Sports and exercise
Sport and physical activity make you fitter and improve your mental health.
Exercise helps you deal with stress and can help you overcome new challenges. And sport isn’t only for people who are really ‘sporty’ or competitive.
It’s important to find what you like doing.
It could be a team sport like football, netball or hockey. Or it could be individual like running or yoga.
What’s recommended?
The NHS recommends an hour of physical exercise every day for the under 18s. This should be a mixture of moderate and more vigorous exercise.
What is moderate exercise?
Moderate exercise is low level exercise like walking, cycling on flat ground, skipping, riding a scooter, walking the dog or walking to school. Moderate exercise raises your heart rate and makes you sweat. One way to tell if you’re working at a moderate level is if you can still talk, but can’t sing the words to a song.
What is vigorous exercise?
Vigorous exercise is higher impact exercise like running, cycling, football, rugby, swimming, dancing, martial arts and many more. Vigorous exercise helps to improve your muscle and bone strength. This type of exercise also helps improve your mood and increases your self-esteem.
Advice to be active
Exercise comes in lots of different shapes and forms.
Health for Teens provides a list of five simple things you can do to introduce more exercise into your daily life, without having to find extra time or money.
Find something to do
There are a range of leisure activities across the borough for children and teenagers of all ages.
Including: bowling; cinemas; leisure centres; parks; and more.