I had the opportunity to play a Nintendo Wii over the last couple of days, and while it's loads of fun, I was skeptical of my parents' claim that it was good exercise. So what's a fledgling runner with a geeky penchant for gadgets to do? Strap on a heart rate monitor while playing video games, of course.
My findings? Well, at times my heart rate did climb to about 50-60% of my max heart rate, but I couldn't sustain it. This was especially the case with games like bowling and golf, which almost require playing with a beer in one hand with all the downtime between activity. I'm also unsure whether my increase in heart rate was due to physical activity or frustration from losing while I played.
One interesting result I found was the soreness in certain muscles I felt this morning, which leads me to the conclusion that my Wii muscles are underdeveloped. My commitment to overall fitness requires me to exercise my Wii muscles to become a more well-rounded athlete.
Seriously, though, I think there's real potential for the Wii to make fitness more fun, especially if they could incorporate heart rate monitoring into the system somehow and create a game that would vary the intensity of activity to make sure you were staying in a good training zone. There must be folks out there working on developing games and accessories to make the Wii into an ideal exercise/entertainment machine.
Of course, it would probably be better to just encourage people to get fit the old-fashioned way so they don't become dependent on a game console to get their exercise, but given the choice between sitting around and mashing buttons with your thumbs or standing up, moving around, and waving your arms wildly to knock out your virtual Pops in the third round of a family grudge-match, I think the Wii is much better than no exercise.
