A Week of Wii Fit

It has actually been more than a week that I have been using the Wii Fit. Here are my thoughts on it.

I like the way the program has been laid out, the first option is Yoga. This starts out slow, with deep breathing exercises and works up to more difficult stretches. This is a good way to get warmed up for the Strength Training exercises. After that, are the Aerobic exercises, including the famous Hula Hoop, but also rhythmic stepping and running in place. It seems that there is a good balance in all three of the sections to work different parts of the body, and different muscle groups, but I think that it is fairly limited by the hardware in what kind of exercises can be done. I have tried to follow a basic rule of “if the game lets you, do it.”  This means that when I unlock more reps, I try to do those reps. If I unlock a new Yoga pose or Strength exercise, I do it. The only exception is if I literally cannot do the full reps. Then I go back down a peg until I feel like the number of reps is starting to become easier, then I ramp up.

I do have a number of problems with the software, however. Once again, most of the problems stem from limitations of the hardware. All Wii Fit has to go by is the balance board. There are sensors on each corner of the board, and they measure changes in your balance. Most of the Yoga poses rely on this, as well as some of the strength training. It places a lot of emphasis on maintaining your center of balance, and it scores you accordingly. Right now, the most difficult exercise for me to do “properly” is a rowing exercise. You stand with your arms stretched out in front of you, then bend your knees and pull your arms back as if you were rowing. The way that the Wii Fit registers a correct rep is that your center of balance shifts backwards. This is very difficult for me, since most of my weight is hanging over my belt, and my arms just do not have the mass to change the center of gravity to the rear. In order for the damn thing to register the rep, I am almost falling over backwards.

One of my biggest frustrations is the fact that the game keeps telling me the same thing over and over, after every exercise. This breaks the rhythm of the workout, since every message needs to be acknowledged by a press of the button on the remote. I am now doing around 15 Yoga poses a day, and after every single one of them, every single day, I get told that I should do Yoga poses every day to help align my spine. When I finish an exercise, I typically have to push the button half a dozen times before I can select the next exercise to move on. Two to three messages regarding what the previous exercise benefits, one more to acknowledge the “do this every day” admonishment, one more to acknowledge the time spent doing the exercise being added to the “time bank,” another to acknowledge the score given to me. After all that, you are given the choice to go back to the exercise selection menu or retry the exercise, with retry the default selection. If I get in too much of a hurry pressing the buttons to get to the next exercise, I wind up starting the one I just did all over again and I have to back out of that one to get to the next one.

Another problem I have is that apparently, the designers are really concerned about getting sued. Any exercise that has you standing on one foot warns you about losing your balance, and tells you lean on something or get someone to hold you up while you do it. I don’t like holding onto the remote during the exercises, so I usually click to start the exercise to set it down. If I forget that I have to press the damn button again before I can actually do the exercise, I have to step off the balance board to grab the remote, press the button and set it back down. This may cause the game to get confused about your weight and balance on the board, since it takes a reading before every exercise to get a basis of comparison to count reps.

I really wish that they had included some method for creating a workout routine. Some way to select exercises and place them in order, then you start the workout without having to select every exercise individually. It would just move from one exercise to the next with minimal interaction with the software, and then provide scores and other data after the workout is complete. As it stands right now, the total time spent working out versus time spent on the workout is about 60% exercise, 40% pressing the button and listening to repeated messages about working out every day. I think the designers figured this would keep you from doing too much at a time, that way you wont have a heart attack and your family sues or something. But for me, its just frustrating. It is hard enough to make myself do the damn exercises, and I really start wanting to just get them over with.

The biggest struggle for me right now has nothing to do with how the game is run, its more to do with me. After I bought the thing, I did a lot of reading on the net about other people had used it and what its effectiveness was. I found at least three blogs where people had bought it and tracked their progress daily. They had about the same rate of progress; they lost between 3 and 5 pounds the first week, and by the end of two months, they had lost around 20 pounds, and a couple of inches off their waistline. I didn’t go into this thing expecting a miraculous overnight change, but I was expecting to see something after a week of pushing my limits and changing my eating habits. As of yesterday, there had been a net total of zero change. I would drop a pound one day, to see an increase of two pounds the next, then drop again the next change. The cumulative change over a week has been zero, and it has made it very difficult to find the motivation to expend the amount of effort that I have been doing for no results. I know that my weight didn’t change much when I was sitting around and eating whatever the hell I wanted, and now I am seeing the same thing after cutting out all soda, all sugar, eating healthier, etc. So my head starts wondering what the hell I am doing this for.

I know why I am trying to get in shape. I mentioned the biggest reason a few posts back. The other reason is that I am tired of being a fat bastard that gets overlooked by the opposite sex. I have enough deficiencies in that I am bald and short, without adding the fat part to it. I am not looking to get into a relationship until after I am legally instead of technically single, but I want to be able have a chance at one when I can.

So, I will keep trying, I will keep pushing myself, but I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t see any results after a month, I wont have the incentive. The bullshit to worth ratio will be so skewed, that it just wont be worth the effort. In other words, it at first you don’t succeed, try again, then give up. There’s no sense being a damn fool about it.

Goals

When I went home to Idaho for Christmas, I started thinking about a lot of things. As most of you know, I have been making some pretty big changes in my life. I left my second wife, took a new job and moved to a new part of the country. Thinking about all of these things while I was back in my “home turf,” I realized that I will be 40 this year, and the older I got, the less likely I was to do some of the “Things I Want To Do Before I Die.” One of the biggest goals I have had for years is to climb the Grand Teton.

This is the view I have had of my “back yard” my entire life. Even after I moved away from Idaho, I still considered this to be my back yard. I simply love those mountains. This is the friendly Idaho side. The more well known view is from the Wyoming side, since that is where Ansel Adams took his picture from. I  have always maintained that from the Idaho side, the mountains seem almost welcoming, a trio (really quartet) of mountains that makes you feel as if they were looking over the valley with a benign presence. If you were to look at them from the Wyoming side, they are more harsh and angular, almost defiant. The Idaho side says “Hi, welcome home!” while the Wyoming side says “Fuck you! I dare you to climb me!”

I know that I am no where near ready to make that climb, but I haven’t given up on my goal. I decided that I would spend the next year and a half getting ready to test myself by climbing Table Rock, circled crudely in red.

Almost every Boy Scout and college student in the area does this, and I never have. If you read the description of the climb, it isn’t for the out of shape. And no matter how many people make the excuse that round is a shape, it isn’t the shape to be in to climb mountains. If you also take into consideration that I am a smoker, and have been living years in elevations that dont exceed 200 feet over sea level, the hike becomes more difficult for me.

So, I decided that when I got home, I would start doing things to get into shape. I set the goal of a specific date, late July of 2010 to save up vacation days and get prepared. My plan was to try to do the same thing I was doing back when I lost about 30 pounds. I had been out of work for quite a while, and wound up taking a job at Walmart just to make ends meet. They put me in the stock room, and I spent a lot of time walking around the store and moving boxes. The best workout I got was when I was required to help unload the trucks that came in, maybe once a week. Somebody had abandoned a pedometer in the break room, and out of curiosity, I set it up and wore it every day for a week. I was averaging about 6 miles of walking a day. Even though my wife had been telling me that I looked like I was losing weight, I didn’t believe her until I went to visit some friends were are very into the whole fitness thing. I used their bathroom and they had a very nice scale in there. For shits and giggles, I stepped on it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was my gut.

I leaned over a little further and saw the numbers. I still couldn’t believe it. I left the bathroom and asked my friend, almost accusingly, if the scale was accurate. I should have known better than to ask him, since I know him well enough to know that the scale was probably accurate to within 1/100th of a pound and took into account molecular decay in its measurements. He assured me that it was accurate, and for the the first time in over 10 years, my weight was below 200 pounds. This was a big shot in the motivation, and I talked with my friends quite a bit about what I could do to continue the weight loss. I lost a grand total of thirty-five pounds before I got another job. Then I was back to the sedentary lifestyle, and pretty much gained it all back. My plan to start getting ready to do all the climbing was three big steps: Start eating like I was before; Exercise, even if its just walking; and quit smoking. I know that all three of these are critical to be able to do the climbs I want to do. The air is thinner at 10,000 feet, and if you are already struggling to get oxygen because of smoking, that elevation would cause you to lay on the ground, gasping for air like a carp. I knew that if I was going to climb 4000 feet, I didn’t want to carry anything more than I had to. That means food and lots of water. I decided that a backpack would be far superior than the belly pack I have all the damn time. I also wanted to be sure that I would be able to walk back down and not use all my energy on the way up, so my endurance would have to be increased.

My plan was to start immediately by eating better. I was also going to try to either join a gym or buy a treadmill. I figured to wait until February to join a gym, since by then it wouldn’t be so crowded by the “Resolutioners.” I am also reluctant to join a gym for stupid reasons. I still think that all the people in the gym will be fitness nuts and body builders. An indoor Muscle Beach full of beautiful people who will all point and laugh when I walk in, derisive comments flying my way, and sand imported from California for the sole purpose of kicking in my face.

Then Walmart came to my rescue again. They actually had Wii’s in stock on Thursday. I went in to  buy deodorant and walked out with a Wii. Sunday, I went in for milk and walked out with  Wii Fit. This works out well for me, since I can start doing some actual exercises in my house, without the sand. I hope to get into the routine of using the Wii Fit to get into a little less embarrassing shape, then join a gym when it wont be as large a risk of ridicule.

I fired up the Wii Fit when I got home, full of trepidation. I knew from reading that the first thing the game would do is get a bunch of information from me, then ask me to step on the scale. Then it would kick sand in my face and call me a Wussii™.  It was as bad as I feared. If I remember right, it said I weighed 218 pounds, with a BMI of 35 point something. Then it said I was obese and inflated my little Mii character like a balloon. I stared, waiting for it to stop inflating. It finally did when it looked like the little brother in “A Christmas Story” who couldn’t put his arms down. I had spent the money, so I started doing the exercises. I eventually had to move the coffee table and futon out of the way to have enough room, but I made it through all the exercises but one. What is said surprised me, I was more fit than I expected. Tonight on the way home from work I am going to try to pick up a cheap TV from a pawn shop and set the Wii up in the office, where I have a lot more room. I know myself too well, and if I have to go through the hassle of moving furniture every day prior to my workout, soon the hassle will override my desire to get in shape. Hopefully, I will be able to keep the motivation up and continue through with this. I will try to keep updating the blog with progress reports, mainly since that adds another level of pressure to keep up with the program if I know there a couple of people watching my progress.

The most difficult part so far? I was using my desire to have a cigarette as the “reward” to complete all the exercises.