropriate songs.

For our HIIT workouts though, I always played the station Top Hip Hop on Pandora with of course the edited setting turned on. Anything with a beat will make anyone want to dance, and in my case move!

You could even take this one step further if you are on the fence about playing rap music and play your students favorite rap songs, but the instrumental versions on YouTube. They’ll know the songs, and it will still get them excited.

This was a huge motivator for my students. During rest breaks I saw a lot of dancing. Nothing crazy because they get tired. And a lot of singing along and smiles. It really was a deal breaker to make this type of working out fun!

Where Can They Work?

Another thing I did was let them pick anywhere in the gym to work. A lot of teachers are strict with controlling where their students are and making sure everything looks neat and organized. Honestly who cares! As long as your kids aren’t going crazy, what does it matter where they are for a class like this?

If they felt more comfortable being near their friends then I let them. If they wanted to head towards the back of the gym to be less visible to others then that’s fine too! Letting them choose where to work is going to make them feel powerful and will help them stay more engaged. I did not care if my students talked during their rest intervals, or moved to another part of the gym or paced back and forth to bring their heart rate down. As long as they were working during the exercise intervals, that’s all that mattered.

And yes, during the exercise interval you want to be working at max intensity, or pretty close to it. But I never complain if the students need to slow down to laugh because they are having fun with their friends.

Now What?

You just made exercise fun for them. And when you do that, your students are likely to want to exercise on their own time. Don’t make a HIIT workout strict, hostile, and boring by trying to make the students perform in their seating charts, or a quiet music-less gym. Let them be kids and have fun with them!

Get PE teaching content directly to your mailbox!

​

Send it my way!

Powered By ConvertKit