Tuesday May 14, 2024

120. Live to Play Another Day

Unstructured play isn’t, and shouldn’t be, just for kids. “We need you, I want you, you need you to go play,” implores host Dr. Andrew Fix on today’s episode of The Code. When we’re little, he explains, we play freely, on a daily basis and, for the most part, without injury. As we get older, and start to play less, we begin to feel more stiff, more achy and less mobile as a result. In the United States, where rates of arthritis and obesity are particularly high, it’s important to start moving your body the way you did as a child.

Dr. Fix recalls a recent trip he took with family, including his young niece and nephew, to the local park. The adults threw themselves into play along with the kids, and it demonstrated an important lesson about strength, coordination and longevity.

Quotes

• “As adults, many times we stop playing, we stop doing the things we used to do as kids and then our bodies start to pay the price for that.” (1:28 | Dr. Andrew Fix)

• “Nothing takes me back to being a kid like throwing the football around. Throwing something. If I’m ever having a bad day, if I’m ever just wanting to clear my mind of things, if I can go outside and play catch with somebody, and throw a ball around, Oh my gosh. It is so therapeutic for me.” (3:18 | Dr. Andrew Fix)

• “All of us, for the most part, when we’re kids, we do all sorts of stuff. We play, we go do things, we build up an intense sweat, we do this day after day, after day, after day, we’re playing with our friends. And we’re not hurt, we don’t have injuries—we might fall and we might scuff our knee, we might actually hurt something. A kid could fall off the monkey bars and actually injure something—but what I mean is we don’t have these constant day-to-day aches and pains that many of us have now.” (6:04 | Dr. Andrew Fix)

• “Many of us are much weaker now, relative to how big we are, than what we were as kids.” (6:48 | Dr. Andrew Fix)

Links

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