The secret to fitness is fun
Monday, August 3, 2020 at 09:20AM 
I am one of those weird people who actually like to exercise. Not that by looking at my body or blood pressure readings, you would know it. I've walked (jogged when younger), biked, and hiked for as long as I can remember. It's what I call a healthy addiction.
I finding walking for exercise easy to do because it is fun. I get outdoors. I hear birds. I look at people. I think shallow thoughts. When walking with others, I enjoy the conversations. I track my walks using MapMyWalk and set goals of speed and distance for myself.
What I don't find fun are stretching, flexibility and strength exercises. Just no motivation. I am too self-conscious to take group classes. I don't know how to set goals.
At least until this past week.
My son Brady has long been a video game fanatic, so it was not a big surprise to find he uses games as a part of an exercise routine. He demonstrated his latest acquisition, Nintendo's Ring Fit Adventure when I visited him a couple weeks ago. Standing in front of his big ass TV, with a plastic ring about the size of a steering wheel in his hands and a device strapped around his upper leg, Brady squeezed, pulled, jogged, squatted, and stretched as he watched his character on the screen mimic his actions. But what made the exercise fun, was that he was performing specific tasks in order to complete a virtual adventure - collecting coins, jumping hurdles, defeating monsters. I expressed my awe of such a cool system, despite not really having played many video games since spending way too much time on Lode Runner in the 1980s on my Apple IIc.
So guess what? Last week for my birthday, he gifted me my own Ring Fit game and a Nintendo Switch on which to play it. (I had looked for them in the usual online sources without success, but he found one at a reasonable price on E-Bay.) And just as nice, he helped me get them all connected to my own big ass TV and made sure they worked.
So for the past couple days I've been having a new kind of "fun" while exercising. Once past the initial learning curve of setting up the devices, learning the controls, and configuring one's avatar, the experience is strangely immersive. I stretch and work on flexibility and strength. I have some new goals. I can "compete" with friends and track my efforts. This may become a new "healthy addiction."
Much smarter people than I have long encouraged game-based learning in education. Plenty of people play sports to get exercise. Not sure why the connection between exercise, both mental and physical, and fun has only taken me 68 years to recognize.
How do you make exercise fun?
Reader Comments (2)
In my summer program. we used Go Noodle (https://www.gonoodle.com/) to get the kids moving during breaks. It was a lot of fun and they only needed their online device to join in. It was a lot of fun to join the action with them.
Hi Pat,
I think I've seen this used in our elementary schools here as well. (And Dance, Dance Fever, I think.) Fun to see the kids get up and moving.
This COVID thing is making the importance of physical activity more apparent than ever!
Thanks for the link.
Doug