Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

In a recent Get Fit Guy newsletter, I mentioned a study that's done by researchers from the University of Essex,

and the study found that two-thirds of children

think that their parents do almost no physical activity. I'll link to that study in the show

notes for you if you want to check it out, but basically how it worked was that in the study,

researchers asked school children to rate how active they thought that their parents were. And then they had

those children complete a test of their own cardio fitness. In this case, the test was a bleep test,

which is a common way to measure basic fitness levels. And what the researchers found was that the

likelihood of a child having a greater amount of fitness based on their performance on this bleep test

was directly influenced by how active that child perceived their parents to be.

Well, in this episode, which actually includes a very special guest, who I'm going to introduce in just a little bit,

you'll learn how to get your kids fit and learn how to increase physical activity and motivation to exercise in children.

Okay, so let's talk about how parental fitness actually affects kids.

As you just learned, kids who are under the impression that their parents don't exercise very much, don't appear themselves to be exercising very much. And this results in a

dramatic decrease in their fitness compared to peers who rate their parents more highly

in the physical fitness department. Now, it's important to realize that the children's ratings

were not based on whether they thought their parent had big muscles, a skinny waist, or a six-pack, or any other aesthetic value, but it was rather simply based on whether or not that parent did any physical activity.

So how can you act on this information to get your kids more fit?

Well, first of all, you need to be the example, whether that

means hitting the gym a few times a week, going on frequent walks, or avoiding long periods of

time sitting on the couch, watching TV. But unfortunately, your kids might not take significant

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