Exergaming Adventure for Parents and Children

Gamercize gives adventure games some exercise for charity.

This Saturday I went to lend support to a great charity at a fantastic venue. The charity, Parentline Plus has a focus on strengthening family bonds with helpline and email support, this weekend they ran an event for fathers. Parents and children were introduced to quality time activities in one of the UK's top leisure centres which included video game fitness with Xbox and PlayStation made possible by Gamercize.

As Gamercize was created from the experiences and needs of my own family, I was very happy to attend and help raise awareness of the event and introduce other families to Gamercize. The only problem is how can you demonstrate the ability of Gamercize to support every game in such a short period of time? The enjoyment of the products depends on the enjoyment of the game, get it right and everyone loves it, get the game wrong and people don't go home as enthused.

The Xbox 360 Gamercize Gym Pod is available in Chamberlayne Leisure Centre already, so I brought along a standard school set up - the GZ Mini Pod with a regular two player PS2. This is very popular with schools as the cost and range of games is unparalleled in exergaming. I had to choose one game for each console.

There are a lot of games based on first person shooter engines, which is not exactly what the parents of 7 to 14 year old children want to see. Luckily these consoles have been out long enough for some great family alternatives.

I still had to be careful though the games for this event should really be co-operative, and not competitive, to help the bonding theme. I chose Lego Star Wars for the PS2 and Crash of the Titian's for the 360. Both games are excellent action adventures with an emphasis on co-operation, puzzle solving and game progression.

Gamercize levels the playing field for fitness ability, making it the perfect exergame for parent and child together. When you have stood side by side with your child facing the dark forces together you will walk away with a stronger bond.

Both games were a huge hit, parents and children played well together, getting good quality exercise at the same time. Parentline provided fathers with information about Internet safety and the local heath trust showed how healthy eating can be fun too.

Despite all the children I would have thought that the large plates of raw vegetables would have been left at the end. Not so; all of it had been eaten and the trick was low calorie dips! As Gamercize makes exercise fun, this was a perfect healthy partner, making healthy food interesting!

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XRTZ approach to healthy kids

Greetings! Thanks to Richard for the invitation to post in his blog. I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss how we're using exergaming to impact the lives of families at the XRtainment Zone (www.xrtainmentzone.com).

Coming from a healthcare background and having worked with obesity in the clinical setting for the last 14 years, we do not shy away from addressing the problem head-on.

The XRTZ is more of a family fitness and wellness center that uses exergaming as it's main attraction and interventional tool, rather than an elaborate video game place that hopes to get kids moving enough to get them to be fit on the sly. While we bank on this form of "stealth exercise", we are much more up front about our ulterior motives at the Zone! (Every member has the option of getting a full health and fitness assessment done, for example.) We have basically blended my medical group's health education with the

exergaming gym.

One of our key differences from most of the other exergaming gyms and businesses currently out there is our focus on the whole family, and not just the kids.

Anyone who works in the healthcare side of obesity, especially pediatric obesity,

knows that to really impact the weight and health of a child, you have to include the WHOLE family, especially the parents, since they are the main decision makers on what foods to buy, where to eat, what activities to do, etc. To a lesser extent, we also focus on the siblings because it makes it easier for the overweight sibling to do the healthy thing if the parents AND siblings are doing it as well.

Bottom line, you have to institute a whole family lifestyle change if you're going to see an improvement in the overweight child's health.

This is why we are one of the few, if only ones, who has an insurance contract where this particular insurance company will cover the cost of our 7-week Family Fit class and up to 4 months of post-class membership for continued follow-up at the Zone for kids who are at or above the 95th%-tile BMI.

Finally, exercise is only part of the solution for really making a difference in the health of kids. Nutrition is a vital component to their success, so we have incorporated a demonstration kitchen in our multipurpose room where we focus on nutrition education and interaction in just about all of our programs. This way, we can

impact both their physical and nutritional aspect of their lifestyles.

Pediatric obesity was said to be our "greatest national security threat" by the former US Surgeon General Richard Carmon (2006, ACSM Annual Meeting). We at the XRtainment Zone are doing our part in fighting this epidemic. We are working on having more Zones all over the country and the world, since this, unfortunately, is not just a US problem anymore. We encourage others to join us in this fight, and utilize this incredible technology of video games to help us help our future: our kids.

Erne Medina, Jr., DrPH, CHFI

CEO/Co-founder, XRtainment Zone LLC

CEE "Chief Exergaming Evangelist"

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