According to recent research, “gamifying” exercise can improve motivation and make fitness more effective at all levels. Here’s what you need to know.
In May, Leah Jewer, 34, of Montreal, made the decision to exercise more often.
However, this time, she wanted to find a fresh way to motivate her newfound fitness goals.
Jewer purchased a Fitbit. She also downloaded the Lifesum Health App (a fitness app that allows users to personalize diet plans with healthy recipes and nutrition advice) and the 5K Runner app (designed to train runners).
Jewer was serious about “gamifying” her fitness routine, thinking that if she set a “sort of achievement system” to her exercise regimen, she’d be more likely to stick with it.
What is gamification?
It’s the process of taking something that already exists – such as a workout regimen – and integrating game mechanics into it with the intent to motivate, improve engagement, and increase loyalty.
In other words, it’s a way of turning an activity into a game.
Jewer is no stranger to gaming. In addition to her job as a senior product manager for iHeartRadio Canada, she is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Girls on Games, a blog dedicated to video game news and reviews. So she knows how the need to complete a quest can help push a player to excel.
With her apps and gadgets on hand, Jewer began her new approach to diet and fitness, and soon discovered it worked.
“I found that trying to reach my steps and exercise goals on Fitbit, while trying to eat the right food and calorie count with Lifesum and earning the badges in 5K, to be a fairly easy [way] to keep consistent,” she said. “I do find these apps and the Fitbit itself very helpful because the notifications they all give remind me to keep with the program.”
For Jewer, transforming exercise into a game has motivated her unlike anything else — and she’s not alone.
A quick Google search finds many people sharing their stories of success after using a range of fitness apps, gadgets, or video games aimed at getting people to embrace exercise through gaming.
In other words, “gamifying” your workout works.
Leveling up
Today, Americans appear to be more unmotivated than ever before to get up and move.
A June reportTrusted Source from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that just about 23 percent of U.S. adults are able to meet the recommended guidelines for muscle-strengthening and aerobic exercises.
According to “The State of Obesity,” an annual report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 45 percent of American adults aren’t sufficiently active to achieve necessary health benefits, with a massive $117 billion in healthcare costs tied to inadequate physical activity.
Bradley Prigge, a wellness exercise specialist at the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program, said getting people to embrace healthy physical activity can be a challenge.
He pointed out that thought of embracing exercise — not to mention heading into a gym — can be intimidating for many people who haven’t always been active.
“In our programs here [at Mayo Clinic], it’s really about finding things that are relevant to each individual. It’s about what allows them to find that connection to activity,” Prigge told Healthline.
“Gaming can be a way of doing that. In our classes we [have] here, we do have a gaming component where we introduce people to fitness gaming, and there are some people who are jazzed about that.”
Recent research has looked at the phenomenon of gamifying workouts and its effectiveness on fitness.
A July studyTrusted Source in the Journal of the American Heart Association divided 146 people — sedentary office workers, ages 21 to 65, who sit at least 75 percent of their workdays — into two groups over 10 weeks.
In both groups, participants were given Fitbits, but only one group used the wearable along with MapTrek, a web-based game that moves a person’s digital avatar along Google Maps based on their number of steps. The group using the game competed against each other in weekly walking challenges.
The results? The group playing the map-based game walked 2,092 more steps each day and finished 11 more active minutes per day compared to the group with just the Fitbits.
Lucas J. Carr, PhD, assistant professor in the department of health and human physiology at the University of Iowa, was one of the lead researchers behind the pilot study. Carr told Healthline that the most surprising finding of the research was how many people reported the game motivated them to wear their Fitbit more often.
“This is important, as wearing a Fitbit is a great way to self-monitor daily physical activity levels,” Carr said. “Self-monitoring has been shown as a good way to maintain physical activity and prevent declines in activity.”
However, after the study, people didn’t maintain their new activity levels. By the end of the study’s 10 weeks, both groups failed to maintain their overall spikes in activity, but the MapTrek gaming group still averaged more steps than their Fitbit-only counterparts.
“It’s difficult to say without testing these hypotheses, but if I had to speculate, I would say we need to continue to modify the game in a way that maintains high levels of engagement. Introducing new and fresh game features periodically is something we’ve discussed and plan to do in future studies,” he said.
“We’ve also discussed combining the game with health coaches who can provide continued motivational and educational support to participants.”
Getting people to adopt new behaviors over a longer period of time is one of the biggest obstacles in the world of fitness.
In a 2017 studyTrusted Source in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers conducted a clinical trial among adults who were enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study.
The study involved a 12-week intervention period and 12-week follow-up of 200 adults from 94 families in the long-term study. Each person tracked their daily step counts with either wearables or smartphone apps and was given feedback on their step count performance by email or text over 24 weeks.
Once this baseline was established, half of the participants were put into a game with their family where they each worked to earn points as they moved through levels to see who could surpass each other in their steps.
By the end, people in the “gamified” group reported 1,661 daily steps compared to their baseline of 636.
That being said, as with the other study, new behaviors are hard to maintain.
In the 12-week follow-up period, physical activity dropped in both groups. But the group that played the game still had a significantly greater number of steps compared the control group.
The challenge of maintaining fitness levels
So why is it so hard to adopt new fitness practices — game or no game?
Yuri Quintana, PhD, director of Global Health Informatics at the Division of Clinical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston Massachusetts, has made a career looking at the ways games can impact people’s health.
An assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Quintana has looked at “serious games for health,” seeing ways in which games applied to healthcare practices can impact everything from mental health to pediatric cancer.
When it comes to the difficulty of maintaining lifestyle changes brought about by games, he says that “creating sustained changes in health behaviors is one of the most challenging aspects of healthcare.”
“Mobile apps that are complemented with other support services such as counseling and follow-up care visits have better long-term outcomes,” he told Healthline.
“Traditional forms of education and communication have shown limited results. Gamification shows promise, but long-term studies are needed to find the optimal blend of education and communication methods.”
The phrase “long-term” is key. The two recent gamification studies were both short-term looks at how technology can potentially shift people’s fitness behaviors.
Carr, the researcher from the MapTrek game study, said that moving forward, he would love to test the game with a wider range of populations, including people with chronic diseases, older adults, and veterans.
“We know enough about human behavior to say that people are much more likely to do the things that they enjoy,” he added.
“Lots of people enjoy playing games, but few genuinely like to exercise. Adding a gaming component to fitness is exciting to me because it’s shown to help some people be more active simply because they like to play games. If that is what motivates them to be active, more power to them.”
A growing trend
Motivating people to be more active through video games is a familiar concept to Keith Rumjahn, 34, the CEO of OliveX, which has developed several popular mobile fitness-motivating games. For example, one of the company’s games is 22 pushups, which challenges users to perform 22 pushups each day for 22 days.
Rumjahn, a Canadian based in Hong Kong, told Healthline that he started in the app world when he created a basketball-coaching app around seven years ago. A volunteer basketball coach at the time, he said that he realized “fundamental movement and fitness is more important than technique.”
He thought that he could make fitness accessible through his app-based games, expanding beyond just basketball.
He says that gamifying fitness centers on two key questions: “What if fitness was as addicting as games?” and “What if fitness was as fun as games?”
“Gamification is definitely a growing trend and spreading to other areas,” he added. “It’s growing beyond fitness and into sports. For example, I wrote a book about using game-based basketball training instead of traditional drills where 10 people stand in line and take turns shooting. This is because the best way to imitate a game or real life is through games… there are more people watching eSports than any other sports. The next generation will all play games so it’s natural for them to experience the same in work and fitness.”
Prigge, of Mayo Clinic, added that in order for technology-based fitness solutions to really be effective, they have to engage the “why” of what motivates people to be active.
“You really need sustainable change that comes down to ‘why am I being active?’ And ‘how do you help me be active in my daily life?’” he said.
Jewer for her part is going to stick with it. She said that before she gamified her workouts, she would go through phases of constantly having exercise in her routine and then would fall out of it due to her “crazy work schedule.”
“Associating exercise with my joy of games makes me feel like I am playing a game rather than working out, and I can see that working for a lot of others, [too],” she said.
Are 5-Minute Daily Workout Routines Really Beneficial?
If you’re running out of time to exercise today, you should probably just skip it, right? Wrong! You can reap the benefits of working out with sweat sessions as short as five minutes. You read that correctly: five minutes. Still skeptical? Keep reading to learn more about how micro-workouts can boost your health and strengthen your body.
Do 5-minute workouts help?
It’s possible you’ve never considered working out for only five minutes. It doesn’t sound like enough time to make a difference. After all, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion says that aerobic activity lasting longer than 10 minutesTrusted Source in duration counts toward the 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutesTrusted Source of vigorous aerobic exercise you should aim to get each week. But that doesn’t mean shorter, high-intensity exercises can’t help.
Benefits of regular exercise include everything from losing weight to getting better sleep to increasing energy levels. Keeping fit can also help tremendously with your self-confidence. So, shouldn’t anything count toward this goal? Well, researchers are discovering that even exercise sessions as sort as a minute may help you keep fit and active.
What the science says
A study from the University of Utah shows that all those little bits and pieces of exercise you do throughout the day can add up to something big. In fact, even a single “brisk” minute of moving can have a noticeable impact.
Women who incorporated short bursts of high-intensity activities into everyday life had a small decrease in their body mass index (BMI), compared to control subjects. Men had similar results. The calorie burn during this short but intense session of exercise allowed the women to weigh about 1/2 pound less than their nonactive counterparts. Odds of obesity also went down for both men and women who did these quickie workouts. The key is kicking up the intensity level of whatever you’re doing, versus focusing solely on the length of time.
Another study published in ObesityTrusted Source revealed that splitting exercise up into short chunks makes some sense when it comes to appetite control. One set of obese participants did one hour of exercise each day while another set did 12 sessions of five-minute workouts. In the end, both groups had similar amounts of the protein that controls appetite in their blood.
The group that did the short workouts, though, said they felt an average of 32 percent fuller throughout the daytime hours. In other words, their satiety had increased by doing intermittent workouts of just five minutes in length.
You also may have heard of something called Tabata training. A Tabata workout is actually a four-minute high-intensity interval training workout that is made up of 20 seconds of hard effort and 10 seconds of rest, repeated eight times. The name comes from the author of a study on interval training that was published in 1996. The results of this study showed that short interval sessions greatly improved the body’s anaerobic and aerobic systems.
Fitting exercise into your routine
This all sounds good, but you may feel like finding even five minutes to exercise is impossible with your busy schedule. Or maybe when you finally do get some down time, you just want to rest. Nobody says staying fit is easy, but it doesn’t have to be impossible either.
Tips to find time
- Use TV commercial breaks to your advantage. You can get up and do jumping jacks or get down and do pushups before your television show resumes.
- Try the nano workout method by exercising while you do daily tasks like brushing your teeth. Instead of just standing there, do a few calf raises.
- Set a reminder on your phone to motivate you to exercise throughout the day. You could close your office door to do yoga or take a short walk as a work break.
- Walk to complete errands instead of driving. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Park farther away from the store.
Keep it consistent for the best results. After a while, you may tweak your routine just enough that more movement naturally fits into your day.
Short workouts to try
You don’t need a gym membership to work up a sweat, either. In fact, the logistics of getting to the gym, getting changed, and finally working out may kill time and your motivation. When you feel inspired to move, try searching for quickie workouts that you can find for free on YouTube.
Some examples:
- Work your core with XHIT’s 5 Minute Abs routine. You’ll complete a series of five exercises that are each one minute long. Prepare to become an expert at straight-edged planks, hip thrusts, oblique crunches, side planks, and full situps.
- Work your favorite asset with this 5-minute Butt and Thigh Workout by Fitness Blender. You’ll do a variety of squats using the pattern of 40 seconds on with five seconds of rest. These moves will help lift, tone, and strengthen your bottom half so you’ll look better in your jeans and have more power for your daily activities.
- POPSUGAR Fitness shares this 5-Minute Fat-Blasting Bodyweight Workout video for those of you who need an all-over burn. You’ll start with jumping jacks and sprint intervals. Then you’ll move on to pike jumps, scissor jacks, and jumping lunges and squats.
- This 4-minute Tabata workout by Rebekah Borucki has been viewed over 2 million times. It’s part of her series titled “You have four minutes” — and it’s killer. Each exercise in the workout is performed twice, each for 20 seconds, followed by 10 seconds of rest. She suggests doing it as a warmup to a longer routine or as a start to your morning.
Not near a computer? Set your watch or phone for a five-minute alarm and try doing as many bodyweight exercises as you can fit in. You can do pushups, situps, planks, squats, jumps, lunges, jogging in place, or whatever else. Just stick to it and try to get to the highest intensity level possible. And don’t forget to drink plenty of water when you’re done!
