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Wii Can't Replace Actual Exercise
Next Generation notes the results of a study into the health benefits of playing the Nintendo Wii. According to the University of Liverpool research, Wii Tennis can't compare with the real thing. "The result showed that the youths burned 60 calories (in nutrition terms) more an hour playing Wii, a 2% increase in the amount of energy burned versus the Xbox 360 players. The study is quoted as saying that 'these increases were of insufficient intensity to contribute towards recommendations for children's daily exercise,' and that active gaming using the Wii is no replacement for actual sports."
No, it's not a replacement for real exercise, but as a replacement for sitting on your butt, eating cheetos, and pushing buttons, it's an improvement.
Of course arm movement alone is not the same a full body movement. But I would prefer that the kids at least get some exercise. I wonder if it would have been different if they had tested the boxing game as it is much more physically involved.
The article makes no mention of what games they used on the Wii to test this. My experience is that some games are far more active than others - playing Wario Ware normally leaves me quite worn out after a while, but playing Super Mario Galaxy requires almost no movement. Without knowing what they used for the experiment, its results are meaningless...
And here I thought playing Wii tennis made me better at the real thing...
it CAN replace the Gamecube, which it was built to do
Particles, stuff that matters.
Not True...the injuries are real. I am personally suffering from some nasty tennis elbow from Wii Sports, and a torn ACL from playing Madden '08. Doctors say I'll be up and running by the '09 season.
Some folks go nuts with Wii sports and jump all around, but chances are the kids are just sitting around. I swear I think my aunt is going to tear down my house half the time and is pretty much exhausted afterwards.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Sadly that's what these kids need; Motivation! If playing Wii Sports gets them interested in playing real tennis then yeah, it's a good thing. Not a replacement, I won't stop going to the gym because I got a Wii or play DDR but it's a step in the right direction to get people moving again.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I don't believe the study (or I need more information). Standing and moving around (such as Wii boxing or tennis, or whatever) burns many more calories than just sitting there and playing an RPG on Xbox360 -- this study isn't conclusive at all, with just six kids being tested.
:)
I do agree, however, that it doesn't even come close at all to real sports, and that it should not ever be considered a replacement. Nothing beats a few hours on the courts
There are two ways to play the Wii, especially Wii sports: You can really get into it, swinging yours arms and making big motions and make it exercise (while having more fun in my opinion).
Or you can play it like a video game, and just twitch the controller around. Of course, as Tycho and Gabe put it so eloquently, that makes you a toolbox:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13
In reaching the conclusion that Wii is only a 2% increase in calorie burning over 360 games, I'm sure the kids were only moving their wrists. Then, the difference breaks down to 360 = twitching thumbs, Wii = twitching wrists. I could believe that twitching wrists instead of just thumbs is a 2% increase in calories burnt over the 360.
I know that when playing Wii boxing and making real punching motions, my arms get physically tired and I can work up a sweat after long enough. I am sure if someone wanted to, they could run another study and grab another headline by stating something like Wii Burns As Many Calories as Real Workout.
We need to have weighted Wii-motes to help go that extra distance. It would be like the 2 pound power-walking weights.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
One could always add say wrist weights to your wii enjoyment. Wii Boxing with 5lb's on yeah arm will get your going real fast.
... DDR!
Nothing... NOTHING beats a DDR workout. Wanna really test something against a sport/gym workout? 30 mins of DDR (actual play time) vs 30min Cardio workout. I'd be curious how close the ratio comes out to 1 on that.
~my $.02
AccountKiller
I'm going to assume that this is Obvious Day, so I'm expecting the next headline to read something along the lines of "Scientists Announce That The Xbox 360 Is Less Effective At Making Toast Than An Actual Toaster".
Real exercise consists of more than merely flapping your arms around? Seriously?
With today's kids, I'd already be happy with 2% workout. It sure is an insane boost from the 0% they get now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a hoax. The original research "appears" at http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7633/1282
It is worth noting that BMJ regularly provides joke studies on Christmas.
Further explanation from the Language Log: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005246.html
i played wii boxing and tennis for about 2 hours last nite and my arms are killing me.
The study basically doesn't prove anything because you would need more than 15 minutes to break a sweat and really start burning calories with Wii Sports. You would also need to test overweight people where it actually is easier for them to expend more energy far easier than a fit kid who can basically bounce off the walls for five hours straight and burn 0 calories.
If they wanted to test this, they would have ran the tests of over an hour, and used normal or overweight middle aged people.
I would bet that, while it can't replace actual sports, it could replace other healthy activities like meditation, yoga, stretching or even light aerobics. The Wii Balance Board looks like it can help people with those, and I'm sure there are some health benefits from those like lower stress etc. While you might stretch the health benefits of something akin to DDR with a dancepad, it's still a step in a good direction for better health while still having fun with video games.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
It's all about how much you put into it. These were healthy kids who regularly get exercise tested. Try it on a kid who now has the wii as the most movement they are getting at all. Most people using the wii as a fitness tool will be moving their feet for tennis and using full arm movement. Were these kids doing that? Or sitting down? Sometimes I even with wrist or ankle weights.
As an adult, I use one of those watches that counts how many calories you burn(takes your heart rate and compares with age, weight, height). I get a decent warm-up type workout, especially with wrist weights. I still go to the gym, but the wii helps me get into the mood. Light warm-up workouts really get you in a good mood and you want to go to the gym to continue that.
Also check out the Wii Sports Experiment.
I teach bass guitar at a center with about 15 instructors so we've got about a hundred students coming through. Most of these kids attempt bass/electric guitar for a few months and then give up (this is typical of most instruments btw). I took an informal poll of the other instructors and we haven't noticed any increase in enrollment (or students actually sticking with it) since the introduction of Guitar Hero/RockBand.
While you can become pretty good if you sit down one day and play GuitarHero, while playing an instrument requires a *bit* more dedication/time/effort. However, if GuitarHero took as much time/effort/practice to get good at it as a real instrument, we'd probably see the same dropout rate.
Clearly, they aren't playing it right.
The Wii was designed for the people who swing their arms from side to side trying to make mario jump.
It's not designed for couch potatoes.
If you're sitting down playing the Wii, or you're not getting into it and getting excited and involved, then no, of course you're not going to burn any calories you moron.
Play Guitar Hero the way it was meant to be played. Over your head, jumping up and down on stage, scissor-kicking, etc. And then just for good measure, thrash your couch with the guitar controller afterwards (but be sure to hit the cushiony parts).
THEN tell me how many calories you burn.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Chindgu to the rescue....
Surely this is easily remediable with some kind of "heavy" controller.
Heck, even duct tape them to hand weights.... they did the same thing with telephone handsets awhile back...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Practicing those arm muscles will come in handy later in life.
Namely, when they hit puberty. They'll be moving those arms like crazy then.
Best to start building those muscles and tendons early.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'm assuming that most slashdotters managed to get through 3rd grade math, so they know this is a joke already. But for the three or four of you that don't understand any jokes that don't involve ponies, I'll explain.
If 60 extra calories per hour is a 2% increase over playing the xbox, that means the xbox users are burning 3,000 calories per hour. That would make playing the xbox about twice as much work as pro-level cross country skiing or long-distance bicycle racing.
They also used young teenagers to test it as well.
They also demonstrated a much higher than 2% energy consumption increase, a number that the BBC appears to have completely misrepresented from the "Discussion" section of the report, which had concluded that "In a typical week of computer play for these participants, active gaming rather than passive gaming would increase total energy expenditure by less than 2%". In other words, everything you do the rest of the week dwarfs the amount of energy that you used by playing games for a few hours, or in layman's terms: "no shirt, shitlock". The BBC ignored the first sentence of the section: "Predicted energy expenditure was at least 51% greater during active gaming than during sedentary gaming."
Is it a replacement for exercise? Not really, but that's not based on the "only" 2% increase in energy consumption.
Musical Instrument teaching methodology sucks.
Maybe you are different, but not many people are interested in learning notes, they are interested in playing music.
I have yet to see a music teacher teach towards a goal the student can comprehend.
Usually it's, here is how you do this note, not please do it 10,000,000 times.and I'll also tell you your doing it wrong every 3rd time.
F' that.
If people taught guitar the way guitar Hero taught people to use the guitar controller, there would be fewer drop outs.
Let me tell you what piece of music I want to learn, and teach me what i need to know to get through that. The student will learn more as they get interested in a different piece of music.
Which is why I want to get funding to create a console guitar game that uses a real guitar.
All the pieces are there, I just need a 1.75 million to finish it and bring it to market.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
After an entire summer of working at Cedar Point with DDR Supernova machines at my disposal during my time off, I would think the new DDR game for the Wii would be an excellent candidate game for a study like this. I was usually sweating rather heavily after two rounds of DDR in the arcade on difficult 6 or 7 footers (I usually played at 9pm, when temps were about mid to low 70s, average indoor temp.), and by the time I finished my normal three or four rounds, I was breathing pretty heavily and my legs felt about ready to give. I'm not out of shape either, having ran cross and track, as well as playing volleyball whenever I get the chance. So yeah, do the study again with DDR on at least medium difficulty and I think you'll get some very interesting results.
This is a great example of science journalism. The study that the article is based on found that Wii games use at least 65.1 kJ/kg/min more than the 125.5 kJ/kg/min burnt playing sedentary games. Because science journalists lack even rudimentary math skills, they're often unaware that "2% more" isn't the same thing as "more than half again". Furthermore, since they also lack reading comprehension skills, they weren't tipped off that the position of the article was dead wrong by the statement that energy use when playing Wii games "was significantly greater than when playing sedentary games".
Of course, they also failed to notice that the study was from an issue of BMJ consisting entirely of jokes, like every other Christmas edition of this journal. In case it wasn't sufficiently clear that the articles were all jokes, one of the articles analyzed the distribution of types of jokes in articles in BMJ Christmas editions. It's unclear whether the cited study was actually carried out (some people will go to great lengths for a joke, perhaps even so far as to play video games in lab), but that just makes it even more annoying that the article managed to come up with a conclusion entirely contrary to the only possible source.
how about a boxing match between me: a "wibot", and you: a non-believer?
i hope you like hospital food buddy.
I want to tape a Wiimote around my penis with duct tape, and for some game publisher to create a vagina game that I can thrust my penis with the Wiimote attached tword the screen for exercise..
Can you help me?
They should have measured the amount of CO2 produced by the participants. Sure, this means they can't do this study at home and it will cost a lot more to do. But on the plus side, it will be actual, meaningful science that is really undisputable. I know their method is both common and accepted, but I also know that similar systems have created a lot of confusion in the past because the results are not what you'd expect.
in Liverpool took six boys and five girls aged 13 to 15
And the report from here on out is total bunk. Eleven samples? WTF
Come back to us when you test 100-500 people
Anybody who thinks that the Wii doesn't promote exercise has never been in Walmart and heard "Attention shoppers, we just got a shipment of Nintendo Wii's in at the electronics desk." come over the PA.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
So obviously that article is wrong. This less sensational and more accurate article states: Microsoft's Project Gotham Racing 3 for XBOX 360 can't hold a candle in fitness for teens to bowling, tennis, or boxing on Nintendo's Wii Sports, researchers found here.
But neither compared with fitness gains from playing live sports, reported Gareth Stratton, Ph.D., of Liverpool John Moores University, and colleagues in the Dec. 22 issue of BMJ. and - For Project Gotham Racing 3, the mean energy expenditure was 125.5
kJ/kg/min.
- For Wii Sports bowling, it was 190.6 kJ/kg/min.
- For Wii Sports boxing, it was 198.1 kJ/kg/min.
- For Wii Sports tennis, it was 202.5 kJ/kg/min. So the study actually states that playing Wii Sports burns 51-61% more energy per hour than Project Gotham 3 on the XBox 360. However, the difference in total overall energy consumption over an entire week (counting time doing other things) is only 2%. It isn't clear in the medpagetoday article how many hours of play resulted in that 2% increase. However, if someone burned 12,000 calories per week then 2% of that would be 240 calories, which equates to 4 hours per week (keeping in mind that their definition of an hour includes a 5 min break for every 15 min of play).
Of course, how you play will affect how quickly you burn the calories too... I know people who play Wii sports sitting still while only flicking their wrists and others who stand up and move their whole bodies pretending they're really boxing/batting/whatever.
I say the article smells of Microsoft propaganda. Sure, the Wii will never (and thankfully wasn't intended to) replace traditional sports played in a gym or outside, but it does a damn good job in making people move a little more.
Just a small note: losing weight is a goal nobody achieves by playing some Wii games and then going to McDonalds. Get rid of all that junk food and you'll lose lots of weight; the Wii will just help in making the transition much much funnier.
Not a bad article but they forgot to test with the top calorie burner for a Wii this holiday season: Trying to Find a Damn Unit to Buy. You will burn thousands and thousands of calories as you plod along from store-to-store in every mall and driving great distances in search of the elusive console. Be sure to practice your 100 m dash so you can be the first to get from the front door to the back of the store where there is only one box on the shelf. Remember the old children's jingle, "You Snooze, You Lose."
He's not an expert. You, on the other hand, are about as far from an expert on the subject as a person could possibly get. Burning calories is, in most cases, not even close to linear. Unless of course your "activity" involves so little energy output that you could do it all day. Do you have any idea how much energy your body expends just to keep itself cooled down as you go beyond those 15-minute sessions? Didn't think so.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
You don't need much resistance to do aerobic exercise if you are using parts of your body other than your legs.
You can drive your heart rate well into the anaerobic range just by keeping your hands in constant motion. If you haven't tried something like shadow boxing, you'd be surprised. I think that the human body has evolved for efficient bipedal locomotion; it is extremely inefficient at keeping the arms in motion. Three minutes of continuous shadow boxing takes far more energy than jogging the same amount of time. If you don't believe me, try it; see if you can shadow box for three minutes, and throw during that time 120 minutes, a mere 1.5 seconds/punch.
Check out this video of a boxer hitting the focus mitts. Notice that his punching rate averaged over each 30 second period goes up and down -- from about 1 1/3 down to about 3/4 punch per second. He's throwing blindingly fast combinations, but he has to rest and the rest period between combinations goes up and down. If you took 100 people off the street, I'd bet maybe one or two could keep up this level of activity for three minutes without coming close fainting. Of course the bulk of the energy being provided is from the creatine phosphate pathway and glycolysis, but believe me you go into oxygen debt doing this. I've seen strong men reduced to the consistency of overcooked spaghetti by underestimating how hard this is. It's really amusing to see the reaction of a newbie macho man when after sixty seconds the 98 pound woman in the next group is hitting harder and faster than he is.
In Wii Tennis, you lose the main benefit of real tennis: running. Wii Boxing is far superior to Wii Tennis because you are encouraged to keep your upper body in constant motion, which as we've seen uses a lot of energy. It would be even better if there were a head tracking device, or something like a DDR mat that gave you more interesting tactical options like circling, advancing or retreating. One thing that newbies have trouble putting to use is that there are more directions in sparring than just forward and back. It adds a whole new um... dimension to the sport. Moving side to side is part of the answer to practically every kind of fighter. If you have a guy with a lot of reach, you throw of his sense of distance shifting to the side. If you have a powerful, aggressive puncher, you keep in circling so he can't plant his feet for a heavy punch. If you've got a southpaw, you move left to get out of range of that sneaky left hook, and so you can cross his lead with your own left hook.
It would be better exercise too, not because the lower body motions are huge in themselves, the key is that you'd have more of your body moving at one time. It is reasonably easy to throw 120 fast punches in three minutes if you are standing flat footed, but if you are shuffling forward and back, side to side, doing a little bobbing and weaving and its a serious workout, even though if you kept your hands perfectly still those motions would hardly amount to anything.
Of course, it still depends on the user. More experienced users are no doubt more efficient, just as more experienced sparring partners are more efficient. But the key is that it is to your advantage in the game then to throw more punches and blocks with your saved energy. In tennis, as you get more efficient, it is more advantageous to relax and wait for the next ball.
Of course I totally agree, Wii Sports -- even Wii Boxing aren't a substitute for working out. But I think the Wii points the way to games that are much more active. I'd like to see head foot and hand tracking incorporated into future games. Non-shooting combat games are ideal for getting the whole body into motion.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I miss the days when there was a "Reality Check" to science. You see, there are so many factors that can contribute to data being wrong that most professors will institute what's known as a Reality Check Rule. When you're figuring out the EMF of a particular circuit, coming up with 25 Tesla is really out of the ballpark, the data is either wrong or miscalculated.
I seriously think this is an experiment missing the Reality Check. It's really quite easy when you think about it, how many muscle groups are being actuated to play a Wii game, standing up or sitting? I could see results like this playing the Wii while sitting down, but boxing, golf or bowling are definitely alot more physically intensive than even a heated Halo 3 match.
I don't mean to sully the reputation of these "scientists", but I seriously think a miscalculation has been made, or the data isn't covering all aspects of physical movement involved when playing the Wii.
Case in point:
Playing Mario Galaxy, you're using pretty much every muscle in your forearms as well as your thumbs and forefingers. Halo? Just your thumbs and forefingers. As a rock climber I can tell you empirically that actuating your fingers while dealing with different orientations of the hand relative to the wrist is at least twice as intensive and exhausting as just actuating your fingers. Calorie burn-count should be twice as high than when using X-Box or Playstation controllers.
I don't know, anybody else smell something fishy here? Anybody know who conducted the study and who might have contributed to the study or company that conducted it (Rival company to Nintendo, maybe?)
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
I remember reading something 6-8 months ago about them studying wii tennis vs real tennis, and drawing the same pointless conclusion.
The amount of calories you burn is extremely dependent on how "hard" you play the game and which game you're playing. Tennis burns next to nothing. Boxing on the other hand after 30 minutes I can work up a good sweat.
It makes no difference, this is a culture problem. The kid jumps around a bit, burns 2% more energy and then scoffs down half a box of double choc-chip cookies whilst his friend has their turn..
Stop feeding your kid junk, move them around (go to these places we used to go as kids called parks) for 30 minutes and the little fatties can play all the X-Box, Wii, PS they want - regardless of this 2%.
Nothing more depressing that going to the school's annual track meet and seeing kids who can't run 200m without stopping but can jump around playing Wii tennis all day long.
3000 Calories an hour (60/0.02) seemed a bit high.
I can't tell if you're serious, but here goes. 60 calories is the TOTAL BURNED for the Wii-hour, not the INCREASE. Therefore 60/1.02 = 58.824 calories an hour for the 360 - using the numbers you provided, of course. The study actually says 2% increase in calories burned for the whole week, from active vs. passive gaming. But what about the XBOX 360 vs Wii, you say?? The calorie/consumption difference is a staggering 51%. So, really 60/1.51 = 39.735 calories per hour playing the XBOX 360.
So, according to the article, and this is on a Gaming Website so it must be true, playing X-Box 360 games for more than an hour will burn a staggering 3,000 calories, approximately 500-1,000 more, indeed, than the average person is supposed to consume in a day.
Speak for yourself, I would shrink to nothing eating the pittance! (for my self esteem, please assume we weren't talking in the standard - food - kCals)
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
To the editors, the source of such research is not the "University of Liverpool" but the John Moore's University (wich happens to be located in Liverpool also) as the article states in the first paragraph:
Professor Gareth Stratton and a team at John Moore's University in Liverpool
There are 3 Universities in Liverpool, UK. One is The University of Liverpool (recently renamed just University of Liverpool), secondly you have Jhon Moore's University and third is the Hope University.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
n/t
but come now - have you ever played tennis? If you have ever played basketball, imagine that but not getting the chance to stop for setting up your next game plan.
If you want cardio, trying to keep beating your record in the first boxing practice thing is great for your upper body and cardio.
I now feel obliged to call in a certain phrase involving profanity, and Sherlock Holmes. How would swinging a plastic half brick around give you any exercise, you're not hitting anything, and you dont have to run about. Many people who play the Wii do it sitting down, making miniscule hand movements to control the games, so now it is time to use my phrase...