making exercise fun

Exercise is great. Along with healthy eating, it keeps us healthy, makes us live longer, and drastically improves our chances of not getting sick or injured. The one knock on exercise one could make is the repetitiveness and the eventual boredom that sets in for some people. This boredom and lack of motivation can be helped by the use of personal trainers, so that is definatly a good route to take.

Video games are fun. playing them can be very entertaining and can make some people mentally happy, but they definatly do not provide a physically healthy lifestyle, but that seems to be changing.

Video games now are becoming much more interactive and movement oriented. For America, fitness wise, this is definatly a step in the right direction. i remember back in the early days of home video game systems there was a track game for the regular nintendo. Instead of using the classic controller, it featured a pad that you would use to run on in running events. The faster you tapped your feet to the pad, the faster the guy on your screen would run. Other than that game, i hadn't seen many movement oriented games until recently. about 7 or 8 years ago, they came out with a game called dance dance revolution (ddr), and it's controls were two foot pads to the sides of you, one in the front, and one in the back. DDR can be slow for less skilled players, but can also be very fast for the more skilled players, and this is a great way to get people who live sedintary lifestyles because they just wanna play video games to exercise while playing one. At first this game was only available in the arcade, but quickly became available to people at home.

Another video game system that has hit the market that involves getting up and moving around is the Wii. The Wii is a system that the primary controls for the game involve different upper body movements. There are varios titles for the Wii that include sports simulated movements, which can be good for people who want to work on timing and hand-eye coordination. The movement factor is not huge in most cases but its better than holding a contoller.

Lastly, they're developing a controller that forces the user to use thier muscles while they play. Say it's a racing game, the steering wheel gives extra resistance and other games may involve different body movements and provide resistance for those body parts. Things in the video game industry are getting a little better.