Exercise Program for Adults Is All Fun and Games

Although they are in their 60s, Frank and Marian Del Veccio still play like kids.

On Thursday mornings, when the real kids are in school, the Del Veccios are at a health club, running relay races, twirling hula hoops and generally having fun.

The exercise program is named Recess, and it’s run by the Crunch health clubs in New York City and Miami Beach.

“The Recess thing is doing things we all had forgotten after we were kids,” said Marian Del Veccio, who moved with her husband to the resort’s trendy South Beach section after Frank retired three years ago from his Boston law practice. “There’s a funny kind of therapy involved, I think, in regressing. There’s something about a silly game and doing it as an adult.”

Recess makes exercise fun, said Frank Del Veccio. “I used to say this is my therapy,” he said. “I look forward to it.”

He used to run along the Charles River in Boston. “I thought that was real boring, but I did it,” he said.

Putting fun back in exercise was part of the plan for the program’s designer and South Beach club class leader, Kevin Creegan. Over about a dozen years in group exercise, he often had noted the large number of exercisers who burn out and drop out.

“I told the [club’s] athletic director about two years ago about wanting to develop a class based on the games we used to play at recess as children,” Creegan said. “When you are a kid, you do exercise because you want to do it--because it’s fun. That’s what I wanted to bring back.”

Creegan doesn’t try to make an exact count of the cardiovascular benefit the program holds. “You’re not going to keep your heart rate sustained like in a Step [aerobics] or Spinning [cycling] class--it’s more stop-and-go,” he said. “You probably burn more calories than in a rice cake and less calories than in a pint of Haagen-Dazs. It’s probably in the Moon Pie range.”

Creegan’s program includes jumping rope and running-backward races. “The two most fun parts are hula hoops, once they get past the frustration of remembering how, and the other thing people love is dodge ball,” he said. “That’s a passive-aggressive thing.”

“When I first saw the hula hoop, I remembered I was a decent hula hooper as a kid,” said Nina Weber Worth, 45, one of the Del Veccios’ Miami Beach classmates. “I took it and I tried it, and it was the hardest thing in the world. But by the third class, I won the endurance contest.”

She concedes there is something silly about all the fun and games. “It felt silly in a good way, in terms of letting your inhibitions go and throwing caution to the wind and just participating,” she said.

“I never do anything while they are facing the mirror,” Creegan said. “That eliminates them feeling silly because they never see. And I try to keep people from judging themselves.”

Making sure exercise is fun is valuable, outside experts agree. And fun is something that health clubs are turning to, said Carl Foster, an associate professor in the exercise and sport science department at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

People who join only for self-improvement often quit, he said. “At one year, you’ve got less than 50% who are still doing it. The dropout rate is the single largest problem in the industry.”

As for looking silly, “There are worse sins,” Foster said. “If you have to see someone looking like a giddy kid again versus someone getting the best physiological workout you can do, I would say more than half the people in our industry would come down for the former.”

It would be nice to see the fun expanded into other exercise areas, said Dan Wagman, a sports psychologist who is health and science editor for Muscle and Fitness magazine. “Cycling, lifting weights--couldn’t we manipulate them so that it becomes a little more fun?” he said.

“Where it doesn’t become a hassle, where it isn’t something you force yourself to do, where you actually enjoy it, then the likelihood of sticking with it is so much bigger.”