In late April, I was invited to attend a reception at a Smithsonian art center for a premiere of the latest-and-greatest digital “exergames” video. It was a delightful affair featuring all the latest games and sounds designed to entertain and motivate people (mostly kids), to get off the couch and get a workout.
Wine and healthy snacks slid down the gullets of various digital game engineers and marketing pros who claimed that the latest generation of digital games has turned the corner to provide just the kind of workouts kids and adults need.
We need dedicated, well-organized and disciplined teachers to cure coach potato-ism. Anyone out there in cyberspace want to join the Be Active America movement?
This photo is effective marketing, perhaps, but it's hardly a representative sample of exergamers.
But, according to a recent study undertaken by Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and published last week in Pediatrics, the official journal of American Academy of Pediatrics, “exergame videos...turn out to be much digital do about nothing.” Researchers reported that when kids participate in ideal laboratory conditions, they can get a pretty fair workout. But when left to their own devices at home, the couch wins almost every time.
Why? (Drum roll please.) Researcher Anthony Barnett says it’s simple and well known. (Hmmm, wonder why they are researching something that is “simple and already well known?”) According to Barnett, “When you prescribe increased physical activity, overall activity remains the same because the subjects compensate by reducing other physical activities during the day.”
Dr. Charles Cappetta, executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness reported that “live sports”– the kind that are outside of the home, without controllers and television monitors—“remain the gold standard to get cardiovascular benefit.” Imagine that….
PLEASE! Not only are we among the most inactive and obese populations in human history, it seems our researchers are also among the most elementary, myopic and soft-headed! And folks, someone is paying them to do crap like this and report it as both science and news!
Why do we need to verify what any 10-year-old kid could tell us in a heart beat: Play and sports outside are much more fun and more likely to attract their leisure time than standing in the living room with a console in one hand a pretend racket in the other.
Just to make the point, the conclusion of the “research” reads, “For physical activity that brings measurable health benefits, kids need things like real balls, real rackets and real courts.” Really?!
Here’s an issue that needs some serious research: What’s wrong with the allied professions of health, physical education and athletics that has so totally failed to fulfill the No. 1 Cardinal Principal of American public education: Organic vigor and dynamic good health? Folks, with rare exception, quality, daily health and PE is gone, history, went bye bye. Don't teach reading? Kids can't read. Don't teach health and physical education? Kids don't move and get fat.
When will AAHPERD’s national and state association do something relevant and effective to re-institute daily, quality physical education? How can there be so many state and federal public health agencies being funded by tax dollars and employing thousands of health professionals who deliver the same old and tired complaints that rationalize the pitiful status quo?
Of course, exergames don’t cure couch potatoes. Dedicated, well-organized and disciplined teachers do. Anyone out there in cyberspace want to join the Be Active America movement?
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Photo By Richard Coshott (originally posted to Flickr as Gamercize GZ Sport) [CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
