GoTrybe.com 1 Year Membership Giveaway

Its pretty hard these days to get kids up off the couch and moving.  The electronic overload of video games and internet consuming most of their time, coupled with their parent’s generation also becoming increasingly dependent on technology, is causing children to expand at an alarming, and dangerous rate.

So what do we do about it? 

We use what they already know and love, to teach them to know and love exercise: the internet.

GoTrybe.com is a great website to get kids excited about exercise and proper nutrition.  The video below explains GoTrybe.com and why its such a novel idea.

I headed to the site a few days ago, to give it a shot.

After entering all my info, and picking my grade level (I chose middle-of-the-road 6-8 grade level, but the site goes the whole way up to 12th grade) I got to pick my avator. Much like a WiiMe, I chose her hair, face and clothes, hit save and started exploring.

The site has so much fun information, written in a way to appeal to kids, and encourage them to give things a shot.  Its very user friendly, and easy to navigate, so kids can do it by themselves, or with an adult.  You can build your own workout routine, divided into warm-up, cardio, and cool down sections, or you can choose an exercise routine that’s already made for you.  The exercises are easy to understand and age appropriate, while effective and fun.

There is an exercise journal function where kids can write down what activities they did that day, and how they felt about it. Tryber’s can earn pooints by completing all the different sections (fitness, nutrition, wellness, and motivation to play different games or buy clothes for your avatar (your little gotrybe person.) This teaches children that by being active you can earn the right to play video games- the more active you are, the more play time you can earn. There is a leader board for points, so you can see how you measure up with kids around the country, and motivating you to go out and move to get to that top spot.There is a buddy feature that allows your child to make friends with other children using the GoTrybe.com site, and share workout tips, recipes, or just chat about whatever it is kids chat about (ugh, I’m getting old.)

The GoTrybe.com Store was my favorite part, because, come on, its clothes. There are all kinds of shirts, tanks and sweatshirts so your child can fashionably declare that they love to exercise. This one’s my favorite.

I find this site more inspirational than, say, a Wii Fit console, because instead of surrendering to video games and  turning them into something that sort of, kind of, in a round a bout way gets a child move, GoTrybe.com encourages them to actually unplug and engage with, you know, the world itself.

You can go to GoTrybe.com and sign up for a free 7 day trial to see what its all about.  However, the wonderful people at GoTrybe.com are allowing me to give away a free 1 year membership to GoTrybe.com to a lucky reader.  Leave a comment telling me what child you would give the membership to and why. I’ll choose a winner on Monday September 22, 2008.

Make fitness fun for a child close to you.

grounded fitness, fitness, health, yoga, pilates, strength training, personal trainer, cardiovascular, cardio, exercise, wellness, weight loss, blog, blogging, fitness blog, weightloss blog, gotrybe.com, kids fitness, internet, childhood obesity