Sit-ups

#sit-ups#exercise#abs#movement#workout

The stomach is burning by number seven, and number eight feels as arbitrary as number twenty, because nothing marks where the end is. The pictures below give the exercise a shape: warm-up, a fixed count, rest.

A boy lies on his back with bent knees and hands behind his head while doing a sit-up.

♂

Boy doing sit-ups

A boy lies on his back with bent knees and hands behind his head while doing a sit-up.

About this visual support

The benefit of sit-ups sits weeks away, while the effort sits in the stomach right now. For most children that is a poor trade, especially when the number of repetitions looks like somebody else's decision. Without a visible frame, every new repetition becomes a fresh decision about whether to keep going.

With visual support the training turns into a track rather than open-ended effort. The pictures can show lying down, how the knees bend, where the hands go and how many rounds are included. Once the set is visible the child counts down towards something, and what burned just as much a minute ago suddenly feels manageable because it has a measure.

Let the child move a picture or a pebble aside for each completed round. What is already done becomes as visible as what remains, which is the whole point with repetitive training. Keep the sets short and stop one repetition early rather than one late, so the exercise ends on a good feeling. In Routined the session can be built as a sequence with pictures and a pause between rounds.