`Active` video games offer no physical benefits to kids

Sydney -  Many parents may think that active video games such as Wii FIt Balanceare are an easy solution to getting their kids off the couch, but a new study has found no physical benefits for children from these activities. 

The Nintendo Wii game console, which arrived in the United States six years ago, was such an exciting prospect as it offered the chance for children to get exercise without even leaving the house.

Tennis was one of the games in the Wii Sports software that came right in the box with the console. This was the progenitor of “exergames”, video games that led to hopes that fitness could

turn into irresistible fun.But exergames turn out to be much digital ado about nothing, at least as far as measurable health benefits for children.

The study undertaken by the Children’s Nutrition Research Centre at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston was published early this year in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American

Academy of Pediatrics, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Previous studies have shown that adults and children, who play active video games, when encouraged in an ideal laboratory setting, engage in moderate, even vigorous physical activity

briefly. The Baylor team wanted to determine what happened when the games were used not in a laboratory, but in actual homes.

The participants in this study were children 9 to 12 years old who had a body mass index above the median and whose households did not already have a video game console. Each was

given a Wii. Half were randomly assigned to a group that could choose two among the five most physically demanding games that could be found: Active Life: Extreme Challenge; EA Sports

Active; Dance Dance Revolution; Wii Fit Plus; and Wii Sports. The other half could choose among the most popular games that are played passively, like Disney Sing It: Pop Hits and Madden

NFL 10.

The participants agreed to wear accelerometers periodically to measure physical activity over the 13-week experiment. To observe how well the intrinsic appeal of active games changed

children’s behaviour, the researchers distributed the consoles and games without exhortations to exercise frequently.

They found “no evidence that children receiving the active video games were more active in general, or at any time, than children receiving the inactive video games.”

How is it possible that children who play active video games do not emerge well ahead in physical activity?

“When you prescribe increased physical activity, overall activity remains the same because the subjects compensate by reducing other physical activities during the day,” said Anthony

Barnett, an exercise physiologist who is a consultant at the University of Hong Kong, and one of the authors of the Pediatrics article.

Changing sedentary behavior is extremely difficult, says Dr. Charles T. Cappetta, an executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Sports Medicine and

Fitness.

“It may seem that active video games are an easy solution to getting kids off the couch. But as this study and others show, they do no such thing,” he said.

He stated that “live sports” – the kind that are outside of the home, without controllers and television monitors – “remain the gold standard to get cardiovascular benefit.”