MP COLUMN: I hope the Olympics inspire more people to swim

My hope is that the victories for Team GB’s Adam Peaty, Tom Daley, and Matty Lee inspire people to take a look at swimming for recreation and exercise.

Swim England rightly says that North Tyneside has great swimming clubs where you can be #InspiredToTry swimming, para swimming, diving, water polo, open water swimming or artistic swimming.

People can find their local clubs by using Swim England’s club finding tool here discover.swimming.org/.

You can enhance and extend your life and enjoyment by taking a dip, whatever your age.

But good health habits are best begun young.

Public Health England and Sport England have teamed up with Disney to help get children active throughout the school holidays by playing 10 Minute Shake Up games.

The games are inspired by characters from Disney Frozen, Disney, Pixar Toy Story, and Marvel.

The aim is to inspire children to rebuild their confidence in being active and develop new and longer-term physical skills. It could then encourage participation in other physical activities and sports.

Physical activity seeds better health, social, and academic outcomes as well as mental wellbeing. Children and young people should aim to achieve at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day, but many are not reaching this target.

People can take a look at https://www.nhs.uk/10-minute-shake-up/shake-ups for details of the games.

And let’s hope for more medals in Tokyo too.

Mary Glindon, North Tyneside MP