• MOD.'s Take
  • Delve Deeper
  • Fresh Perspectives

Exercise just kind of sucks. Sure, some people like it, but most of us don’t. We know it’s one of the best things that we can do to keep healthy, but that doesn’t change anything. Creative designers Grumpy Sailor have created Cascade to attempt the near impossible: making exercise fun.  

Welcome to the Training Ground. The goal is to make Cascade explode. What can you do with your body to get it excited? How do you feel when you are doing it? 

 

How can we make exercise more fun and hurt less? 

Let your pleasure guide you 

If you worry too much about heart rate and reaching specific levels of effort, exercise has been proven to get harder. Instead, if you set your goal to just feeling good (or as good as you can), you will probably hit those targets anyway. 

It’s better with friends 

The tighter a group or team is, the more likely you will keep exercising or playing sport together. It’s important to play with people you like, and to make sure you have some rules in place to help keep everyone on board. 

Make a game out of it 

Have you heard of exergaming? It’s the new big thing. Distract yourself from the pain of exercising by making it into a game. This has been found to distract you from the effort, stay longer, work harder, and have more fun! 

Discover more:

Watch:

Explore:

Read:

Find this exhibit at the UniSA Library

We worked with a group of young people to review Training Ground. Here’s what they had to say…

It’s such a weird sensory experience. I feel like I am in a pool of rice. — Georgia

If you are interacting with this it makes you exercise. It gives you different pleasure to how I normally exercise. It’s good for people who like games, it makes you want to try more and more. — Denish

I just want to dance. It’s like playing a dancing arcade game. — Miranda

I find this technology really interesting. It’s like you move on the floor and the squares go up and down. — Abdul