Exercise better for health than dietary changes Scientists are lending a helping hand to overweight men who have difficulty staying away from unhealthy food: get your heart rate up a few times per week and you’ll improve your health more than you would by losing weight through dietary changes. (Photo: Colourbox) Here’s some good news for students living on spaghetti and meat sauce and bad canteen food, and for fathers who struggle to find the energy to cook up a proper meal for the family. If you exercise every day and get your heart rate up just a few times a week, giving it a bit extra when you run, bike or swim, your body will get healthier than if you change your diet in the hope that you’ll lose weight. If you can’t improve your diet, just exercise This is the simple message from a team of Danish researchers who have made the first thoroughly controlled study of how diet and exercise affects overweight men aged between 20 and 40. ”Scarily” little exercise enough to keep you healthy Backed up by top researchers Exercise fills you up
Gamification Blog Blogging Innovation » Enhancing Creativity – Adult Games versus Kid Games In my blog post, “How Can Goals Enhance Creativity” I said… “…As long as everyone in the organization believes they are playing a game which is designed to get them energized today, and it is not specifically about hitting the target, I can assure you that people will be more motivated.” Games can be a useful tool for enhancing creativity. Not all games are created equally. With adult games, there tend to be rigid rules, the games have an ending, and there are winners and losers. Think about nearly every game we play: Monopoly, poker, or basketball. They typically have a complex set of rules that all of the players need to adhere to. Adult games end. And nearly every adult game has a winner and one or more losers. Contrast this with kid games. Kids play games with very loose rules, the game continues until they say it ends, and there is no concept of winner/loser. If you watch kids play. Rarely is a stopwatch involved when kids play. And there are no winners or losers.
Thirty minutes of daily exercise is enough ‘Less is more’ now also appears to apply to exercise and weight loss, new study finds. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Exercising for a full hour rather than a half does not provide any additional loss in either body weight or fat, a new Danish study shows. Over a three-month period, scientists monitored 60 overweight, but healthy, Danish men in their efforts to improve their physical fitness. One half were asked to work out one hour a day, wearing a heart rate monitor and a calorie counter. The results show that 30 minutes of exercise intense enough to produce a sweat is enough to turn the tide on an unhealthy body mass index. “The men who exercised 30 minutes a day lost an average of 3.6 kilos in three months, while the full-hour group only lost 2.7 kilos,” one of the researchers, PhD student Mads Rosenkilde, says in a press release from Copenhagen University. “Both groups had a reduction in body mass of around 4 kilos.” And there’s an additional bonus to exercising for 30 minutes:
Game On: The Rules of Online Ad Engagement Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research, Institute for the Future If you're wondering what engages people consider this: Globally, there are now 1 billion people on the planet who play games for at least an hour a day. And that number is climbing fast with the growing adoption of smartphones and tablets. In fact, Jane McGonigal, director of game research at the Institute for the Future argues in her wildly popular TED talk, we should spend more time playing games too. Games like World of Warcraft give players the opportunity to save worlds, and the incentive to learn the habits of heroes – as well as solve big real-world problems. Gamification, the process of applying the best elements of gaming to real-world, non-game situations, is also incredibly effective at creating behavioural change. It’s no wonder then that brands have been quick to consider game mechanics to solve an advertising challenge: increasing ad engagement. Rule #1: Find the right game fit. Friday is Venn-day.
Wanna Come Out and Play? Community Engagement & Technology Development | MIT Center for Future Civic Media [This post originally appeared on the MIT CoLab Radio blog, in Danielle Martin's Media Mindfulness column.] When my old friend and collaborator Leo Burd returned to MIT as a research scientist for the Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM), we started to gather some like-minded folks to discuss how media and mapping tools and youth civic engagement can intersect in the world of the Media Lab. Both of us have often been called a bridge or a translator between technology developers and underserved community members. At first, we just wanted to be part of multi-directional conversations and find creative ways to document the ideas exchanged. At heart, we wanted to create processes of development where innovation happens iteratively with community educators, activists and youth as collaborators, not end users. Playing games in a public space are more fun with different kinds of players and if they keep happening over time.
The Burpee Workout: Get Fit Fast With This Simple Exercise When I played football in high school, my offensive line coach had an exercise he liked to use on us for punishment. When we were caught screwing around or didn’t respond with “sir” or didn’t hustle in-between plays, Coach Chamlee had to say just four words to elicit an audible groan from the offensive line: “Get your feet moving.” Those four words marked the beginning of one minute of pure hell. It was burpee time. The Benefits of Burpees The burpee is the ultimate full body exercise. Strength. Fat burning. Conditioning. Free. Portable. Burpees are how Mike Rowe keeps in shape to work his dirty jobs: How to Perform a Burpee The burpee is a ridiculously simple, full body exercise that will leave you gassed after doing only a few. To perform a basic burpee, just follow these instructions: When performing burpees, the key is to perform them in quick succession in order to get the conditioning benefits this exercise is famous for. Some of you might be thinking, “Hey, this is a squat thrust.”
Find Chaffy Heading Out on Your Own — Day 25: Establish an Exercise Routine When I was in high school, I didn’t have to worry about creating and sticking to a fitness routine. I had football coaches who took care of that for me. I just had to show up at the weight room at the designated time with the rest of my teammates and do the scheduled workout. Because of that consistency, along with a lot of hard work, I was in really good shape when I graduated and headed off to college. With my football days behind me, I pretty much stopped working out once I arrived on campus. I’d play the occasional pick-up basketball game, but I didn’t have a set fitness routine to maintain the strength and conditioning I achieved while in high school. I’ve noticed that a lot of young men heading out on their own fall into the same trap I did. If you didn’t exercise regularly in high school, without working out (and a healthy diet) you won’t become a fat ex-jock, you’ll just become fat. Why You Need a Fitness Routine Increases testosterone. Good for your brain. Reduced health costs.