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“Kid Fit For Fun” Teaches Health, Fitness, and Fun

February 1, 2021 by
Credit: Erin Crain
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Erin Crain says there’s one key thing to remember when working with kids: make it fun. And that’s what she brings to her recently-released children’s book, Kid Fit For Fun, a resource for kids and their parents, teachers, or coaches. 

The book: Crain, who earned her L1 in 2015 and CrossFit Kids certificate in 2016, describes Kid Fit For Fun as a curriculum for kids age 10-14; pages are built from lesson plans she created teaching fitness to first through eighth-graders. In the book’s five chapters and 30 lessons, Crain goes through the foundational movements of fitness, 10 general physical skills, muscular strength, gymnastics, and skill work. 

The lessons: Each lesson starts with a movement, like the deadlift, push jerk, or handstands. Crain describes the movement through beautiful, hand-lettered and illustrated pages, in some cases – for instance, the gorilla on the deadlift section – connecting back to the CrossFit Kids methodology. 

  • The movement pages come with workouts, like the medball cleans, where, after illustrating technique (through stick figures much like the well-known Instagram account Whiteboard Daily), Crain writes a 10-minute AMRAP.
  • Every lesson comes with a fun fact, ranging from the importance of and care for health systems in the body to sharks and hydration. 
  • On the push jerk page, Crain uses her fun fact to educate readers’ on lungs, writing, among other facts, that “Our boogers and nose hairs filter and trap toxins so they don’t reach our lungs. This means our boogers are filled with air pollutants. Yuck! Don’t eat boogers.”

Crain also makes encouragement and inspiration a center point of her book.

  • You think about the experiment with plants,” she explains. “You can speak words of life, or you can speak words of death. And they’ve done experiments and when you speak words of death, [the plants] die. And so really, with kids, to speak to kids kindly, you’re going to help kids grow.”
Credit: Erin Crain

 The details: Kid Fit For Fun is available for purchase on Amazon. Though Crain says kids ages 10-14 are the book’s target, she’s quick to note the book can be adapted for all ages – it’s fun for kids to look through with their parents or teacher, regardless of education level.

  • Gym or no gym, Crain says that she felt Kid Fit For Fun would be a useful tool especially with “the season we’re living in… now [that] kids are at home, homeschool, and [parents] don’t know what to do with their kids.”
  • And already, just over three months after the book’s release, she’s hearing from parents, laughing, “A lot of the moms are like, I want this for me.”

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