Water-Walking-Ball for Physical Fitness

What is it about?

Water-walking, while standing inside a ball, can be used as a form of physical fitness training to strengthen and broaden (bandwidth) core muscles. You go inside a ball, through a waterproof zipper opening, and the ball is inflated with a blower, and zipped closed so you can walk-on-water without getting wet, yet feel connected to the water in a powerful way. Trying to balance yourself while standing up, you will need to exert a good amount of core muscle bandwidth. Unlike walking on a tightrope or slackline where you only need to balance mostly from falling left or right, in a ball you can fall in any direction, front, back, left, right, or diagonally in any direction. So it is kind of like walking on a tightrope through a 4-dimensional space, i.e. there's an extra degree of freedom in terms of how you can fall. This requires not just core muscle strength but also muscle bandwidth to be able to overcome the inherent instability. We gamify this experience using virtual reality or extended reality so while you're in the ball, you're wearing a headset that's like a flight simulator, with a goal of keeping a certain metric or task or space, etc.. As a result you can jump into a ball and become super-fit in terms of core muscle strength and bandwidth.

Featured Image

Photo by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash

Photo by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is important because there is a growing number of us with back problems. It is often said "sitting is the new smoking" and as we sit hunched over keyboards or desks, or hunched over a screen of a handheld device, we're destroying our backs. We need a way to regain spinal health, and "waterballing" is a great way toward fitness. By making it into a game, we can track fitness progress and development using technology that connects us to each other and our environment. In many ways the ball is also symbolic of technology as a vessel that connects us to each other and our surroundings, as a quintessential "unit sphere" (in metres, i.e. 2m in diameter = 1m radius unit sphere), so it serves as both a specific example of Mersivity and more broadly Mersivity itself is an important concept.

Perspectives