To ensure that children between the age group of 8 and 12 years grow up to be fit and make exercise a part of their daily life, cricketer Virat Kohli and technology-driven fitness platform Stepathlon Lifestyle on Tuesday launched Stepathlon Kids.
Virtual race
The company will launch its operations with a 30-day pedometer-based mass-participation virtual race designed for kids. It will encourage them to participate in a 30-day race around a virtual world.
The children will be given pedometers to track their steps and encouraged to take 15,000 steps a day for a healthy lifestyle and to create long-term positive behaviour. These steps, when entered on the Stepathlon Kids website, will get converted into distance and the team will move across a map of the world.
To make it a fun activity, the race will take the children on a virtual journey around the world, provide them information on health, history, social studies and general knowledge.
Responsibility
Speaking at the launch, the cricketer said: “As a sports figure, I realise my responsibility towards creating awareness about the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle, especially among children. The statistics on growing obesity in India are getting scarier day by day.”
He added that a fit body and healthy lifestyle not only make one physically strong, but also make a person feel good about himself/herself. “More importantly, it works. I can vouch for it,” Virat said.
Ravi Krishnan, co-founder and CEO of Stepathlon Lifestyle, said: “Children today have become more sedentary than ever in the history of our species. The initiative aims to get them out of the house.”
Virat said he wasn’t very interested in his fitness regime until a couple of years back. It was only after the 2012 Indian Premier League that he realised he had to become more devoted towards his fitness if he wanted to rise above average. “It started because of my sport, but now it has become my lifestyle.”
