My 5 year old daughter and I are playing at a new park- it’s this cool park they put in at a middle school because someone finally realized that adolescents still like to climb and slide and jump on stuff. There are lots of cool obstacle style balancing elements and climbing structures and we are having a blast.
I’m intentionally not pushing myself to work on any skills or do anything resembling training. This is an easy play time. This is about being with my kid.
We find things we can do parallel to each other- I found a bar I’m interested in vaulting over and she is working on some wiggly balancing steps. I walk over to her and give her a hand when she asks for assistance. Now she’s off to climb up a tower and I’m weaving between some ropes pretending they are lazer beams. We reconvene to take turns spinning each other on a carousel.
This isn’t a parkour park or a ninja gym, but we’ve already got crawling, jumping, running, climbing, vaulting and balancing under our belts in just 15 minutes of play. We aren’t training sets or reps, we are setting challenges for ourselves and working on them.
Later in the week I went home and set up a distance jump that I did train for sets and reps because of something at the park I wanted to be able to do next time. My play fed into and fueled my training. Having skills and challenges to reach for are so helpful, and you can see and feel results right away when you get direct feedback from your environment.
We don’t need specialty equipment. We just need a mindset. Can we see possibilities? Can we be willing to drill the basics so we can expand our play vocabulary? Can we do a self assessment of what level of risk we are willing to take on in any given day? Can we be comfortable that that level will change day to day and year to year?
