YMB #91 Active Kids 2.0: A Conversation with Larissa Maloney

Hi there everyone. I’m Pam Barnhill and welcome to episode 91 of the, your morning basket podcast. I am so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, on today’s episode, we are getting physical. We are getting physical with a Larissa Maloney. She is a mom of two, soon to be three, and she owns the website Active Kids 2.0. Now Larissa has been active her entire life. And she started playing volleyball when she was 13 and then became a professional beach volleyball player, which sounds like the perfect job to me. But she started teaching physical fitness and then saw a need at the beginning of the pandemic and started bringing physical fitness classes to families online so that other families could get active as well.

And so today on the podcast, Larissa and I are going to be chatting about why physical fitness is so important and how you can fit it into your homeschool day when you have a lot of kids and not necessarily a lot of time, Larissa has a few really fun ideas for us. So I think you’re going to enjoy this episode of the podcast. Now, if you would like to come on over to the, your morning basket community, you can find a link to that at members.Pambarnhill.com. You can join the community, or if you’re already a member, come on over and join us. And we’re going to have a conversation thread for this episode of the podcast and kind of chat together about all the different ways we can bring more physical fitness into our kids’ lives and help get the kids and maybe even mom and dad, just a little bit active. So do come join us at the free homeschooling community at members.Pambarnhill.com. And now on with the podcast,
Larissa Maloney is a former professional beach volleyball athlete, personal fitness trainer and coach. This mom of two with one more on the way has been mentoring and coaching kids for over 15 years. She has a passion for helping our youth become happier and healthier people. Larissa is the owner and creator of Active Kids. 2.0 an online membership site designed specifically for kids to take classes like dance, karate, and so much more. Larissa, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Pam. Oh, what an introduction. I loved it. You said everything.
I got it all fit in there. So, well, could you start off by telling us a little bit more about you and your background in personal fitness?
Sure. So I was originally born in Buffalo, New York. I have to add that in there because I am a huge football fan and I’m a big Buffalo Bills fan. So I always have to add where I’m from because that always stays with me. But I grew up in a town called Ormand beach, Florida. It’s right next to Daytona beach, Florida, which is the East coast of Florida. So I grew up in a family of yes, sports and athletics. My mom and dad both played sports in college and high school. And we started off, I have a brother, an older brother as well. His name is Ben and we started playing sports at a very young age, probably about four or five-ish. We started off playing basketball. So that was my sport. Growing up, my go-to sport was basketball. Believe it or not. I really thought that I was going to be the first girl in the NBA. So that, yeah, it was that intense. So having my sports background, I mean, was I the first girl in the NBA? Absolutely not. But I ended up picking up a volleyball along the way. And I ended up playing volleyball in high school. I started very, very late. I started my freshman year of high school, which is extremely late.
That’s 13, 14 years old, starting a sport. You’re, you know, you’re late, you’re late to the game. Right. But I started it then and I ended up getting a volleyball scholarship to play at a school in South Florida called Lynn university. And after playing, I went on to play professional beach volleyball. So it’s, it’s just funny how it just worked, but all of a sudden volleyball came on my radar and I picked it up and I ran with it. I know a big part of that was my mom introducing me to the game at a young, you know, not at a young age, but at an age where I was open to trying new things. At 13, 14 years old, she took me to a University of Florida volleyball camp and that they were at that time. I mean, they still are the best of the best.
So I literally sat there and saw those girls. And I was like, I want to be just like them. And there were black and brown girls playing volleyball. And that was another thing that said, huh, that had me saying, I want to be just like them because they look like.
So you saw some role models that you liked out there.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So that is my athletic background. I’ve been coaching since my senior year of college as well. So coaching and mentoring, I started my personal fitness journey around that time too. So it all comes hand in hand. After I got off of the pro circuit, I started a family, I got married, I have two awesome kiddies. I have a third one on the way. And I went into the teaching realm after I was with my kids for a few years. I said, you know what? I want to still, you know, I was still coaching volleyball, but I want to do it on a bigger level. So not so much a bigger level, but impact even more kids. Right. So I went back and I said, how about, you know, I do fitness instructing for high school and coach high school at the same time. So that is what I did. And this is the crazy story of how Active Kids 2.0 was born.
Okay. So I’m going to stop you for a second because it’s so interesting to hear your story. And I’m going to contrast it with mine a little bit, because I was always the last kid chosen to play volleyball when I was in school. And I don’t know what it was about the coach. I went to a very small high school, a very small rural high school. And the coach there, all she ever did with us was volleyball. Like we did nothing else.
Sometimes she would take us outside to run the track. And my favorite part of going outside the run, the track was like, when her back was turned, I would cut across the middle. So I would pass her again faster. But so I’m in high school in, I’m always the last one chosen for the volleyball team, because I’m just abysmal at it.
And I go, I get my one credit of PE that I need. And I come back the next year and the only class. So like, totally small school, the only class that will fit in my schedule is PE. So they have to put me in a PE class. It’s the only class I can take. So I show up at the coach’s office with my schedule change to give to her, she takes one, look at me and she says, what are you doing back here? You already have your PE credit. I said, this was the only class that would work. So she turns around and walks away. God bless her. She was a hundred years old if she was a day. And she goes down to the library and signed me up to be a library aid for the whole year, which I love, I really loved that. I never had to play volleyball ever, ever again, but you know, I hear you. And one of the things I promise you, there’s a point to this story. Your parents encouraged your activity and you know, out of that encouragement, blossomed, you know, your own career as a professional beach volleyball athlete, which just sounds like the best job ever. And now you’re paying it forward to all of these other kids and sharing this. And so I can really see like how important it is for parents to be the one to encourage kids. Like, you know, there has to be somebody in a kid’s life to encourage them and tell them like, this is what’s important.
This is what you need to do. And it’s just, you know, paid forward and forward and forward from that encouragement. So that’s so off awesome. And people just please encourage your kids to get up and move. Don’t let them be the kid that the coach looks at and says, what are you doing here?
I love that.
So was it after you had your own kids that you started realizing that young people do need this kind of encouragement?
Yes. Well, I mean, yeah, that kind of went hand in hand, but I’ve been mentoring kids for over 15 years now. So I always knew that young kids and even older kids need that encouragement. They need that motivation, even that inspiration. And I feel like that I am, I have been that person for them and I love that.
And, you know, and that has brought me to Active Kids as well. And just me doing, you know, being the face of active kids has really brought the attention of such a bigger audience that I could have ever dreamed of. You know? So it’s, it’s been amazing. The amount of kids’ lives that just, you know, we’ve impacted just by providing, you know, these classes that we provide.
So I think that sometimes we kind of feel like, okay, we know this already, but I want you to reiterate for me, if, for nothing else than maybe to motivate some of the moms out there to get, you know, to prod their kids up off the couch,
why is it important for kids to grow up, being active? Okay. So, you know, it’s, we it’s, it is a priority in our house. My little ones have no choice about the matter. And I’m so glad that they love it. Right. But, you know, I know that there are families and kids that do not love it.
So that’s when the motivation, the inspiration talks need to be had. I’m a big fan of modeling the behavior for your children. If your children see that you’re sitting on the couch all day and they see that, you know, you’re putting in your body unhealthy snacks, you’re, you know, on your phone all day, they’re going to want to emulate that.
So instead of that, getting outside with your kids and, you know, playing these different sports, taking walks and having fun and being interactive, and it, it, it doesn’t have to be through, you know, sports or anything like that, because that might not be your, you know, your kid’s thing, that they might not have any interest in sports. And that is okay, but as long as you’re being active with them and you’re making it fun, there’s, there’s no limit to it. So I’ve, when my little kids were young, we used to, we used to go on trail walks and we used to walk. We used to walk along this trail at a park and I used to bring a bag of dinosaurs. I used to stick a whole bunch of dinosaurs in my bag, and we used to call it the dinosaur trail. And so we used to walk and I used to say, look, look over here to the right. I said, I think I see a stegosaurus and the kids would say, you know, where, where, and then, you know, out of the bag, I would throw a little dinosaur in the bushes and make the bushes move. And they find a little toy dinosaur, you know, like things like that is, is, you know, it doesn’t have to be so intense, so sport-oriented, it’s just getting outside and enjoying each other, enjoying nature and the fresh air, and you’re moving your bodies. So you’re, you know, you are getting healthier, but you’re doing it in a way in which it’s fun and keeping your kids healthy at the same time.
I love it. Yeah. So I’ve started putting, go for a walk on my kid’s daily list. So, you know, it’s like, okay, you can’t finish the list until you go for a walk.
And usually, you know, I go on that, walk with them, cause I’m trying to move more and I’m not very sports-oriented, but getting out and moving, getting out in the sunshine, listening to an audiobook, that seems to be our family’s favorite thing to do while we walk. I love that. Yeah. Or a podcast. So very much so.
Well, how much activity do you think is a minimum that a family should aim for in a day?
Yeah. So 60 minutes is the minimum and that’s not 60 minutes out riding your bike, you know, that’s the whole day. So if you walked, you know, down the street and back, you could include that in your minutes. You know, if you, the kids were out on the playground for 15 minutes, that includes in your minutes. So that’s the full day. That’s not just a whole 60 minutes at the same time.
Right? Yeah. It doesn’t have to be like a straight 60 minutes. You can break it up at different parts during the day.
So I have a Fitbit that actually will measure like my number of active minutes for me. Yeah. So that, that is one of the ways that I kind of keep, keep track of what I’m doing. Well, what advice do you have for parents who really don’t see themselves as athletic or active?
Yeah. And I get that all the time as well. And it of it, you know, it piggybacks on what I said before. You know, if your kids see that you are active, that they will be active too. And I like the happy medium, I’ve talked to a lot of moms where they say, you know, sometimes they have to compromise, which is, which is great. You know, how about we go for a walk and then I’ll do this with you, you know, kind of thing. Or how about we spend 15 minutes on doing something that you enjoy. Let’s spend 15 minutes on something that I enjoy too, but making sure you find something with being active that you actually enjoy. So if, if I presented to a mom, you know what, we’re going to get fit. And we’re going to do 30 minutes a day of karate classes or boxing classes.
And this is what we’re going to do five times a week. You know, a mom that does not like sports or working out is probably going to say, wow, coach Larissa that sounds horrible. So finding that passion within yourself is so important. So the moms of the house need to find what, what makes them light up.
And if that’s getting outside in any way, if that’s, you know, getting in the gym and just stretching that’s enough, you know what I mean? So making sure you find the passion within you, because my mom, she, she loves watching sports, but does she like playing them? No. Just, you know, does she like running? Oh, absolutely not.
I’m with your mom.
Right? But, but I tell her all the time, I say, mom, you have to find something that you enjoy because you have to stay active because it’s not only helping your body, but it’s helping your brain as well. So you have to find that thing.
I think that I’d like, you are totally speaking my language. If I am running, it is because there is something chasing me. But you know, when I was a child, I did not like playing the volleyball. But when I came to be an adult and we moved away. So you mentioned being in South Florida, we lived in Tampa for 10 years. And one of the fabulous things about Tampa is it, believe it or not, it’s an ice hockey town. It’s an skating town. And that was one of the things I always wanted to do as a little child. I did not want to play volleyball, but I wanted to skate. And so I went, when I was an adult, when I was about 25 years old, I took up ice skating for the very first time.
And I skated for about eight years until I got pregnant with my daughter, Olivia who’s 15 now, but it was my sport. It was what I did. I would be in the ice rink at 6:00 AM on a Sunday morning. So I could skate with my team or I could practice my ice dancing or something like that. And, you know, I absolutely loved it.
I can’t do it now. There’s no ice anywhere close to me at the moment. But then, so I started dancing. I took up tap dancing, and now that’s what I do. So, you know, I think it’s so important moms, especially if you’ve never done anything before, and you dread the idea of getting outside and, you know, walking or running or lifting weights or anything like that. But you like the idea of taking a dance class. I would just encourage you to, and now with so many online for adults, it’s so easy to get into a dance class where it didn’t use to be.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. So definitely find what you love. Okay. So we’ve talked about making it a game for your kids by throwing the dinosaurs or whatever other little fun things you can make it doing it with them and modeling for them and setting an example, which I absolutely love. We’ve talked about finding the things you love to do, and I’m sure you’re going to tell me, find the things that your kids love to do as well. Right?
Absolutely. That is the next step. I’m pretty, I’m a fan of letting my kids try out everything. Okay. Now I just coming home today. I picked up my little, my little boy and he said, Hey mom, you know, what about T-ball? Do you think it’s boring? Or do you think it’s fun? You know? And I said, well, you know, I never, I’ve never played it, but I think you would probably enjoy it. Do you want to try it? And he said, yeah. Okay. So the next time we go out, we’ll, we’ll be trying out T-ball you know what I mean? Yeah. And just listening to what your little ones say and what they want to explore. My, my little girl she’s so sassy. Let me tell you, so she’s very vocal with what she wants and what she does not want, but, you know, we put her in soccer at three because my husband is, he is a former professional soccer athlete. So yeah. So we put her in naturally we put her in soccer at three, three or four or something like that. Cause my older one was in soccer. His name is Finn and she absolutely hated it. Like she was on that field wanted nothing to do with the ball. She wanted everything to do with the planes that were flying by the rainbows that were shining. You know what I mean? So allowing them to pick and choose, you know, what they want to try and, you know, presenting them new opportunities. I think you can’t go wrong. And then eventually they’re going to stick to something. Yeah, exactly. And that is, and that is another reason why active kids are so great is because we offer so many online programs where the young kids, they don’t really know what they like just yet. They can try it all and then, you know, they could stick to it all if they wanted to, or they could stick to one of the programs that we have and, you know, grow, grow, and grow with the program and progress with the program.
Yeah. And you know, I think it’s like, you wouldn’t want your kids to read just one kind of book. You know, if they pick up mysteries or they pick up, you know, Hank, the cow dog, and we love Hank the cow dog, or if they pick up historical fiction or only science fiction and say, this is the only kind of book I’m ever gonna read or will I read this book? And I don’t like it. So I’m never going to read any other book. I mean, that’s not the kind of behavior you want to see encouraging your kids about literature. So you wouldn’t encourage that behavior about sports and activity either. You know, you want to, you know, get them to try a wide variety of things and give, give lots of things, a chance if one thing doesn’t work.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what if you have, we have moms who are listening and maybe they have five, six, seven kids and they’re just like heaving this big sigh and going, we just can’t, we just can’t sign up for the T-ball, you know, either it’s a financial commitment that they make can’t make at this point or, or it’s just a logistics problem, you know, getting everybody into, like you can’t have kids going in a bunch of different directions. So how can families who are not going to do sports or can’t do sports right now? How can they get activity in every day besides just going for a walk?
That’s a great question. I mean, right now I’m growing a family, you know, we have two, and it is crazy, you know, running them around to their different sports. So I can’t imagine six or seven ready to run it around to a whole bunch of different things. But again, I mean, finding a program that, you know, still offers them that that outlet to move is just so important. I mean, I know when I have friends with big families, they’re always out biking and doing things like that. I mean, I know that’s, that’s just a lot of my friends with big families. Do they all have bikes and they’d go out, you know, biking instead of, you know, just doing the walk or whatever. I don’t know. It depends on where you live too. If you can get outside. I mean, there’s, you can do a million things outside with a big group and your family and hiking and things like that. We went on a vacation in Colorado and I would love to live there even though I live in Florida and I, I love Florida, but Colorado is just so beautiful. And there’s so many spaces to explore. I say, to explore your own city and really see what it offers. Like when we first got shut down and we couldn’t really do much except go on walks and you know, except enjoy each other. We, we bought a little kayak and we put all, you know, put our two kids in it and we just kayaked down the river and with no one there and it was so peaceful and you know, me and my husband got our workout in with our arms and we had the kids rowing too. I don’t know. You just have to get creative. And you know, if you guys enjoy outside, you know, and right now I have a, a couple of people up North that the weather isn’t too great either. So I had a mom do like a live on Instagram and the weather was absolutely horrible. And she said, guess what we’re doing today? We’re doing Active Kids today because our kids can’t be outside. So yeah. You have to pick and choose as a family, but just making sure you keep that, that movement aspect in your lives is so important.
Yeah. And that’s what makes something like the, the online, the virtual video classes really good is that you can participate from your own home. You don’t have to run kids around and it’s all right there for you. Something else we’ve done before it’s, we’ve used the, Wii fit. Oh yeah, yeah. To get some workouts. And we’ve done some of the little things on the Wii fit. I see that.
Have you seen the Dance, Dance ones where you dance and do it?
Oh my goodness. Yes. Those are awesome. Yeah. We had a subscription. We’re big dancers here. I’ve got two kids who are in dance class and we, we love dancing. So that’s a really good one, but we also love like the, you know, the hula hoop and the ski jumping. I actually got a Hulu for Christmas. Believe it or not. There’s like a whole hula hooping is a thing.
Wow, I love that. Yeah. So that’s something my kids come in and say, Hey mom, can I borrow the hula hoop and take it out to the yard? And so we let them take it out into the yard and do some hula hooping. So they’re just, we also have some of the stretchy bands, which they, they love to use as well. So they’ll like put the stretchy bands under their feet and, you know, do some bicep curls or, or something like that as well. And then we do planks during the school day. I have one kid who’s in OT and the OT said he needs to strengthen his core. And so we’ll set a timer and, or see who can do planks for the longest amount of time or something during the middle of the school day. So I think even just sneaking in little bits and pieces like that, sometimes
I love that making it fun. I love that plank thing. We did. We did a little challenge too, and it’s very, very hard, but it was the song called Sally up. Have you heard of that? You know, I’m not going to sing it cause I’m a horrible singer. But throughout this song, it says, bring Sally up, bring Sally down. And every time it says, bring Sally up, you would do a pushup. And my, my kids just loved it. So they wanted to challenge themselves every day to see how far they could get it. Yeah. It was just fun. You know, it was challenging and it was fun.
Okay. I love that. And that kind of answers my next question for you, which was, you know, how do you squeeze some little bits of exercise into your day when you don’t want to take a large chunk of your school time to do it? And so I think little games like that one are absolutely wonderful. You got any more?
Yeah, no that, no, that was a perfect one. That was a perfect one.
What else have we done? We, we do love playing challenges too, because obviously with competitive parents, we have competitive kids and my kids will not drop. And like I’ve, I’ve tried to stay up as long as I can and they beat me every time. It’s crazy. Like the, the way kids’ bodies work. It’s just amazing, but we’ve done those plank challenges too.
We also do a lot of stuff with jump rope, you know, that’s, you know, an old-school work, you know, workout method, but my kids love jump roping and we jump rope all the time. And you know, first it was, you know, things really teaching them how to do it and, you know, have them really catch onto how to do it.
But now we jumped rope all the time. Oh, that’s such a good one. I can remember as a little girl, my grandfather would go out and he had the rope tied to a tree and he would swing it for me. And I would always see like a hundred before I stop. And just kind of like that, pushing myself to get to a certain point and then beat my record again.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s that competitiveness. So kids love that kind of thing, especially when kids get to those kinds of middle ages. So do you think there’s a correlation between a kid being healthy physically and their ability to do well in the education sphere?
Yes, absolutely. And I feel like you can really, you can see it within your own kids if you’re in tune, but you can really see it within yourself as well. You know, if you have, you know, a couple of days of not eating properly or you have a couple of days where you’re not getting enough sleep or you have a couple of days where you’re not being active at all, you absolutely feel it within your body and within your performance. So that either that’s performance at work or that’s performance at school, it goes hand in hand. So if you have that, you know that you’re getting enough sleep, you’re drinking enough water, you are getting enough activity during the day. You are going to thrive within whatever space you’re in, whether, whether that’s in school or whether that’s in work. But if you notice that when one of those things are lacking, something about that aspect, either education or work is lacking as well.
Yeah. And you know what? I think that’s one of the things we don’t all it. Like we should think about it, but we don’t always think about is like, Hey, after a couple of days of eating wrong or not work, you know, we’re not moving. I won’t say working out, but not moving or whatever. I kinda, you know, don’t feel good. Our kids are the same way. I mean, there are people too, they’re exactly the same. And so it’s totally gonna show up and the way their brain works and how much energy they have and what they’re able to do during the day and how they feel. And you know, so much of how kids act stem from how they feel. So it’s totally going to show up in the same way. Yeah.
Well, tell us a little bit about active kids, 2.0, what inspired you to create an online space to encourage kids to be active?
Sure. It’s, it’s a cool story. It really is. So I told you guys, I went into the educator space, right? So I was working at a private school literally right down the street from me. So we went through what everybody went through in March. Okay. The crazy shutdown. And this is how it went for me on the Friday, we had a meeting and the principal said, just to let you guys know, you know, we might be going to virtual. We probably won’t be, but we want to have this meeting just, just in case. Right. So I got home and I was like, Oh, okay. That’s interesting. It’s probably not going to happen. But that’s interesting. Literally, a few hours later, I get an email. Okay guys, we’re going virtual. Figure it out.
I think at that point we were all going. This can’t happen. And then it did. So yeah. I think a lot of people will respond to that one.
Right. Right. Exactly. And so I was blown away because it wasn’t just our school. It wasn’t just our city. It wasn’t just our, you know what I mean? This, everyone was going through this. So it was insane. So they literally said, figure it out. There was no direction. There was no nothing. It was, you need to figure it out. Good luck. Because we started to get on Monday. Yeah. Nope. What I did was that next morning I sat at my kitchen table and I wrote a couple of things down and I said, how am I going to instruct fitness to kids virtually? How, what does that look like? And how am I going to do this? So I sat down, I wrote down a couple of things. I said, you know, maybe on a Monday, we’ll go out and do a run. They’ll tell me there’s time on a Tuesday. We’ll do arm’s arms and abs. On a Wednesday, we’ll do stretching. Thursday, we’ll do something, something, something. So I wrote that down and I looked at it and I said, okay, this is horrible. I was going to say, miss Larissa, I would come and tell you my time. But I’m not sure I would. Yes. I know. I know. And kids would tell me some crazy time that they didn’t do right.
And that mile in two minutes and 30 seconds. Exactly. So I literally crumbled it up and threw it away. I said, how am I going to do what I do when I am in my sessions with my students, I am extremely engaged. It’s not a class where I throw out a whole bunch of balls and I say, go play. Now, everything is extremely structured. And I’m engaged. I do everything with them. So how am I going to do that at home? So I thought, okay. So my husband has made me and him a little home gym, okay. In our, in our garage. I said, what if I go live on YouTube and they can just do the workout with me.
Okay. And I said, okay, there’s something here. So that’s what I did. I said, I sent them messages, all my students, I had about 75 students at that time. And I said, I’m going to go live, listen, we’re going to do this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. At the same time,
every day, we’re going to do it at 9:00 AM. Okay. And then I had a teacher friend of mine from a local high school say, Hey, what are you doing? And I said, Hey, I’m just going to go live, do a workout. She said, can my kids do it too? Absolutely. It’s like, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s on YouTube. It’s free. Right. I said, yeah, come join. So what I did was I sent a message to a PE forum as well. And I just said, Hey, if you guys are feeling a little stuck, this is what I’m doing. So you guys can hop on too, not a big deal. So Monday morning hit nine o’clock hit. I press play. I started warming up. And then I look at my computer. It literally like five people on. And I said, okay, students, what is going on? Because there should be 75 of you. And there’s about five. So I finished with my warmup and then I go back, you know, I checked my computer just to see how many have popped on, have logged on. And then all of a sudden it was 50. Oh. I said, okay. And so I’d started to say, okay, this is how we’re going to do the workout. And while I’m saying this, the numbers, all of a sudden start climbing, it was a hundred people than it was 200 people than it was 500 people than it was a thousand.
And then it went up to 7,000 people watching my session, my workout session.
That’s awesome.
I was speechless. And I’m still, I still am. When I tell people this story, because it was just wild. And I said, okay, we’re doing this. I don’t know if you here for me, but we’re doing this right. So that’s what I did. I did. I did Monday through Friday 9:00 AM. It was a 30 minute, 30 minutes, 25 to 30 minute workout. We did cardio on some days. And then we did strength on other days. And I did it consistently for about three and a half months until the end of the year into the summer, a little bit as well. And what I found was I got so many messages from students, schools, teachers, homeschool families, moms, kids saying how much they love the workouts and how, you know, this has become a tradition in our house. And it’s not only me doing it. It’s my mom and dad. It’s my grandma and grandpa, we’re all doing it together. You know, keep doing what you’re doing. Can you shout me out in the videos and all of this?
So it really became a physical education, personal fitness community. And it was absolutely beautiful. I literally had people from Poland and Africa and Australia and England watching every day just to do these workouts. They were fun. I had my son come in a one day a week and he did dance challenges. Oh, we met, we had a blast. I mean, we were laughing. We got our laughs in. That’s how we were losing weight by laughing too. Oh my gosh. It was really, really great. So at the end of it, I said, you know, one of my final videos, you know, I said, you know, I’m going to, you know, I’m going to take a break because I know everybody’s on summer break. And then I got this flood of messages saying, you can’t, you can’t take a break. You know, this is, this is something that we’ve, it’s been a tradition in our house, so you can’t stop now.
That’s awesome. And so now you have eight other teachers who are teaching with you, right?
Yeah. So now we’ve built it into a full platform, full, online on demand platform. So now it’s not just my cardio and shrink classes. We’ve added on karate and dance and gymnastics and cheer and yoga. And we’re adding sports as well. So that’s volleyball, basketball, soccer, and the nutrition portion of it too. So it’s all-encompassing now and that’s active kids 2.0
That’s awesome. So it’s activekids2.com is where you can find Larissa online, along with her other coaches. They’re all of them together for all of the different sports and everything that they offer. And Larissa, thank you so much for coming on today and talking to us about the importance of getting up and moving, what it can mean for how we feel, and what it can mean for the future of our bodies as well. I appreciate it.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, I do want to give your audience something. Absolutely.
Okay. Yeah. I want to give them a seven day free trial and 10% off. And all they have to do is use the code morningbasket10.
Excellent. Okay. So morningbasket10. And we will put that in the show notes, along with a link to active kids2.com. So you can try that out for your family as well. So thanks Larissa.
Thank you so much. You guys follow me on Instagram at activekids2.0 and Larissa.Maloney. Thank you so much, Pam.
Awesome. And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to the Active Kids 2.0 Instagram or website, and also, and another peek at that coupon code, you can find them at the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Those are pambarnhill.com/YMB91. Now we’ll be back again in a couple of weeks with another great morning time interview until then get out and get moving and keep seeking truth, goodness, and beauty in your homeschool day.

ted bringing physical fitness classes to families online so that other families could get active as well.