Keeping fit in new ways

Fitness games

Playing video games or doing sports? It was a tough choice for many people who spent a long time at home isolating from the pandemic. An answer to the question is fitness games, which have become a new favorite of both gaming and fitness enthusiasts.

Wearing smart equipment and standing in front of screens, users are required to use their whole body to play the fitness games. The challenges would usually be hard enough to make the players sweat heavily to meet with their daily fitness goals.

Beijing office worker Liang Wanjia is one of those who started their fitness habit through fitness video games. Along with her husband,Zou Yi, they played Ring Fit Adventure, an exercising role-play game developed and published by Nintendo for the game console Nintendo Switch. It became a major way for them to exercise and have fun at home during the pandemic.

"Each week, I would play the Ring Fit Adventure three or four times. And each time, I would play about one and a half hours," Liang told China Daily. "It was hard for my body to keep up with the pace of the game at the very beginning, but now I can finish all the challenges.

"Honestly, I was not a fitness lover. I barely went to gyms or had a daily habit of doing sport. I felt it's a little bit boring to just run or exercise in gyms. But after I started to play this game, I have felt the benefits of keeping fit.

"Especially during such a special time, exercising in the gym could not be a good choice for many people. It's a relatively small closed environment for people to stay together. After all, we have to avoid gathering to stop the spread of the virus."

According to Reuters, Nintendo has shipped 1 million Switch consoles to China since it launched the device in the world's largest video games market at the end of 2019. While early sales were hampered by a limited number of available games, they were later boosted by the release of popular home exercise game Ring Fit Adventure.

In the early stages of the pandemic, the price of Ring Fit Adventure nearly tripled on Chinese e-commerce platforms. Demand boomed because many people had to stay at home for quarantine. Only in recent months has the price gone down.

"In order to play the Ring Fit Adventure, we bought the Nintendo Switch during the pandemic. And now we feel it's a really good investment," said Zou.

Fitness video games are also a good way to attract children into sports. The Dalian fitness lover Lyu told China Daily that two of his sons spent a long time playing fitness games during their quarantine at home. The boys had a bigger interest in playing the games than sweating away on running machines.

"They play a boxing fitness game on the Xbox and they also play the Ring Fit Adventure on the Switch," said Lyu. "The boxing game is really physically challenging for my eight-year-old and three-year-old sons."