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alex hutchinson's jockology

The question

Will "active" video games keep my kid fit during the school year?

The answer

This is a question that has launched dozens of studies since the release of Nintendo's Wii gaming system in late 2006, and the results of those studies are finally beginning to appear in peer-reviewed journals.

Researchers around the world now agree that "exer-gaming" does burn significantly more calories than traditional video games - but that's not saying a lot. The real question is whether they burn enough to improve health and fitness outcomes, and the answer here is still up for debate.

"The basic message is that if kids are going to play video games, parents should at least try to get their kids playing games that involve being physically active," says Scott Leatherdale, a researcher in the Population Studies and Surveillance department at Cancer Care Ontario, whose pilot study comparing active and passive tennis video games will appear in the January 2010 issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior.









"That being said, video games should not replace actual physical activity."

Dr. Leatherdale and his co-workers asked 51 University of Waterloo students to spend 30 minutes playing either Wii Sports tennis or the more passive Mario Power Tennis for Nintendo GameCube, and measured their energy expenditure using a heart-rate monitor and an armband recording skin temperature and other parameters.

Playing the GameCube was essentially no different from sitting on the sofa and meditating, while the Wii required 5.4 times more energy than the subjects' basal metabolic rate. About two-thirds of the Wii playing time was spent at more than triple the basal metabolic rate, which is considered the threshold for being "active."

A small 2007 study of 11 subjects aged 13 to 15 found a more modest expenditure of 2.5 times the basal metabolic rate for Wii tennis. In most respects, though, Dr. Leatherdale's results are consistent with a series of other studies, including one in the current issue of Obesity that found active video games such as Dance Dance Revolution and even Wii bowling to be comparable to "moderate-intensity walking."

There's no doubt that doing something is better than doing nothing. But it's less clear that an activity mimicking a casual stroll will have any tangible effect on the fitness levels of school-age children.

So far, three short-term studies, lasting between six and 12 weeks, have attempted to address this question, according to a recent review by Amanda Daley of the University of Birmingham in Britain, with no significant effects on outcomes such as BMI detected. More worryingly, two of the studies found that children began to find the games boring after as little as four weeks.

This is a concern that has been raised before. A 2007 Wii study by British researchers in the journal BMJ concluded that, if the energy expenditure was extrapolated over a typical week based on the playing habits of the adolescent subjects, it would represent an increase of less than 2 per cent.

Needless to say, none of the virtual sports come anywhere near the intensity of real sports, so it makes no sense to encourage your children to play more video games in the hope that they get fit.

But as Dr. Leatherdale points out, three-quarters of young Canadians spend more than 10 hours a week sitting in front of a screen, and studies have shown that they're very unwilling to relinquish that time. So could converting some of that time from passive to active be viewed as a reasonable middle ground?

"I think middle ground is perhaps a little strong - compromise might be a better word," Dr. Daley said in an e-mail. "These games are perhaps a way of getting kids started, and are certainly better than being sedentary."

Alex Hutchinson blogs about research on exercise and athletic performance at http://www.SweatScience.com.

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