Fun. Health. Games.
October 4th, 2007 — Blogging fit
One of my favorite blogging web pages, Problogger, is having a birthday bash give away of two 20 inch LG LCD screens! I can see myself now, both screens with 10 Firefox pages open, each page containing 50 tabs of information on exergaming, getting fit and having fun! … Oh the power!!!
September 23rd, 2007 — Blogging fit, DDR weight loss, Exercise with friends, Exergaming, Fun, Motivation, Wii Weight Loss
First, lets define it. Exergaming is a combination of exercise and video games. Thats all!
It may sound simple, but exergaming has the greatest chance of helping kids (and the rest of us) get a leg up in the battle against the bulge. Why? Because its fun. You’ve noticed how many people out there love video games. There’s a lot of us out there, and because exergaming has such great fun and incidental exercise potential, it also has the greatest weight loss potential when we look at society as a whole. Sure, we might not get many people losing 20 kilograms of body fat in 6 months just using the Wii, but half an hour a night is just what the world needs to keep off millions of tons of collective body fat.
“Exercise can be very boring! It takes real determination and long term commitment to drag yourself off to the gymnasium and put yourself through the paces. It is so easy to lose interest when you fail to see immediate results.” -Roland Rocchiccioli, in Fat or Fiction.
That quote, from Donna Aston’s excellent Fat or Fiction, highlights the number 1 problem for exercisers. I believe people have great difficulty staying motivated to work out, and any motivation they do have evaporates due to lack of results and boredom. We can use goal setting to help us stay motivated, however most of us either haven’t been taught effective goal setting methods, or dismiss the idea before the next ad break finishes and Law & Order resumes.
Exergaming provides you and I with an easy, perhaps irresistible urge to exercise. Again, its because its fun, addictive fun! Plenty of us bemoan the demise of children getting outside and getting some sunlight, but we can either go with the flow, or fight it, and any parent with teenagers knows how well that can backfire. Why not join your kids or parents in a game of multiplayer tennis, and build up some family spirit, rather than spouting the same “go outside and get some fresh air” that today’s kids (and plenty of adults!) dread hearing.
Nintendo’s Wii, and Konami’s Dance, Dance Revolution are the first easily accessible commercial exergaming solutions available to the market.
In their current form, exergaming machines like Nintendo’s Wii and Konami’s DDR provide excellent “incidental” or “accidental” exercise. People aren’t playing their Wii games or DDR to get healthy and lean, they’re playing it because its social, challenging, and fun. Lots, and LOTS of fun. If you accidentally burn some energy and fat while playing computer games and having fun with friends, why not capitalize on that as much as you can, rather than trying to use brute will force to get yourself to workout like Roland and so many others do?
If you know anyone with a Wii, or Dance, Dance Revolution, have a go- you might get hooked and go down a belt notch.
