healthbriefs
Children
February is American Heart Month.
Playing Outside
laughter Yoga
laugh MOre
C
hild of Our Time, a televised
research project co-produced by
benefits belly
the BBC and The Open University in
the UK, is halfway through its ambi-
muscles
tious 20-year mission of tracking the
development of 25 children since
A
n experiment to assess the effect of laughter of
birth. One of Executive Producer
yoga on back pain by sports science student
Tessa Livingstone’s studies has found
Ulrich Rehm of Münster University, in Germany,
turned up an encouraging conclusion. In conduct-
ing research for his Ph.D. thesis, he hooked up
two healthy young men to an electromyograph
(EMG), which measures strength, endurance and
increases in muscle activity. Rehm monitored some
of the abdominal and back muscles that are addressed
by conventional strengthening exercises or even in sports physiotherapy.
First, his fellow students performed a series of conventional physiotherapy
exercises on a mat for 30 minutes. Next, they performed another 30 minutes of
laughter yoga exercises. The working conclusion was that, “Simulated laughter
exercises engage as many abdominal muscles as conventional physiotherapy
that the more children played, the
exercises, sometimes even more.” Initial findings are backed by overseeing
more they laughed, especially when
professor Dr. Heiko Wagner, who teaches kinesiology at the university.
outside. In fact, children who played
the most laughed up to 20 times more
than others.
As a child psychologist, Living-
stone maintains that it is important
to get the balance right between
unstructured play and the high level
of structured activity, such as music,
drama and language classes, which
take up so much of the modern child’s
time. Children who are allowed to
play and explore outside are likely to
be more adventurous, self-motivated
and better able to understand risk
when they grow up, according to
Livingstone.
Her research team found the
amount of time children are allowed
to roam out of their parents’ sight has
dropped by 90 percent over the past
20 years. “This is an extraordinary
change and it says a lot about our
fear of modern life, pedophilia, etc.
Children learn two things from this:
Strangers are fearsome and danger-
ous, and it’s dangerous to go outside,”
she explains. She also notes other
research indicating that children are
probably safer from stranger danger
when playing outside with other chil-
dren than when playing online alone.
14 Phoenix
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