Exercise
The Vigorboard's ability to combine fun with a full cardio-vascular workout has prompted St Helens council to promote the boards in all of its high schools and some of its primary schools, seeing it as a method of inspiring children who wouldn't normally take part in traditional team sports to take regular exercise.
The Vigorboard is proving a valuable weapon in the fight against childhood obesity, with some teachers at the schools currently trialing the boards also reporting drops in truancy, with pupils not wishing to miss school should they miss their Vigorboard session.
An independent study conducted by the University of Salford found that vigorboarding resulted in an average increase in heart rate of 227% and a 535% increase in energy expenditure. The study also concluded that vigorboarding results in a 233% greater energy expenditure (407kcal/hr) than walking at 3 mph (174.5kcal/hr).
In its conclusion, the authors of the university study went on to say, 'Vigorboarding may be a useful alternative to increasing physical activity levels and energy expenditure, especially for individuals that do not wish to participate in the usual sports or activities performed by adolescents.'.
Read more about this topic: The Wave (board)
Famous quotes containing the word exercise:
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)