It requires mental as well as physical exertion

Health experts and nutritionists believe that one of the main reasons for the epidemic of obesity in the United Kingdom is due not only to the fact that children do not eat as healthily as they used to but also because they do not get as much exercise.

In a society where crime is on the rise and many more people live in cities with a lack of open spaces children are forced to spend their leisure time inside. Obviously they turn to video games and the television to keep themselves busy and this means that they get absolutely no exercise and they burn no calories…. Until now that it….

A new video game is revolutionising the way that children interact with their TV monitors. The best selling Nintendo Wii is a completely interactive computer game which mimics the movement of the people who play it. You can play virtual tennis, boxing, golf and bowling to name just a few. It requires mental as well as physical exertion and children end up exhausted after swinging their arms around holding a little control that’s movement are exactly replicated on the TV screen.

The Nintendo Wii can also be used by people who have trouble walking and could even be used in hospital beds for the sick. The British government is taking these interactive video games seriously and a project launched in Worcestershire involving five different schools is testing out whether children would be keener to get exercise using these games as opposed to going to unpopular PE lessons. So far the project shows that children are far keener to use the Nintendo Wii then to run around a tennis court its doing exercises.

Using heart rate monitors they could see that the children were burning up a lot of calories and seem to be enjoying themselves far more. The Department of Health has endorsed the use of these Nintendo Wii’s and who knows in the future maybe they could become a regular feature in schools all over the United Kingdom. However it was made clear by The Department for Culture, Media and Sport that there were no plans to buy these games for schools at present.