We’ve heard a lot about the Wii Fit. The high tech device has caught the imagination of the public. Nintendo has sold 7.9 million of the units in North America.
The company promotes the health benefits of the unit. But the Montreal Gazette reports on some research that suggests that the benefits are less than slellar.
The study was funded by the American Council on Exercise, which employed the services of exercise physiologists from the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse team.
The team, led by John Porcari, studied a small sample (16) of male and female university-age subjects who played the six most aerobically challenging Wii Fit games – Free Run, Island Run, Free Step, Advanced Step, Super Hula Hoop and Rhythm Boxing – for six minutes each.
And what did they find? They found that the workouts on the Wii were really not strenuous enough to be of sigificant benefit.
During the roughly 36-minute workout, exercise stats were accumulated including heart rate, VO2 max (aerobic power) and rate of perceived exertion. When the data was tabulated, none of the activities prompted exercise intense enough to maintain or improve cardiorespiratory fitness as defined by the American Council on Sports Medicine.
There is a great appeal to a video game that can also improve your health, get you in shape and help you lose weight.
But you need to reach a certain threshold to benefit from exercise. There has to be adequate stimulus of the cardiovascular system in aerobic exercise. And there has to be stimulus to muscle growth in resistance exercise.
Without adequate stimulus your body does not undergo change. And then the time and effort you expend is of little or no benefit.
That is why you see people walk on the treadmill week after week and month after month without seeing any change. There is just not adequate stimulus for growth and remodeling.
Maybe it’s better that it doesn’t work. We’ve come to a point where we expect machines to do everything. It may be expecting too much that they exercise for us too.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Fitness+much+workout+study/2315091/story.html#ixzz0ftO2Kdpj
