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Areas › Your body › Moving your body
Skipping and boarding ask for much of what a therapist would be working on anyway: both sides of the body keeping time with each other, judging the moment before it arrives, balance that has to keep correcting itself. They cost nothing, they happen with other children, and no referral is needed. Treat that as a genuine route rather than as something to fill the wait with.
To walk along its spacious paths (Quran 71:20). The ground outside the door was spread out as somewhere to move, which is a plain enough permission.
نوح
لِّتَسۡلُكُواْ مِنۡهَا سُبُلࣰ ا فِجَاجࣰ ا
to walk along its spacious paths?” ’
Qur’an 71:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Outdoor walking groups have been pooled across trials and came out improving a spread of physical and psychological measures with few adverse effects, and drop out was low, which is the part that matters for anything free and unsupervised. In children and adolescents, more physical activity goes with better mental health and more sitting with worse, though that evidence is largely observational and cannot tell you which way the arrow runs. Neither body of work studied skipping ropes.
Hanson S, Jones A. (2015). Is there evidence that walking groups have health benefits? A systematic review and meta-analysis.. British journal of sports medicine doi
Rodriguez-Ayllon M, Cadenas-Sánchez C, Estévez-López F, Muñoz NE, Mora-Gonzalez J, Migueles JH, Molina-García P, Henriksson H, Mena-Molina A, Martínez-Vizcaíno V, Catena A, Löf M, Erickson KI, Lubans DR, Ortega FB, Esteban-Cornejo I. (2019). Role of Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior in the Mental Health of Preschoolers, Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
These games train timing, balance and the two sides of the body working together, which is a good part of what the clinic would be training.
A child with real coordination difficulty may need to begin on the ground and slower, and where a therapist is genuinely available that is still the better route.
When a child starts martial arts and their maths marks go up, the maths did not improve. Their attention did, and timed maths tests measure attention as much as arithmetic.
If you are the therapist, you do not need to become the movement teacher as well. Sending somebody to a person trained for it is the better version of helping.
It does not have to be one block. Ten minutes here and ten there add up to the same total, and they are far easier to get.