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2 . The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled over the past 50 years. But what this trend means for children’s long-term health, and what to do about it (if anything), is not so clear.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans.     1     This advice marks a shift from the organization’s previous stance of “watch and wait,” and it reflects the AAP’s belief that obesity is a disease and the group’s adoption of a more proactive position on childhood obesity.

Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain — and the guidelines acknowledge these barriers. Few weight-loss drugs have been approved for older children, although many are used off-label.     2     And surgery, while becoming more common, has inherent risks and few long-term safety data — it could, for instance, cause nutritional deficits in growing children. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether interventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to the stigma overweight kids face from a fat-phobic society. This stigma can lead to mental health problems and eating disorders.

Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, the U.S. and countries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.

    3    In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, unsurprisingly, that kids’ sports participation increases with their parents’ incomes: about 70 percent of kids whose families earn more than $105,000 a year participate in sports, but only 51 percent of middle-class kids and 31 percent of children at or below the poverty line do. This disparity hurts people of color the most. More than 60 percent of white children, for instance, participate in athletics, but only 42 percent of Black children and 47 percent of Hispanic children do. Experts blame these problems on the privatization of sports — as public investment in school-based athletics dwindles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, children between ages six and 17 should get at least an hour of moderate to intense physical activity every day. Yet only 21 to 28 percent of U.S. kids meet this target, two government-sponsored surveys found. The nonprofit Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance evaluates physical activity in American children, and in 2022 the group gave the U.S. a grade of D–.

Why is it so hard to get kids moving? In addition to fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased screen time, changing norms around letting kids play outdoors unsupervised, and a lack of safe places for them to play outside the home.

New York City, for example, had 2,067 public playgrounds as of 2019 — a “meager” amount for its large population, according to a report from the city comptroller — and inspectors found hazardous equipment at one quarter of them. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of youths lived within walking distance of a park, according to the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to have the fewest public play spaces, despite often having a high population density.     4    

Kids everywhere need more places to play: trails, skate parks and climbing walls, gardens and ball fields, bike paths and basketball courts. Vigorous public funding to build and keep up these areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements can make unused spaces available to the public.

4 . There’s a reason why so many people love running early in the morning.     1     Not only do you begin your day more relaxed and refreshed, but you’ve already started things of with an accomplishment. If you think you’re ready to take advantage of the benefits of a morning run, here are five suggestions from the professionals.

●Find a friend, and be gentle with yourself

Finding a partner to run with will give you someone to be responsible for, and make it much harder to blow off the run. It’s also important to remember that this is a process, and you can’t expect to do it perfectly from the beginning.     2     “Once you get into the habit, it becomes natural and actually jump starts your day,” says Sheri Piers, top American finisher at the 2012 Boston Marathon.

●Embrace the movement

“The first few steps or blocks will be tough in the morning. They always are,” says Dr. Jordan Metzl, who has over 32 marathon finishes under his belt. With a practice of more than 20, 000 patients, Metzl’s days are jam-packed, so early morning runs are a must.     3     “Sometimes you have to just do it, and remember that the motivation will come later.” he says.

●Stay warm

    4     “If I go to bed in my sports wear, all I need to do is throw on the outer layers and head out the door. At least that takes away some of the inconvenience,” says Tina Muir, a half-marathoner. She also leaves her alarm on the other side of the room to help push herself up.

●     5    

“I view waking up early like tearing off a Band-Aid,” says Michele Gonzalez, a running coach. “It’s gonna hurt for a bit.” Her advice is relatively simple. “You just have to set the alarm early and start doing it,” she says. “After a few days, you’ll be tired earlier at night and will start going to bed earlier. This makes the early alarm feel a bit more manageable.”

7 . When you think of how much you do with your hands all day, from making yourself fried eggs in the morning to folding laundry in the evening, it becomes clear how vital skillfulness is to daily life.     1     You need it to play sports, for example, or use a remote or a video game controller.

For some specific tips on improving skillfulness, we turned to a personal trainer Abdias Rojas. He said, “there are so many movements you can do to actually improve not just the strength of your hands but also flexibility in your hands.”     2    

Put rubber bands on your fingers, then expand and contract them. This will contribute to myofascial (肌筋膜的) release and getting your hands to feel more comfortable.

To get a better sense of how much pressure you should apply when touching things, do hand exercise in sand.     3     But when you do hand exercise inside of a sandbox, put your hands in a box of sand, you can literally learn to squeeze the sand and understand which joint or which finger is giving more giving more pressure or less pressure.

    4     Practice leaning into them with your palm down on the floor. Then, practice leaning into them with the backs of your hands on the floor, rolling on them, like putting weight on and taking weight off the wrist.

Finally, try seated eccentric (偏心的) wrist extension. Sit upright with an arm on a table, holding a dumbbell with your hand hanging off the edge and your palm facing down. Use your other hand to curl your wrist up, lower it, and repeat.     5    

Don’t overlook the value of overall body health when it comes to improving skillfulness, either. Rojas pointed out that without the optimal gross (最佳的粗肌) and fine motor skills, which make up the skillfulness of our hands, we would be unable to perform daily tasks.

8 . Winter is one of the most magical times of the year to get moving.     1     However, when you wake up in the morning, it can be hard to follow through on an exercise commitment. Here are ways to keep that drive going throughout the cold months.

Work out with a group.     2     This gives you social support and can help with making friends. When you exercise with a group, flaking out (入睡) is no longer an option.

Dress for the weather. When you are working out in the winter, especially if you are exercising outdoors, keep yourself out of the cold in warm layers (层).     3     Make sure the top layer keeps out the snow and rain. If you plan to exercise outside in the dark or in bad weather, where visibility is poorer, wear bright and reflective clothing for safety.

Change up your workout.     4     Doing the same type of training can be demotivating. Those who vary their workout routines are 20% likelier to enjoy the exercise session. Switching up your routine can give you a boost of motivation, and help keep winter workouts fun and enjoyable.

    5     Using phone apps, or a fitbit, or even going low tech and marking your calendar in red pen can help you visualize how you’ve progressed thus far. Finding a system that lets you track your exercise achievements can give you the extra push to get you going when the going gets hard.

New Year’s resolutions are a great opportunity to start an exercise routine. Sure working out during the winter may be an uphill battle, but there are strategies to get us over the hill, and onto a healthier, happier new year.

10 . Making day-to-day activities more intense for a few minutes — such as briefly stepping up the pace of a walk — could offer people who don’t exercise some of the health benefits that exercisers enjoy, according to a new study of roughly 25, 000 adults who reported no exercise in their free time.

Those who include three one- to two-minute bursts of intense activity per day saw a nearly a 40 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause compared with those without such activity. The risk of death from cancer also fell by nearly 40 percent, and the risk of death from cardiovascular (心血管的) disease dropped almost 50 percent, researchers report online December 8 in Nature Medicine.

“This study adds to other literature showing that even short amounts of activity are beneficial,” says Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, a physical activity epidemiologist (流行病学家) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So many people are daunted by feeling that they don’t have the time, money, motivation, transportation, etc. togo to a gym regularly or work out for long periods of time,” she says. “The message we can take is that it is absolutely worth doing what you can.”

The researchers were looking for bursts of intense activity that met a definition determined in a laboratory study, like reaching at least 77 percent of maximum heart rate and at least 64 percent of maximum oxygen consumption. In real life, the signs that someone has reached the needed intensity level are “an increase in heart rate and feeling out of breath” in the first 15 to 30 seconds of an activity, Stamatakis says.

Regular daily activities offer several opportunities for these bursts, he says. “The simplest one is maximizing walking pace for a minute or two during any regular walk.” Other options, he says, include carrying grocery bags to the car or taking the stairs. “The largest population health gains will be realized by finding ways to get the least physically active people to move a little more.”