In PHQP 0014 Heavy Work, Jeff dives into the wonders of kids pushing, pulling, and hauling their way to growth. This episode unpacks how heavy work boosts strength and coordination, brings calm, and more.

Watch Now: PHQP_0014 Heavy Work

Welcome to another episode of the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thank you for pushing play.

On with the show. So, uh, oh look my slides are off. How untidy.

Um, so I found a found a new dolphin bone at the beach the the other day to add to my loose parts collection. It’s kind of broken down and battered but I kind of like it. I’ve got I’ve got five others two two other vertebrae and and a couple of a couple of ribs.

So my plan is to eventually build build my own dolphin which I really look forward to. I find another bone every every eight months or so along the beach. It’s been delightful.

I’m pretty sure they’re dolphins. 98% sure they’re dolphins. They’re not human and the we’ve got a lot more dolphins in the area than we do whales and they are mammal bones.

So I’m assuming dolphins. If I find out otherwise I will let you know. So I’m excited for that growing collection of loose parts.

Topic one for this episode is pretty much gonna be the theme of the whole show is heavy work. So heavy work is activity that pushes or pulls against the body or involves carrying and this is something that is really beneficial to kids. We’ll get into that in a minute but this activity is just pushing pulling and carrying is is something kids are kind of wired and interested in and we should figure out how to how to work more of that into into their days.

So heavy work involves creating force and defying gravity and so think about all the interesting ways kids apply gravity. Running is pushing really they’re pushing their feet against the ground to propel themselves when they run. Jumping is pushing.

Jumping is heavy work. Climbing is heavy work. Arms are pulling.

Legs are pushing. So think about all those kind of activities. Hauling heavy buckets of sand.

Pulling a wagon. Pushing somebody on a sled or pushing somebody who’s sitting on a skateboard or riding a bike or riding rollerblades or climbing a tree. All of these kind of things.

Digging is a form of heavy work and so it’s all applying force and defying gravity. Pushing is applying force away from the body. Pulling, applying force toward the body.

And carrying, moving while supporting something. And so these three things are a really big part of sensory integration and physical development. I mentioned heavy work in previous episodes but really for sensory integration there’s a lot going on here because they’re understanding their proprioceptive system, the awareness of their body in space.

They’re building their vestibular system, their sense of balance. They’re learning to understand their interoceptive system, all of the feelings that they have going on inside of them. Plus they’re building muscle strength and control, hand-eye coordination and not just hand-eye, hand-foot coordination, visual tracking skills, listening skills are often involved in heavy work and on and on it goes.

And so there’s a lot of good learning here going on. And the problem of course is heavy work requires kids to be up and moving and active and a lot of early learning programs are adverse to kids actively engaging their bodies. I mean, look, they might have scheduled physical activity time.

Maybe it’s free play out in the playground. Maybe it’s adult-led calisthenics. I saw a post on X not too long ago about kids engaged in exercise and they were really doing calisthenics with an adult leading them and 88% of the time they were standing still.

In free play, they’re able to move and a lot of kids free play involves heavy work. And so we figure out how to support all this kind of stuff. So kids are naturally engaged in heavy work.

They want to engage in it. You don’t have to build heavy work lessons or plan heavy work activities. All you really need to do to support heavy work is provide a environment where it’s allowed.

And so another thing to consider is that often the things kids choose as heavy work are things that we as adults shut down in early learning programs. Rough-and-tumble play is heavy work. There’s a lot of pushing and pulling and lifting going on in rough-and-tumble play, right? There’s a lot of development there, a lot of beneficial stuff, but we shut that down.

A lot of the big-body activity, the running and the leaping and the climbing, we shut down because we’re worried about safety or whatever else. Maybe we’re just uncomfortable with the kids moving that much. And look, we live in a world where human children have never been more sedentary and it shows developmentally.

One of the great places to learn about heavy work is Angela Hansen’s book, Balanced and Barefoot. And it’s a wonderful read. Angela is a pediatric occupational therapist and she’s all-in on kids moving their bodies more and about them engaging in heavy work.

And as a pediatric occupational therapist, and I don’t put words in her mouth, but I’ve had lots of conversations with her, and kids are not getting these activities naturally in their early years and then they’re getting into elementary school and they’re being sent to pediatric occupational therapists for special services to learn the things they missed by not engaging in these activities naturally when they were younger. And kids are far better off to have early childhoods full of these kinds of activities so they don’t have to be pulled out of class and sent to an expensive therapist later on in their lives. And that’s happening way too often.

So this kind of activity for young children is preventative. It’s keeping them from needing special services later in many cases. And again, adults often don’t approve of the activities kids choose.

So supporting heavy work isn’t so much maybe about creating activities and planning experiences, but just maybe figuring out ways not to say no to the things kids already want to do. They want to climb. They want to run.

They want to leap. They want to roll. They want a rough-and-tumble play.

So figure out ways to say yes to those things. Figure out ways to, look, back in my family child care days, we had a rule about keeping the sand in the sandbox until I felt like I was the sand cop all day long. Keep the sand in the sandbox.

Keep the sand in the sandbox. I felt that’s all I said all summer long from from the time the sandbox thawed out in the spring to the time it froze over in the winter. All I did was was play sand cop and then we quit saying no to it.

And then kids were carrying buckets of sand all over the place. And look, I had to refill the sandbox a little bit more frequently, but there’s a lot more heavy work going on. And so if we provide them with the space where it’s okay to do the things they want to do and then give them the things they need to do it with, which again, just heavy, loose parts.

We’ll get into it in a moment. I’ll give you some examples. And then we can support it without having to do a whole lot of planning.

We just need to learn to say yes to the things the kids want to do. The things they’re kind of naturally inclined to. And if you’re having a struggle with that, go back to episode 13 about change and how to work through that process for some tips.

So the benefits of heavy work. We build muscle strength. Bodies get stronger.

There’s a lot of kids walking around with spaghetti arms because they don’t engage their bodies. They don’t lift things. They don’t haul things.

They don’t tote things the way kids used to do. And so building muscle is an important thing. The building strength is also building muscle, not only strength, but control.

So we’re learning how to control and navigate those muscles. We enhance endurance. Heavy work gets the heart pounding, right? One of my favorite examples.

I’ve talked about this story in other podcasts. And during trainings, I was visiting a program once and the kids were rolling tires, pushing them, hauling them up the top of the slide, and then rolling them down. And so this was an experience in transporting schema.

But it was also an opportunity to engage in some wonderful heavy work because tires are big and odd and awkward and hard to move around. And so the kids were doing this. And it builds endurance.

And again, when young children today are spending a lot of time sitting with screens in their faces, they don’t have a lot of muscle strength. They don’t have a lot of endurance. And so heavy work can improve that.

It sharpens coordination. Again, that’s that sensory integration. And so when we use our bodies to do things, we become more coordinated.

And so it’s practice at using this machine that they live in. And three, four, five, eight, ten-year-olds are still very new to the world and still trying to figure out their bodies and how they work. So that sharpened coordination from heavy work is beneficial.

And it boosts resilience. Heavy work because, look, sometimes it’s hard. And so that makes, that helps kids become more resilient when they do hard things, when they challenge themselves.

We used to keep some, oh, large, we called them sticks because we were big fans of stick play in my family child care days. We had some sticks that were like eight inches in diameter at the wide end and 10, 12, 14, 16 foot long. And it would take groups of kids to move them around.

And it was hard. And it was heavy. And not only were they benefiting from all the physical benefits, but that mental resilience that comes from doing hard things is also beneficial and something kids can benefit from.

And then it also improves sensory perception, which we touched on. The senses work harder. And, oh, I don’t need to go there yet.

So lots of benefits there. It also has a calming effect. If you have children that are kind of bouncy, giving them opportunities to engage in heavy work is a way of taking some of that bounce out of them.

If you’re going to make kids sit still for activities or other things that are going on in your program, giving them 90 minutes of up and active heavy work opportunities on the playground before you expect them to be still for 20 minutes is going to be, they’re going to be much more able to be successful at it. Just because the burning of that energy, having those sensory experiences has a calming effect on us humans. And so topic two is also heavy work related, is heavy blocks.

So I want to touch on this. There are a lot of things you can do. I’ve got a link in the show notes to an article I did a while ago about making concrete blocks.

And basically you’re using little containers like this, and you’re adding concrete mix, and you’re letting it cure, and then you’re using those for blocks on your playground. And that’s one way to do it. I won’t spend any more time on that because there’s a there’s an article there on that, but that’s great.

Other things, if you’re looking for heavy blocks, heavy things to haul around, go to your home depot or Lowe’s or those kind of places and pick up concrete pavers. Especially at the end of the summer season, they usually put them on clearance. And they’re not, I mean, even when they’re a regular price, they’re not that expensive.

And the kids can haul them around and tow them and use them as blocks and stack with them. And those are great. Bigger rocks are wonderful too.

My buddy Lee used to show up with his dump truck anytime I called him. And once we had him bring a couple tons of nine to twelve inch rocks that the kids helped haul from the driveway where Lee dumped them to our play area. And then they spent years hauling them around and building walls out of them and using them in water play and in mud play and burying them and unburying them and putting them in places and leaving them alone for a while and then checking underneath them for bugs and on and on.

So those make good blocks. Big logs, like I talked about, are good. Log cookies, you know, the slices of log that are maybe 12 or bigger in diameter and a couple inches thick that they can haul around and stack are great examples.

Boards, hunks of wood are wonderful. You got to be careful because they can splinter over time and then warp and delaminate over time. And then you’ve got a chance for slivers.

So you want to want to avoid that. So another version of boards that aren’t wood is synthetic decking that they use for making patios. It’s more expensive than boards but it’s made out of, most of them I think are made out of shredded milk jugs, shredded plastic, and then some wood pulp and they’re compressed and so they don’t warp, they don’t splinter and they make great blocks outside.

And then something else I want you to think about, this is one I came up with, I haven’t wrote an article about it yet or anything, but just plastic containers. So this is a jug of white vinegar, weighs about nine pounds, about four kilos, and when it’s full and that’s something that’s hefty. So you can collect containers like that and then fill them with water or sand or dirt and then super glue on the lids and just have them out in your playground to let the kids mess around with, haul around and tote and stack and just move.

Because some kids, if it’s got a handle on it like that bucket or that jug of vinegar, if it’s got a handle, there’s gonna be kids that are carrying it. And so you take the container, you fill it with sand, dirt, water, and then you super glue the lid on. It’s all you got to do to make these blocks.

All you got to do is collect plastic containers that would normally go into your recycling bin that are fairly durable. Milk jugs might work, that’s kind of a thinner plastic, I’m not sure how long they would live. I’ve collected some containers I think would work good.

These little Hershey’s cocoa containers, it’s kind of a thicker plastic and you can imagine filling that up with sand and then gluing that lid on. And if you’ve got half a dozen or a dozen of these, they’re kind of a nice heavy thing. Another one I liked are these plastic coffee bins.

Again, that’s a heavier plastic, you fill that up with sand, super glue on the lid, and you’ve got heavy blocks. And again, those are good for good for stacking. Another one of these little containers, I never figured out what to do with them, but you fill those with, again, water, sand, dirt, glue on that lid, and you’re good to go.

So any of those kind of heavy-duty plastic containers work well for that. And so there’s some ideas for some heavy blocks to support that heavy work. And again, heavy work, activity that pushes or pulls against the body or involves carrying.

So wrap up this episode, read Balanced and Barefoot. Amazon idea for this week is, again, Balanced and Barefoot. There’s a link to it in the show notes.

It’ll tell you more about heavy work, more about sensory integration, and a lot of things that we go over on this podcast. Share it if you like it. I appreciate people who share the show, share the website, PlayvolutionHQ.com, with those who may like it.

And it’s, I mean, thank you. Next week, we’re gonna be talking about hazard mitigation. Risk-taking isn’t the problem.

It’s the lack of hazard mitigation that is the problem in keeping kids safe. That’s what we should be concerned about. Dad Joke of the Week.

I used to play the piano by ear. Now I use my hands. There we go.

This has been the PlayvolutionHQ podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Back soon.

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