According to recent statistics, most American children under the age of 11 don’t exercise as frequently as they should. Even less do so outdoors. Outdoor exercise has been shown to improve children’s physical and mental well-being. It also helps them develop cognitive, creative, and emotional abilities. Ultimately, participating in healthy outdoor exercise habits, such as unstructured playtime using a platform tree swing, helps kids develop healthy lifestyle habits as adults.
What Are Platform Tree Swings?
Before we discuss how tree swings actively engage children and deliver essential physical and mental health benefits, let’s make sure that everyone knows exactly what platform tree swings are. A platform tree swing gets its name from two things: the type of swing seat it uses, and from the fact that the swing is tethered to a sturdy tree limb for support.
Unlike the rubber, strap style seats commonly found on playground swings, platform swings have a flat, wide seat that’s usually large enough for two or more preadolescent kids to sit on simultaneously. The seat can be a square or a rectangle, or it can be circular like the one you find on the Super Spinner swing. The seat can be made from durable mesh, high-grade canvas, or thick, all-weather plastic, among other materials.
Regardless of their particular design elements, platform tree swings are like conventional swings in one respect: They require children to exert physical energy to generate the swinging action. These are the physical and mental benefits of outdoor exercise for children.
1. Physical Benefits
Unlike many adults, most children don’t exercise at a private health club or a public gym. Rather, they get much of their physical activity from playing outside on playgrounds and in yards, which is a good thing when it comes to their physical health. Research has shown that there are at least five crucial benefits of getting regular, outdoor exercise.
Strengthens the Immune System
Outdoor exercise boosts immune system cell generation and replacement. According to a recent article from FITDAY, “Lungs get better equipped at handling oxygen and dishing it out to the rest of your body [when you exercise outdoors].” In addition, “Doctors have found that exercise can boost your immune system by providing a boost to the [production of] cells in your body that are assigned to attack bacteria.”
Using platform tree swings to help strengthen your child’s immune system benefits both you and your little one. It helps your child avoid missing school and playdates with friends, and it helps you avoid paying for costly medical treatment to get your child’s health back on track. For less than the cost of a single visit to a doctor’s office, you can buy an awesome platform tree swing.
Helps Increase Lung Capacity
Vigorous exercise from swinging helps increase lung capacity by causing your child to take frequent, deep breaths to supply a high level of oxygen to the body when it needs it most: during vigorous outdoor play. It’s the same kind of benefit that adults receive when they take regular jogs. The more exercise kids participate in, the greater their lung capacity.
Strengthening your little one’s lungs can do more than enhance his or her swinging experience. It can also help the child succeed in phys-ed activities at school and perform well in school sports and independant sports leagues. If your child is involved in soccer, baseball, or another common sports activity for kids, swinging can serve as his or her “workout” that helps improve performance in the activities, which, in turn, can help encourage self-confidence.
Fine-Tunes Essential Motor Skills
Outdoor swinging fine-tunes motor skills and physical dexterity by helping children enhance the their grip strength, depth perception, and hand / eye coordination—three things that are essential for a child’s safety in activities such as using playground equipment (grip strength), crossing the street (depth perception), and using devices that require a child to look away from them while they’re used (hand / eye coordination).
Developing fine motor skills is one of the most essential yet commonly overlooked aspects of a child’s physical development. Treating your child to hours of swinging fun on platform tree swings helps ensure that he or she develops crucial motor skills that are needed now and in the future, as they transition into adulthood.
Produces Sensory Stimulation
Swinging benefits two main sensory systems: the vestibular system and the proprioception system. The vestibular system controls eye movement and balance and has a major impact on physical coordination. The proprioception system is an automatic sensitivity mechanism in the body that communicates with the central nervous system on how the body should react to certain stimuli.
When these systems don’t receive enough stimulation, it can potentially make a child appear physically clumsy and delay his or her response time to physical stimuli that need to be processed instantaneously. Like motor skill development, sensory stimulation development can also play a key role in your child’s safety while he or she participates in daily activities.
Contributes to Long-Term Health
Consistently using a swing can help create a healthy, long-term exercise habit. Studies show that children who begin exercise or play habits early are less likely to develop health issues later in life. This includes a decreased risk for obesity, heart disease, and diabetes—three health problems that are often found in people who don’t get enough regular exercise.
Most parents have heard about the obesity epidemic among today’s youth, but the problem of obesity can lead to other health complications, such as heart disease and diabetes. Having your child get regular outdoor exercise with platform tree swings can do more than help him or her avoid becoming a walking childhood obesity statistic. It can also help prevent obesity related conditions could compromise long-term health and potentially shorten one’s lifespan.
2. Mental Benefits
In the early days of exercise science, the advantages of regular exercise were typically discussed in terms of physical benefits. Nowadays, the science has progressed to the point that we know outdoor exercise delivers mental benefits, too. What are the mental benefits that using platform tree swings hold for your child? Let’s take a look at three of the most important ones.
Strengthens Cognitive Development
Swinging strengthens cognitive development because it encourages the concept of “child’s play” that aids in a child’s creative development. The platform swing acts as a symbolic object (e.g., a rocket ship, a car, or an airplane) that helps children conjure up play concepts without needing to see them in action. Children tend to excel at pretend play naturally, but especially when they participate in activities that naturally encourage the use of imagination.
In addition, this “pretend play” can set the stage for kids to develop their own ambitions and passions later in life, which can be strengthened by valuable learning opportunities while using the swing, such as cooperation that comes from sharing the swing with others. We often think of childhood cognitive development as occurring in the school classroom, but the physical activities your child does when the school day is over can promote cognitive development, as well.
Strengthens Creative Development
The importance of play in mental development was studied by researcher Jean Piaget, whose conclusions support the view that unstructured, free play is an imperative part of developing children’s creativity. Creative development is a specific form of cognitive development. However, unlike some types of cognitive development, it naturally involves the use of imagination. Consider the above examples of how platform tree swings can serve as symbolic objects.
When using a platform tree swing, your child will create his or own imaginary world around the object, but you can get involved in the fun, too, by suggesting creative games and play schemes that involve the swing. If you feel the need to spend more quality playtime with your child, installing a high-quality platform tree swing gives you the perfect opportunity to make up for lost time. Simply hang the swing using the owner’s manual and, in a matter of minutes, you’ll be ready to participate in your child’s outdoor playtime.
Helps Relieve Daily Stress
Almost every active individual experiences some level of stress as they complete daily duties and uphold responsibilities—and children are no exception. There are lots of ways to combat stress, but outdoor exercise is one of the healthiest ones, as it stimulates the release of endorphins that serve as natural mood enhancers. This is one reason why regular exercisers experience a calming sensation after their exercise routine is finished for the day.
In addition, Mayo Clinic notes that “Research on anxiety, depression and exercise shows that the psychological and physical benefits of exercise can also help reduce anxiety and improve mood.” This is why many mental health practitioners recommend regular exercise in addition to prescription medications—and sometimes in place of medications—for dealing effectively with two of the most common types of mood disorders: clinical anxiety and clinical depression.
People develop all sorts of unhealthy habits to help combat daily stress, such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, overeating, and pleasure shopping beyond their means, just to name a few. Because the type of coping strategies we learn for dealing with stress as children tend to follow us into adulthood, it’s important to expose your child to healthy stress coping strategies. Platform tree swings help you do this by providing hours of captivating swinging fun.
A Cost Effective Solution
It’s often said that taking good care of a child is expensive. This observation is never more true than when it comes to enriching a child’s life with extracurricular activities, many of which require the purchase of uniforms and equipment, ongoing monthly fees, and buying special accessories. Installing platform tree swings involves only one of these expenses: purchasing equipment that’s delivered in a single shipment to your front door.
For a single payment that’s affordable on most budgets, you can implement a physical activity for your child that costs nothing going forward. All you pay for is the swing. The tree that you use for hanging the swing, of course, is free. As long as you have a basic set of universal hand tools, a little bit of time and effort in hanging the swing are the only additional investments you’ll make to put the swing in motion.
Why Use Super Spinner?
There are plenty of platform tree swings available for purchase in-store and online, but the Super Spinner should be at the top of the list for four main reasons: It’s made from durable, all-weather materials that withstand scorching summer days and cold winter nights, is amazingly easy to install, allows your child to spin in a circle while swinging back and forth, and encourages the physical and mental development of your child in healthy ways.
To see how the Super Spinner works, check out this video of the dynamic swing in action. If you like what you see, leave the conventional swing equipment that you were thinking about purchasing behind, and give your child one of the most amazing swings on the planet. To place an order, give us a call today at (330) 333-0555, or simply use our secure contact form. We look forward to contributing to your child’s happiness and well-being!
