Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Cheap, fun, convenient video game exercise

The problem: find an at home exercise alternative that is (1) fun – as in you actually want to exercise without forcing yourself to, and (2) cheap – under $50.

First of all, I decided to concentrate on video games to solve this problem; the other at home exercise alternatives are just not fun for me. Running on a treadmill or exercising to an aerobics tape gets pretty dull. I could watch TV while running on the treadmill, but since running on the treadmill is not mandatory for watching TV, my laziness would eventually win out and I would watch TV without the treadmill. You can read my entire article about
why I chose video games for exercising
.

So let’s see what video games are available for us to exercise with at home. Oh, and I’m assuming that everyone has a PC.

Dance Pad – For those that don’t know what a dance pad is: a dance pad is a mat type 3x3 foldable pad that you lay on the ground. It has buttons that you press with your feet. Here is a link to a Wikipedia description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_pad. The following two games are for the dance pad:

StepMania – This is pretty much the equivalent of DDR, only it’s for the PC. The basic premise is that you have to hit dance pad arrows at the right times. While the music is playing, arrows are scrolling up the screen, when the arrows are in the right place you have to press the correct arrow button. From an exercise perspective this games is excellent, I played it for 20 minutes and I was exhausted. The only thing that I had a problem with is the difficulty level. I was playing the easy songs and I still failed every single time. I think this game might be harder for older people to pick up.

To play StepMania you would download the game from http://www.stepmania.com and you would download and install some songs, also from their website.

Egg Snatch – An arcade style video game that also uses the dance pad. In this game there are 8 windows that are directly mapped to the 8 buttons on the dance pad. Each window has a weasel that tries to grab an egg from a basket and a chicken that pulls the basket away when a button is pressed. You control the chickens with the dance pad, you try to move the basket away before the weasel can grab an egg. Unlike StepMania this game is the more traditional type of video game, with levels, lives, and scoring. Egg Snatch is simple and very easy to learn. It is also a very good source of exercise; I get exhausted after 20 minutes of jumping around.

To play Egg Snatch you would download the trial version of the game from http://www.evstep.com/egg_snatch/. This is a shareware game that only goes up to level 5, after that you would have to register it for $7.99.

Cost for StepMania/Egg Snatch:

Dance pad ~ $15 - $1000. The price really ranges, but you could get a pretty decent one for $40-50.

USB Adapter – If the dance pad you buy has a PS/XBOX adapter you would have to convert it. If the dance pad has a USB connector you don’t have to buy an adapter, but a USB dance pad costs more than a PS2 dance pad because there are less of them around. A PSX/PS2 to USB adapter costs around $10. An XBOX adapter costs a little more.

Yourself! Fitness

Not so much a video game as an interactive exercise program. The program has a personal instructor that runs you through exercises such as yoga, cardio, and pilates. There are also exercises that use an exercise ball and hand weights. You see the on screen instructor exercising and you are supposed to do what she is doing. Based on the schedule that you set up and your ongoing input, it dynamically figures out how you are doing and what kind of exercises you should do.

From a few accounts that I read, people are actually using this game to exercise and lose weight, and they are saying that it provides very good exercise. Although, I'm not totally sure of the fun factor involved.

Cost: $28

Others:

There are other things like virtual boxing, virtual ping pong, and tennis. All of them use some sort of remote that plugs into the TV. I haven’t read any accounts of people using them for exercise, but they are interactive video games that involve something other than pressing a button and they are pretty cheap. I bumped into http://www.exerciseinabox.com, a site that sells some of these products.

I haven’t mentioned any of the console games, like Wii Sports or DDR for PS2, because they require a console. If you have a console they are cheap, but if you don’t then they come with the expense of the entire console system.

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