Wii sweat claims tested: Canadians box it out!
We all know the claims in the media and from Nintendo themselves that the Wii gets couch-dwellers off their rear ends and onto their feet, working out. No surprises there; but does it pass the fitness test? Could you for example, substitute a walk in the park or a game of tennis for a bout of Wii Boxing? The Canadians were keen to find out.
"I was playing Wii boxing with a friend and noticed how exerting it was," said Justin White, a fourth-year kinesiology student. "I thought to myself, 'I'm working up a sweat doing this Nintendo thing; I might run with that.' So I put together an outline and the class thought it would be a good project to take on," he said.
White and 27 students tested the impact of playing Wii boxing for 30 minutes against a 30-minute walk in a local park and an equal amount of time doing a boxercise video. Every student did each activity and their heart rate was measured as well as how hard they thought they had worked out for all three activities. (cont...)
They found that the Wii did get people off the couch and more active but, as a cardiovascular workout, it didn't pass the test.
"If they're looking for cardiovascular fitness, I'd advise them to do something else because it's really not intense enough," White explained. "But if they're just looking to lose weight, it's a good way to get started. It can also be a gateway to other things and may get people interested in the actual sports themselves too," he added.
The students said the most energetic exercise was the boxercise video, while the walk through the park was the least demanding.
White, who is thinking about publishing his findings, believes interactive fitness could be a good way to get people to enjoy exercise more and therefore do it more.
"I've always held that the best exercise is exercise that a person will do," Jo Welch, the professor of the class, said in a statement. "Because different activities appeal to different people, the more options that are readily available, the more likely it is that exercise will occur."
This agrees with British research into the effectiveness of the Wii as a fitness tool, especially for children. The idea isn't entirely new of course, dance mat titles have been trying to help gamers to lose weight for some time. Nintendo is set to release Wii Fit later this year that allows the user to perform a variety of exercises -- and tracks changes in their BMI. More than a million copies have sold in Japan, and we'll cover the game as soon as Ninty get revealing.
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