Is Fitness Gaming A Post-Pandemic Option?

The past year has led to a considerable change in the day-to-day lifestyle for many of us with further uncertainty of when things may get back to normal – with gyms remaining closed for some time yet to come, many are turning to at-home solutions to keeping their fitness on track and maintaining their healthy lifestyle goals. There has been a nod toward using the many benefits of the digital era to assist this change, however, as fitness gaming could be the answer for those looking to keep on top of their own fitness goals too.

Gaming has always provided its own unique benefits, and the reward aspect can certainly be enough to encourage a change for some – where some platforms have found enormous success despite adjustments to regulation such as Gamstop with some examples here of the growing online gaming space, much of the same reward structure can be used to aid fitness – it had already been seen through certain titles as positive messages of encouragement and reminders to meet daily targets serve as encouragement enough.

There are also the social benefits to gaming that can be linked to fitness that will encourage many too – many fitness tracking apps already have links to social media so users can share their progress and update their social platforms with their own fitness goals, with gaming platforms providing the same utility to do so, turning it into a game could encourage some level of fitness competition with social sharing being a big driver.

Perhaps the most important feature of a connection between gaming and fitness, however, are the cognitive benefits offered – maintaining good fitness holds many physical benefits but when falling out of a routine it can be hard to motivate getting back into it, but interactive gaming provides a huge number of cognitive benefits from competitive gaming through to other aspects such as multi-tasking, problem solving, and creativity. With these benefits to the crossover between the two, it can certainly act as more of a buffer to encourage keeping up a regular schedule whilst also honing these other skills – this may be particularly helpful with younger kids and actively encouraging them to exercise with creative approaches whilst using gaming as the buffer.

There are already a number of different options here – early platforms such as the Wii introduced Wii Fit early on, but the newer consoles also have their own VR features and wider support for VR which enables fitness gaming a whole new platform to operate on. It will be interesting to see how fitness and gaming intertwine, but with the pandemic showing how important it could be, there will certainly be growing support for the two to mix and find some common ground to deliver a new fitness opportunity.