Be Fit With Biray

Two weeks ago, I attended an exergaming summit in beautiful Portland, Maine to discuss the future of exergaming - its advantages, limitations, barriers, and applications. A big ‘thanks’ goes out Beth Bryant and Ben Sawyer from Games for Health initiative and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation for making this retreat possible. In the two-day intensive, we launched into interesting discussions about this growing field.

For more on those in attendance and general overview of the summit, Dr. Ernie Medina wrote an excellent post on his Exergaming Evangelist blog. The results from our conversations will eventually be published in a white paper and delivered in presentations at next year’s Games for Health conference. Stay tuned.

Now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to digest the outcomes of the retreat, I wanted to revisit a question that had been on my mind prior to attending this summit.

“Do exergames belong in the gym?”

Now, obviously I’d be the first to say “YES!” without batting an eye. And, yes, I still firmly believe there is a role for exergames within the fitness community. I’m certainly not suggesting they should be excluded as an additional mode of activity or equipment in a facility. But given the culture of a club and roles of the fitness professionals who staff it, exergames are not successfully coupling within this group.

Let’s take a closer look at the roles our fitness professionals play in this environment. They are in the business of creating and designing a workout experience. Their knowledge and experience have taught them the art and science of comprehensive program design. Exergames are developed in such a way where anyone can simply plug-in and play, by-passing the element of program design. They don’t take advantage of the education and expertise that fitness professionals bring to their jobs. If fit pros wanted to integrate exergaming into their program, outside of facilitating game play or motivating the players - what else are they to do? Verbally translate the directional arrows during a session of Dance Dance Revolution?

Exergames (at least, the ones currently on the market) DO NOT complement the strengths or highlight the roles of the qualified, certified fitness professional.

I feel I can somewhat qualify this statement. In my experiences teaching DDR classes in group exercise settings (in gyms & at recreational facilities), I honestly found my role as a facilitator disappear as participants caught on to game (often within the same class period). Although the classes were well-attended, it wasn’t clear how much of this was due to my instruction. Sure, as a video gamer and exerciser I was able to generate enthusiasm for exergames (as well as provide the equipment for the class). But as a fitness professional, I couldn’t help but notice how I was curbing my traditional teaching skills and refocusing my role.

An exergame should be able to retain its unique benefits (the fun-factor, its social appeal, the built-in biofeedback mechanisms, etc.), while still taking advantage of skills a fitness professional brings to this environment (by utilizing their expertise and teaching styles). Currently, there is no reason to couple fitness pros with exergames.

So if we ever want exergames to be successful in a gym setting, we have to justify to the fitness professionals how they can benefit from delivering exergames as an alternative mode of activity. Otherwise, we’ll just have fitness professionals on one side of the gym doing their thing and exergames on the other side (stuck near childcare).