I need a bit of help devising an experiment

[Audhumla]

I'm currently working on my senior Extended Essay for IHS. I've decided to write it on the health benefits of games like DDR, PIU, ITG and so on. I'm sure this website will be a great resource. Since this is a rather significant paper, we are supposed to put more effert into it than a normal research paper. As part of this, I've decided to create and conduct an expirement testing just how beneficial DDR is as excercise. I'm probably leaning more towards general fitness benefits than just weight loss.

My current idea is to perform some fitness benchmark to see how "in shape" someone is. Then that person would use DDR (and only DDR/ITG/PIU) as their excercise for a week. Then they would perform the same fitness benchmark again, and the improvement would be noted. However, I'm sure that this alone isn't enough. If they improved their time running a mile by a minute, 30 seconds, what does that mean? I'm sure I'm going to need to test the same benchmark with additional forms of excercise as the only excercise for about a week. Since I really couldn't use the same person for more than one (since a week of excercise would change their fitness level, and they could plateau and skew data) I'll definetly have to use a group of people. What I'm worried about is that their beginning times on the same fitness benchmark may differ greatly.

So I have a few questions:
1) Are there any fitness benchmarks that are considered to be the standard in fitness benchmarks?
2)How important would it be to have the expirementee record their diet through the expirement?
3)I'm definetly shooting for the excercise form to be the only variable in the expirement. Is there anything else I would have to be sure stays constant between groups? (Age, gender, diet, and so on? )
4)Any other advice you could give me regarding my experiment? Is the current set-up total trash? Are there any small tweaks that need to be made?
5)Any books regarding fitness and what makes an excercise "good" that you could reccomend?
6)Any anecdotal evidence you could provide?

Thanks in advance :D

(I hope this is posted in the right place)

[psisar]

I'll try and help out the best I can, although I'm not an expert by any means on the subject. My first word of advice is to see and personal trainer, and a dietician... they can give you better and more accurate answers

How important would it be to have the expirementee record their diet through the expirement?

Extremely. Say you have one person that's eating McDonald's every day for the experiment, and another that's eating nothing but fruits and nuts, both who are doing the same amount of exercise. Obviously the one who's been eating healthier is going to perform better than the one who hasn't. Diet is a very important part of personal health, if not the most important, so it would be essential for your subjects to keep track of what they eat.

I'm definetly shooting for the excercise form to be the only variable in the expirement. Is there anything else I would have to be sure stays constant between groups?

I don't know how many people you're able to get together, but I would either have one group of people with approximately the same physical attributes... IE a group that's all between 5'4" and 5'6" and between 140-160 lbs (that's just an example), a group of males and a group of females. Or, have sets of people, three groups of four (two males and two females) varying in age, weight and height per group.

Sorry I can't help you out more with this, but maybe some others on the boards can... read around at some older posts too for some good ideas as well.

Good luck!

[abrannan]

Is a week really going to be long enough to get measurable results? A good overall general cardio-fitness measurement is resting heart rate, but I doubt that just a week of regular exercise will be long enough to get solid results in that area, particularly if you're introducing new people to dance games. It takes at least a few weeks to get up out of beginner and light modes and really get into strong cardio activity. How long do you have for your research experiment? A 3-6 month exercis eprogram would definitely be best for showing demonstrable results, but I doubt you've got that long.

What may work better for you is somethign along the lines of what others have done with research papers here, and do a survey of the members to determine their experience with dance games. Maybe ask what their perceived fitness level was before beginning playing (could you run a mile without stopping, could you do X, could you do Y), find out how long they've played, what level they're playing at now, how often they play, and whether or not they could achieve milestones they couldn't before (the mile, X, and Y from the earlier questions). That would be enough to at least show strong anecdotal evidence of benefit from dance games, which if written up properly in a proposal, could get you a grant to do a more focused study (I know, you're not lookin to make a career out of DDR-related health research). You might also contact RedOctane and see if they can provide any additional data or details of their experiments with the elementary school they provided ITG to. Although i believe that was focused more on classroom performance improvement, rather than physical fitness.