Fitness | Can fitness apps help students work out more?

APD NEWS

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Input "fitness" or "running" into any app store and you'll easily find dozens of results for programs to help you exercise. Global developers for workout apps seem to have estimated the scale of the fitness market to be the same in China.

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According to China's Fitness for All Program 2016-2020, the number of people who exercise routinely is estimated to reach 435 million by 2020, whole spending on sports is expected to total 1.5 trillion yuan (approximately 238 billion US dollars). With these numbers in mind, fitness apps have increasingly joined the competition.

Compared to hiring a personal trainer, the apps provide a cost-effective way to exercise. However, students in China have complained that the apps their schools are pressuring to use may not actually be helping them work out more.

Ma Lin didn't realize she would get an F when from her university simply because she did not finish an accumulated 60km running, recorded on her app.

“I’d never skipped sports class or dropped out of the class and I’d also passed a series of physical tests but I still failed,” Ma told China Youth News, a Beijing-based news outlet and added that she was not the only victim in her class as almost half the class failed.

Another student, Li Miao faced the same situation and found it hard to accept the monitoring on her fitness app.

“Workout exercise only includes running? It should depend on personal preference just like eating. Now a stuff suddenly comes out and strictly tells you what you should eat as well as how much you should eat. Who can I feel happy?” asked Li.

Seen an indicator of health, running was a constant for Chinese students in elementary school and some universities. In the past, teachers or coaches played the role of judges and recorded students' time. But as fitness apps emerged, many universities introduced them in place of manual recording.

Students can govern their time and run at any time while teachers were also "liberated" from judging and recording. However, a series of deficiencies have been continually roasted by both, like wrong GPS locating, poor network or weak signals.

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“Sometimes, [we] finish running and find it is not recorded due to some deficiencies,” Ma Lin said helplessly. A university physical education teacher, surnamed Ma claimed that more students cheated with the apps.

“It is found that some students hold more than one phone when running or shaking their mobile phones while biking to accrue the kilometers,” Ma complained, while also asserting that "there is no other way than the compulsory exercise.”

In 2016, China issued the Health China 2030 Outline to beef up national health and public medical infrastructure. The outline states that the country encourages students, women and elders to take part in workout exercises by upgrading fitness facilities and making more room for fitness. Students’ campus workout time is also required not to be less than one hour a day.

However, compulsory exercise should adhere to a scientific way, said Mao Zhenning, the head of the Sports Association of Schools. He also suggested that teachers should consider if the compulsory app monitoring could actually do more harm than good to students' mental health.

(CGTN)