Abstract
(1) Background: Poor levels of physical fitness and motor skills are problems for today’s children. Active video games (AVG) could be an attractive strategy to help address them. The aim was to investigate the effects of AVG on health-related physical fitness and motor competence in children and adolescents with healthy weight. (2) Methods: Randomized and non-randomized controlled trials investigating the effects of AVG programs on health-related physical fitness and motor competence were included. Two different quality assessment tools were used to measure the risk of bias. Twenty articles met the inclusion criteria and the variables of interest were body mass index (BMI), body fat, cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), muscular fitness and motor competence. (3) Results: AVG interventions seem to have benefits in BMI when lasting longer than 18 weeks (SMD, −0.590; 95% IC, −1.071, −0.108) and in CRF (SMD, 0.438; 95% IC, 0.022, 0.855). AVG seems to be a promising tool to improve muscular fitness and motor competence but the effects are still unclear due to the lack of evidence. (4) Conclusions: AVG seem to be an effective tool for improving some components of health-related physical fitness and motor competence in healthy-weight children and adolescents, but the effect on some fitness components needs further research. Therefore, AVG may be included as a strategy to improve health.
Highlights
Childhood and adolescence are decisive periods because numerous physical, physiological and psychological changes take place [1]
Oliveira et al [67] performed a systematic review focused on healthy-weight children and adolescents and the results showed that Active video games (AVG) were effective in reducing weight and body mass index (BMI)
The most recent article about the effects of AVG in motor competence was performed by Medeiros et al and the results showed that AVG and PE group improved motor competence, with the control group improving performance on more of the motor skills included in the TGMD-2 than PE group
Summary
Childhood and adolescence are decisive periods because numerous physical, physiological and psychological changes take place [1]. Lifestyle, understood as the habits and behaviors that, whether healthy or not, are acquired during these stages and have a clear influence on adult health [1,2]. Physical activity (PA) is generally considered a healthy lifestyle directly related to health and to physical fitness [3,4]; being true that fitness has an important genetic component, it is associated with active and sedentary behaviors [4,5]. Health-related physical fitness is currently considered one of the most important health markers [1,3]. The level of physical fitness is a predictor of morbidity and mortality for cardiovascular and metabolic disease and for all causes of death in life [1,4,5,6].
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