Sports & Your Body
Tap a card and try it before bedtime Running · Swimming · Football · Jumping · Balance · Stretching · Getting Stronger · Breathing While You Move · Warming Up · Rest · Basketball · Tennis · Volleyball · Cricket · Rugby.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
Running — the oldest game there is
Running is the sport you already know how to do, because you did it in a playground before anyone taught you. It is also the one people most often decide they are ‘bad at’, usually because someone once made them run further than was fun. Speed and distance are not the point at all — the point is that moving fast feels wonderful, and your body is built to do it in bursts.
Swimming — moving in a thicker world
Swimming is the only sport where the ground disappears, and that is exactly why it feels like flying once you trust it. Your body is very close in weight to the same amount of water, which is the whole reason floating works. Learning to swim is also one of the few skills that can genuinely save a life, including your own.
Football — one ball, endless games
Football is really a thinking game wearing muddy boots. Anyone can kick a ball, but the players everyone wants on their side are the ones who see what is about to happen a second before it does. That is a skill you can practise alone against a wall, and it costs nothing at all.
Jumping — beating gravity for a second
Jumping is the most honest measurement in sport: you either cleared it or you did not, and the ground never argues. It is also the fastest thing a human body does, because all the power has to arrive in about a fifth of a second. That is why jumping feels so satisfying — you get an instant answer.
Balance — staying up on purpose
Balance feels like something you either have or you do not, and that is completely wrong: it is a skill, and it improves faster than almost anything else you can practise. Circus performers are not born different — they simply spend thousands of hours making tiny corrections. You can start improving yours tonight, in a corridor, with no equipment.
Stretching — giving yourself more room
Stretching has a reputation for being boring, mostly because it is usually taught as a punishment at the end of a lesson. Done properly it is one of the nicest two minutes of the day, and you can do it on a carpet in your pyjamas. It is also widely misunderstood: the old advice to stretch hard before running has not held up.
Getting Stronger — practice changes what you can do
Getting stronger is not about looking a certain way, and it has nothing at all to do with the shape of a body. It is about what you can do this month that you could not do last month: hang a bit longer, carry the shopping, climb the frame at the park. That kind of strength is available to every single body, in its own way.
Breathing While You Move — the rhythm under everything
Breathing is the one part of moving that you can take over whenever you like, which makes it the most useful tool in this whole world. Athletes do not have magic lungs; they have practised rhythms. And the same rhythms that help you keep going in a game will also settle you before a test or after an argument.
Warming Up — waking your body up first
The warm-up is the part everyone wants to skip, and it is the part that decides how the rest goes. It is not a rule invented by adults to spoil the fun: a cold body is genuinely slower, stiffer and clumsier than the same body five minutes later. The good news is that a proper warm-up is mostly just playing, gradually.
Rest — when the improving happens
Rest is treated like the opposite of training, which is exactly backwards. Training is the question you ask your body; rest is when it answers. Skip the answer and you can practise every day for a month and end up slower, sorer and much less keen than when you started.
Basketball — bounce, pass, shoot
Basketball is a fast game of passing and shooting where five players bounce a ball up the court and drop it through a high hoop. You can practise almost all of it alone with one ball and any wall. The clever part is not being tallest — it is reaching the open space before anyone else notices it.
Tennis — you against the bounce
Tennis is a game of patience and angles where you hit a ball over a net and try to make it bounce where your opponent is not. You do not need a court to start: a wall and a racket teach you almost everything. The winner is usually the one who stays calm and keeps the ball in play one shot longer.
Volleyball — keep it off the floor
Volleyball is a game of quick teamwork where you must pass, set and hit a ball over a high net without ever catching it. Because you only get three touches, players learn to help each other instantly. It is one of the friendliest sports to start, since a beach ball and a washing line already work.
Cricket — bat, bowl, and wait
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game where one team bats to score runs and the other bowls and fields to stop them. It looks slow but is full of little duels between the bowler and the batter. All you really need to start is a bat, a ball and something to aim at.
Rugby — carry it over the line
Rugby is a running-and-passing game where you carry an oval ball over the opponent’s line to score a try. It looks tough, but the friendly touch version has no tackling at all. Its real heart is teamwork and shaking hands afterwards, whatever the score.
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