Creative Spelling

BBC NEWS | Health | Rock drummers ‘are top athletes’.

As I recently discussed my own workout experience with drumming, here’s confirmation from a bona fide drummer!

Since Nintendo’s Wii console was released, prepackaged with Wii Sports, there has been an increased interest in video gaming as a exercise medium.

Of course initially the options on Wii Sports were limited, it offered you a chance to track your reflexes and accuracy over the length of time you chose to maintain use of it as a fitness tool.  Not exactly the best set of tests our routines available, it was more for entertainment purposes than for setting any specific goals.

Just recently, Nintendo has released the much-anticipated Wii Fit, complete with a specialized component that will weigh you and track your actual progress.  Having not actually tried it myself, I can only pass along second-hand info that the minigames used to get players moving are enjoyable and indeed a workout.

Unfortunately, neither of those fitness-targeted products appeals to me much, but I do love video games.  Luckily, I was thoroughly looking forward to playing Rock Band on my PS3 last fall.  Specifically, I wanted to play drums.  I had absolutely no drumming experience [aside from bothering everyone with the occassional pen drumming at my desk] and wasn’t even sure I’d be able to play all that well.  A quick go through the included drumming tutorial [it teaches basic drumming technique as well as specifics for helping with the gameplay], and I was ready to try my hand [both of them, plus a foot] at drumming my way through the venues and the extensive song list.  Surprisingly, the easiest songs were difficult for me to get a handle on at first, maybe I was too excited and couldn’t deal with having to play slower songs.  But as I stuck with it and got a feel for the timing and force required for good hits on the drum pads, it definitely got easier.  I got booed off several times and had to go practice some songs at a slower pace, but it was all very helpful.  Once I was confident in my form and rhythm, I was able to really put myself into the game.

So here I had Rock Band, a game not intended for exercise, but drumming is inherently a workout.  I was getting excited about getting better and playing harder songs, I was really into playing the songs I liked and playing aggressively as my confidence grew.  I would play through 3 or 4 songs and realize I was soaking with sweat.  The first night I was playing so intently, I think I drank 3 or 4 bottles of water during the course of an hour or so.

Because of the increasing difficulty of songs, the varying levels of difficulty, and the sheer volume of tracks to play and open up, as well as purchasable download content, Rock Band has kept me interested for 7 or 8 months now.  This is a far better retention time than most games I can think of, and incredibly impressive compared to the limited content of games intended for working out.

My point of all this is that prior to playing Rock Band, I had been trying to lose weight.  Over the course of maybe 6 months I had lost only 5 lbs.  Granted, I hadn’t been trying that hard, but I had a lot of other things going on that were more important at the time.  In the first 4 or 5 months of playing Rock Band and changing nothing else about my diet or daily habits, I managed to lose 25 lbs.  I find that kind of weight loss incredibly impressive since I believe it to be a direct result of playing drums for a video game that is not intended to help people get or stay fit.

Rock Band 2 was just announced and the full song list released this week.  I’m eagerly awaiting the fall release date and hopefully another 25 lbs of weight loss, just from playing a video game.