New Gamepad Designed To Build Muscles?

Robmonster writes "The BBC are reporting a story about a product designed to address both exercise and videogaming in one fell swoop. According to the piece: 'A new type of gamepad from a US fitness equipment company aims to turn the couch potato gamer stereotype on its head. The Kilowatt controller by Powergrid Fitness is designed to build up muscle while playing a PlayStation 2, Xbox or PC game." The article explains: "In a racing game like Gran Turismo, the harder you push on the joystick, the faster a car goes, while pulling back slows down the vehicle."

Re:We need a total body workout

[ryanwright]

DDR builds only the lower body.

Not if you hang on to a couple of heavy weights and try to keep your balance while playing on heavy...

Excuse the exercise, or a way to participate?

[dexterpexter]

The system works on the principle of isometric exercise, which contracts the muscles without moving any joints. After just a couple of minutes of playing Gran Turismo with the joystick, you can feel the strain in your upper arms and shoulder muscles.

This sounds to me like another item to add to the hundreds we use that cause carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress disorders. Now, instead of just mildly turning the joystick over and over again, there is resistance that will add to the strain. This doesn't see like its at healthy as it first appears. Exercise indeed, but what I believe these sports medicine professionals are missing is the fact that unlike lifting weights or other people who exercise for health reasons, gamers do not typically stop playing after a short one-hour workout. (Good, healthy workouts are usually about that long) Gamers sometimes sit in front of those games for hours and hours; having repetitive moments with muscular tension could actually harm the muscles instead of build them up. It would seem that this is a great idea for the health nut looking for an interesting way to lose weight as these people would play for an hour and stop, but this is not a particularly great excuse for gamers to exercise. The company should stick with the idea of putting these in gyms, but perhaps skip the idea of a marketing this to a hardcore, overweight RPGer.


However, I think that if used in moderation, I suppose this is an excuse (note: I said excuse, and its not a particularly great one) to exercise. But perhaps they should look at marketing this, instead of as a piece of exercise equipment, as a way to physically enjoy the games. Anyone remember when Nintendo made the the large floor pad so that you could really run and control the track game? It was great not because of the exercise but because one got to really participate in the game. Maybe applying this to VR, anyone?

.
In the end, however, one thing holds true:
This device makes a perfect symbolic comment on our culture.

I tried this thing at CES

[ChristopherD]

Some friends of mine and I took turns trying this device out at CES running Gran Turismo. It looked like all games should work on it, because it has a full complement of PS controls and buttons on it, including dual shoulder buttons. The consensus among the group after using it for a few minutes each? BLECH! I found it unintuitive as to how to move the device to control the car in a specific direction. It sort of made sense, but required hitting one of the gamepad buttons to put the car into reverse or to perform any of the other actions that games require during play. So, that meants that during your "strenuous" workout driving the car around, you would have to jump out of the workout abruptly to get the car back onto the road if you got turned around, then start back up again. I suppose if a game were built specifically for the device, then a continuous workout could be achieved, otherwise I thought it required too much switching between working out and playing the game. Having used this thing and DDR dance pads I can say with certainty that DDR integrates working out with fun gameplay FAR better than this device. If I may quote the horse from classic Ren and Stimpy, "No sir, I don't like it!"

To work the legs and heart

[Anonymous Coward]

To work the legs and heart, the player could play DDR, as many others in this thread have pointed out.

Re:What the hell is this?

[Lumpy]

"stop eating when you're not hungry, not when you're full."

a very un-insightful statement there.

many people that are overweight do stop eating when they are not hungry. their insulin-intolerance causes a insulin spike to last too long making them hungry too long.

Maybe if you knew much about the human diet and medical conditions that are common to cause obesiety you would have not made such a stupid remark.

want to lose weight? go to a doctor and have him/her tell you what YOU need for weightloss and lifestyle changes. only a fool believes the line of yours I quoted.

Re:not new.

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

That would be Epyx [arcor.de]..

Re:White House Approved Lifestyle

[drinkypoo]

Look, if you want to talk about what the government is doing wrong, you have to look at the Food Pyramid [gsa.gov], which codifies a government-sponsored lie in a convenient, triangular symbol. From the page:

The small tip of the Pyramid shows fats, oils, and sweets. These are foods such as salad dressings and oils, cream, butter, margarine, sugars, soft drinks, candies, and sweet desserts. These foods provide calories and little else nutritionally. Most people should use them sparingly.

(...)

At the base of the Food Guide Pyramid are breads, cereals, rice, and pasta - all foods from grains. You need the servings of these foods each day.

What they neglect to mention is that sugar and white flour might as well be the same thing. It doesn't matter if you consume 50g of carbs from sugar, or from flour, they rapidly become the exact same thing in your body.

The biggest problem with food in america is that we have a tendency to eat preprocessed food, and preprocessed food tends to have huge amounts of sugar added to it for flavor. Personally, I have always hated overly sweet food, such as the pizza sauce at Domino's... But the fact is, all this extra sugar is making us fat. Any carbohydrates you take in become fat if you don't burn (use) them.

What you need to read on this topic is a fine article in the NYT by one Gary Taubes entitled "What if it's all been a big fat lie?" Unfortunately, NYT moved that to an archive article and you have to pay $2.95 to read it now, because they are bastards. I mean seriously, I can see a dollar or something, but three bucks? In any case I condensed the article (sharply, I'm afraid) in an article I wrote for Everything2 entitled "How the Government Fattened America [everything2.com]". Please be gentle to E2, though it has moved to a new host it is still pretty fragile in terms of overuse.

One of the important paragraphs from my article runs like so:

The run up on fat began in earnest in 1977, as a Senate committee led by George McGovern declared that Americans should reduce their fat intake to curb disease, in the report "Dietary Goals for the United States". The National Institutes for Health summarily spent several hundred million dollars trying to prove a link between being fat and contracting heart disease -- which failed. On their sixth try, though, they found something they could use to prove that the previous money had not gone to waste; a study showing reducing cholesterol via drug therapy reduced the risk of some kinds of heart disease.

The bottom line is that the government tells us to choke down the carbs. A bag of sugar (from C&H) says that "Sugar Contains No Fat" but eating fat doesn't even raise your cholesterol, eating fat mixed with a bunch of carbohydrates does. The emphasis on low-fat diets (which do not work for most people) causes many people to consume more carbohydrates. Problem is, the more carbs you eat, the more glucose ends up in your body at once. Glucose regulates hunger. Your brain will eventually build up a tolerance to it, meaning you have to eat more carbs to feel full. So, then you eat more carbs, which means you become more resistant to glucose - a classic vicious cycle.

On top of all this, when you consume carbohydrates your pancreas produces insulin as part of the conversion process. The more carbs you take in, the more insulin is produced. The more insulin you produce, the harder your pancreas has to work, and eventually it will give up and you will become a diabetic. How's that for your carb-heavy payoff?

So, in summation; The government says sugar is bad and other carbs are good, when in fact all carbohydrates (except fiber, which is indigestible, and cleans out your colon) have the same effect on your system. (The less processed they are, however, the slower they are

Re:BULLSHIT

[3terrabyte]

Yep, the American Heart Association (AHA) has their stamp of approval on every Sugar-Flakes cereal in the aisle!! How can you trust anything from them?

Just because you fortify it, doesn't mean it's healthy!

The main problem with today's health is the myth that "fat is bad". So they make all this fat-free foods that people gobble up. Their blood sugar spikes from all the carbs and they're hungry again too soon.

Enriched flour is a terrible misnomer. It means that for the food companies to save money, they've taken wheat, ground it down to a powder, losing all the vitamins. Then fortify it with vitamins, and make cereal, bread, cakes, cookies, and pastas. The bad thing is, it's only 1 step above sugar.

Complex Carbohydrates, protein, and fat all satiate your hunger for much longer than sugar and simple carbs.

I'm no Atkins fan, but I did learn a lot from it. I only cut out simple carbs and counted calories when I lost my 150 pounds.