Fitness lab tech at the forefront of change

There is no lonelier journey than the one travelled atop a stationary bike.

You are against the clock, against the wheel tension, against yourself; the only things that change in this mad dash for health are your thoughts and, more often than not, your will to keep going.

If, however, you happen to be taking that lonely ride in a lab high above the Butterdome track-breathing through a hose and hooked up to a computer that is reading your body's reaction to your anchored trek-Alex Game will be there to cheer you on.

As the kinesiology lab co-ordinator, Game's main duty is to run all the fitness testing-related undergraduate science labs within the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation. This entails helping the teaching assistants with the finer points of instruction and designing exams. Game's role also includes setting up a series of demonstrations that range from how to properly tape an ankle, to administering and interpreting fitness data from various exercise tests, to performing skin-fold caliper tests for body-fat indexing.

The Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation is Known as a leader in high-performance sport education and research, and Game says the faculty has recently embarked on an important interdisciplinary shift that comes thanks to a growing push towards exercise as a tool to achieve and maintain good health. As a result, physical education and recreation students are beginning to see a lot more of kinesiology's amiable lab tech, as their education becomes more and more grounded in fitness and health assessments, as well as clinical experience.

"Five years ago [Alberta Health Services] only had one exercise specialist; now they have 12 or 15," said Game, "It is our students who are in those jobs and they're the ones giving us the feedback saying that's what students need to know."

Now entering his tenth year, this U of A master of science grad is also responsible for running the Faculty's Sport and Health Assessment Centre within the Exercise Physiology Lab, which conducts health and fitness tests on everyone from those interested in losing weight to professional hockey players.

And while most people separate work from play, Game also juggles an active family life by playing recreational hockey and rugby, as well as volunteering as the Pandas rugby team strength and conditioning coach. He says he does it because it doesn't feel like work.
"The best part about working at the university is my peers and colleagues who I work with day in and day out, and the students," said Game. "I'd say 99 per cent of the students are very motivated, want to be here, want to learn and are a pleasure to deal with."

This story was first published in Folio, March 26 2010