I empower my clients to successfully meet their customized health goals through information and lifestyle changes. One of the things I encourage my clients to do is to “exergame”. Movement is critical to overall physical well-being. Theoretically when buddies are striving for maximum movement each day, they can playfully compete with each other on the number of miles they walked/ran or the number of steps they took each day. Exergaming gear (Fitbit, Jawbone, wrist pedometers, etc) seems to be very current on trend, and it seems to help people measure their progress with others. That seems to be beneficial for the most part when the buddies are similarly active.
If a more sedentary person was encouraged to join their team, however, the results are not so positive. This third person would start to feel like a third wheel because they may not be able to compete effectively with the other two. When you push your body physically and mentally to compete, and you can’t ever come out on top, what does this do psychologically? It is not positive, as I know people that lost their motivation because they couldn’t fit in with their peers. The unfortunate thing is that these exergaming technological gear (Fitbits and pedometers, and jawbone, etc) was designed for people to get motivated to do more than they normally would. In actuality, there is an active subset that is being motivated to do MORE; but a sedentary subset that it may not be reaching or helping.
