Adventure Course Overview

Rediscovering How to Play

The traditional viewpoint that exercise must be uncomfortable, un-enjoyable, or even painful in order to be effective has turned many-a-health-seeker away from starting a fitness program. This is understandable because people naturally avoid pain. Most in the fitness industry have fallen asleep and forgotten that play is the best form of exercise. Fun, exciting, physical, social, functional play. It’s time to get back to our primal roots…

Exercise Meets Gaming

Within the Life Cirque facility is an awesome two-story 12,000 square foot obstacle course called an Adventure Course. It is surrounded by an observation mezzanine that provides spectators (members and non-members) with fantastic up-close views of the most skilled players as they whiz by.

We have developed 15 exciting mind-body fitness games that can be played on the Adventure Course. Most of the games are very socially interactive and promote teamwork and altruism. Simply playing the games quickly develops practical strength, balance, and agility, and improves one’s overall fitness beyond almost anything that can be achieved in health clubs or gyms.

The fitness games, also known as Adventure Games, draw from many popular fitness trends like parkour, CrossFit, and obstacle racing, as well as from many popular reality TV shows like Ninja Warrior, Wipeout, Amazing Race, Biggest Loser, and Man vs. Wild. The games are designed to be captivating and habit-forming.

The Adventure Course features a variety of graded obstacles and challenges that require players to climb, crawl, vault, swing, lift, carry, balance, throw, evade, etc. This is how our ancestors moved through their environments thousands of years ago and how we are still biomechanically designed to move today.

The Future of Fitness: An Exciting New Sport for Everyday People

The Adventure Games and the Adventure Course were designed to be a fun and exciting fitness and entertainment outlet for everyday people.

The Adventure Games are intended to trigger strong adrenaline responses in players and spectators. In players, this has shown to increase dopamine levels, sharpen focus, and suppress pain. As with sports, players have great fun and don’t even realize how hard they’re working, while spectators are entertained and inspired to work harder and play more frequently.

Players can compete with themselves and others, thanks to a high-tech tracking system that automatically records player performance data, generates game scores, and, if player elects, posts those scores to virtual leader boards and social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Performance data could also be shared with health care providers, health insurers, and employers, resulting in better health care and significantly reduced health insurance costs for corporations and individuals.

How the Adventure Course Came To Be

The Adventure Course was invented in 2003 by personal trainer Scott Sperry. After seeing some of his most committed clients lose interest in traditional exercises, he began to experiment with a new approach that combined coordination, balance, functional strength, team building, and a sense of risk to sharpen focus and make the activity exciting.

The adrenaline rush that this new technique produced helped his clients push beyond their ordinary mental and physical limitations and enabled them to meet increasing challenges while having fun. For the first time they were losing themselves in the moment and forgetting about the "work" aspect of the activity. Together, they had discovered that to become sustainable, exercise must embody the same core elements that make playing and watching sports fun and exciting or it won't arouse people and keep them coming back for more.