Spent another hour on the Wii Fit this morning.

I feel almost apologetic for doing it because I see so much negative press from a lot of exercise experts talking about how it doesn’t replace the gym.  That’s the phrase that’s used.  “It doesn’t replace the gym.”  It almost makes me feel bad about myself, because I do get sweaty and out of breath doing an hour on the Wii Fit.  I do V-sits, pushups, sun salutations, running in place, step aerobics, planks, many strength exercises that have an added component of pushing one to balance that  I haven’t worked toward since my ballet classes, squats, and a hula hoop exercise that would be about like doing a minute and a half of really fast hip rolls in belly dance (if you’ve never tried it, it requires a certain amount of core strength as well as coordination.  You’ll sweat).

Then I get pissed for feeling apologetic.  I’ve seen measurable improvement in balance.  I can run in place for ten minutes where it hurt to do it for three before.  I’ve lost five pounds.  I haven’t had a nap except for recreational purposes since I bought the thing.  I sleep like a rock at night.  I feel like I’m being told that if the Wii Fit is a workout for me, then I must just be lame.

But…

I am seeing almost exactly the same results in my regular daily life that I’d see from swimming and lifting weights.  I’m seeing the same mood elevation and mental clarity that I do from any other reasonably well-planned exercise program I’ve ever tried.  Now, since I bought the Wii Fit (Oct 6), I’ve been using it an hour a day or more.  My piggie turned gold yesterday, so I’ve logged over 40 hours using this thing, and it’s not 40 hours playing the balance games. Your mind would turn to Swiss cheese!

With that in mind, why, why, why do fitness professionals trash it so?

Could it be that you’re less inclined to hire a personal trainer?  Could it be that we’re using it as a substitute for the gym and they’re worried about revenue loss?

Gee, I wonder.

Okay, so I’ve been doing the Wii about an hour a day for the last month. As I was doing that, I wondered what that would mean in terms of real world activity. I mean, I know jogging in place really isn’t running, bodyweight exercises do strength build, but not like free weights, and what have you.

I had a busy day yesterday. Got up early to pick up my daughter, did a lot of shopping in preparation for a local Halloween event, and then attended an event where I was out in the cold, on my feet and walking for a great deal of it, then culminating in a dance. When I go to a dance, I don’t go to sit. I go to dance. And after years of dance training as a youngster, I don’t do the White Boy Shuffle, either. I dance.

Was I tired at the end of it? Well, yeah, it was late and I’d been going all day. I was glad to go to bed at bedtime.

What I wasn’t was dead exhausted and hurting. I was just tired and happy after a fun day. I have no more than the usual arthritis aches and pains that accompany damp cold that hovers around the freezing point. But there’s no cure for arthritis, so I discount that. My range of motion is still good, and that’s what really counts. I feel properly rested and up for my day.

So yeah, I’d say that the Wii Fit workout has some Real World value.

So, in the continuing saga of using the Wii Fit Plus for exercise. I’ve been doing this for close to a month now and am I getting bored?

Not really, no.

I had promised myself that on days where I was teaching all day, I’d work out on the Wii Fit for half an hour, and on days I have off, I’d work out a whole hour.

That’s not quite the way it worked out.

The Wii Fit is actually addictive

I use the Wii Fit for a minimum of an hour most days. I plugged the data into an Excel spreadsheet¹ and found out that I was averaging 70.2 minutes a day in using the game. Yes, it is possible to spend 70 minutes in balance games that don’t get the heart rate up or challenge the muscles at all, that’s not really what I’m doing. What I do is get up in the morning and program it to do a half an hour workout involving strength and stretching. Then during the day when I get brainfried and need to get away from my computer for a bit² I’ll do a run around WuHu Island, or do some of the more aerobic games for fifteen or twenty minutes a couple of times.

It’s a nice way to take a little break and get some activity in.

Sure, sure, the cool kids have physical activities they like to do, or have physically demanding jobs. I’m a writer and a teacher. 90% of my time I sit on my ass, okay? And I’m sorry, but unless it involves sun, warm weather and water I’ve little interest in that healthy, outdoor lifestyle that’s so popular here in rural New England. WuHu lsland lets me forget winter for a little bit, see blue water and go for a run. So there.

The real question is what kind of results am I getting?

Well, as you can see from the graph, my weight is all over the place. I’m not really sweating it at the moment <hur hur>, as that’s not entirely what I’m working out for. I’m working out more for energy levels, physical strength and general quality of life.

That, friends, I’m getting. I am sleeping hard, just as I always do when I get enough physical activity. I wake up alert and ready to go, and I’m not tired during the day. My range of motion is excellent, and my balance is quite good.

So, am I getting decent results on the Wii Fit?

Yeah, I think so.

_____________________________________________________________________________

¹ Stop looking at me like that. I’m a computer applications instructor. Setting up problems in various applications is part of my job if I want to be able to show students how to use this stuff.

² Or cold,. I keep the house cool and use exercise as a way to warm up.

Day Nine

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Still using the Wii Fit.  The deal is that I use it for an hour on days I don’t teach and half an hour on days I do.

I did set a calorie burn goal.  Yes, I’m keenly aware it’s probably not very accurate.  I just don’t happen to care.  It’s just a target to shoot for so that I don’t spend an hour playing balance games and don’t get sweaty.

I’m insanely busy today, so I’m also using this as a break when I’ve been sitting too long.  I’ve got things set up so I’ll work a couple of hours, then do a run, or set up fifteen minutes worth of yoga or strength exercises, and use that as a break.  It seems to be improving my focus on my work, so I can’t complain there!

Day Twelve

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Still doing the hour a day thing.  I see a lot of criticism of the Wii Fit online, usually with the caveat to go to the gym.

Yes, you can get a workout going to the gym – no doubt.  There are lots of good gyms out there with good equipment, good staff, you name it.  There’s one a half a mile from my house and I went for years.

I don’t consider the gym the be all and end all of fitness.  It has its place. It’s great for social people who find exercising with other people more pleasant.  It’s good when you want/need a place to work out with a personal trainer.  It’s fantastic when the exercise you want to do has heavy/inconvenient equipment you need to use.

But just like running is not the apex of fitness and swimming beyond the pale[1], I think a lot of people into working out do forget that different people have different ways of doing things, different needs and different desires.

Will doing the bodyweight exercises put on as much muscle as using a barbell to squat?  Gee whiz, of course not!

Is the ten minute “run”[2] around the Island the same as going outside for a run?  No.  However, I’ll do that ten minute run around the island, and there is no way in hell you’ll find me running around the block.

I’ve said before that the best exercise is the exercise you’ll do.  It’s the truth.

And I don’t mean it in terms of “something is better than nothing” like, “Oh well, it’s better than sitting on the sofa eating a bowl of candy.”[3]   That’s a bunch of condescending crap.

Ferinstance…Put me in a kayak on fairly serene lake or river and I’ll happily paddle all day.[4]  Throw me in a body of water and I’ll swim all day, ditto.  Give me a foam sword and send me running around the woods solving puzzles and whacking monsters and I’m happy like I had good sense.  Have me take a hike in those same woods and it’s kind of a “meh.”[5] If you say I have a childish need for mental and emotional stimulation before I’ll get off my ass, I won’t argue it.

For now, Wii Fit does that.

A friend of mine who is majorly into using the Wii Fit[1] introduced me to one of the Plus options – the custom workouts under My Wii Fit Plus.  You choose what you want to work on – say abs or posture, then decide how many exercises for each category you’d like.  Then you keep choosing exercises and categories until you’ve chosen enough exercises to fill the time you want to work out.

I like a lot.

Because there’s a random factor involved, you’re not courting boredom.  It’ll pick both games and the more standard exercises, so there’s a mix of Serious and Fun.  It also picks things you may or may not have tried before, so there’s a bit of a surprise factor.

And…

You don’t waste time deciding what you want to do next for the next two to three minutes.  It just keeps going from exercise to game to exercise.

I did a half an hour in the morning, and frankly it didn’t feel like a half an hour at all.

Then I went to work, creating handouts for a class in basic computing that I’m going to be giving in the next couple of weeks, studying for an Outlook class I’m going to be teaching, and working on cleaning up the interface on a website I maintain.  Yes, it was a good morning’s work.  Remember how I comment you need to exercise and get the blood flowing before you start brain work?  Yeah, that.  I wasn’t following my own advice and while I doubt other people could see it, I could.

After lunch, I did another half an hour on the Wii Fit, concentrating mostly on aerobic-type stuff.  Hula Hoops, dancing and doing a couple of little runs around the island – all was fun.  I found out if you pass the little cat pacing you in the Basic Run+, another cat you can follow will show up and guide you along a different run.  Good to know.

I’ve also become addicted to the obstacle course.  Those of you used to Mario-style games will probably eyeroll, but I never could really enjoy those games as a youngster.  I mean, when I was into video games, it was Pac-Man, Asteroids, Q-bert and Qix.  And semper toujours!  Zork.

The jumping over stuff and dodging games were just never something I much did.  Those games got popular for home systems (at least that I was aware of) after I discovered karate and boys, so that took up all the time I wasn’t spending writing utterly unpublishable fiction.

The result of this is that I’m getting addicted to the obstacle games a bit late in life.  That I’m doing some minor running and sort of jumping to play them actually makes it somehow more fun to me.

Though if they came out with a version of Frogger that would work for the balance board, I might develop some interest in the game.

I was sore from yesterday.  Yeah, 0-60 will do that.  However, this wasn’t the OMG, I FEEL STEEL PIPES RUNNING FROM MY SHOULDERS DOWN MY HAMSTRINGS sore I get when I get a little too ambitious in the weight room.  It was more, a mild twinge.

I like the games a great deal.  I’m hardly a hard-core gamer, though, so maybe I’m a bit too easily entertained.

Today I’ve tried a few of the new games – the Kung Fu (yes, I know, it’s not real martial arts), the bicycling around WuHu island, and a self-programmed yoga routine.  Now, I know nothing at all about yoga.  I can do the Sun Salutation asana, but that’s the extent of it.  Since it’s new, the novelty will keep me interested for a bit.  The only thing that really worries me is the idea that I’m learning to do moves wrong and would get laughed out of a real yoga class.

Except, of course, the chances of me actually going to an exercise class are nil, and the workout itself is the point.  If I can feel a pleasant stretch in the right muscles, I really don’t care all that much about anything else.

I did spend another 60 minutes exercising and used the Plus routines.  I programmed the machine for 15 minutes of various yoga postures, and 15 minutes of strength training.  I did another 15 minutes of aerobic exercise and then spent the last fifteen minutes playing any damn games I felt like.

I have a confession, and I don’t want anyone laughing at me.

I like the running in place thing where you’re jogging around WuHu island.  No, stop looking at me like that.  I know running in place is supposed to be the most appalling thing ever.  It’s teaching me something about running I’d never known.

I didn’t know balls about pacing.  Running was where you push yourself as hard as possible to get the damn run over as fast as possible because it’s so evil and painful and the gym teacher is yelling at you for being slow and lazy.  Yes, what I did was more sprinting[1] than running and the last time I ever tried a run of any sort was the last time I had to do it in a gym class.

I know running in place isn’t real running at all.  I can say it’s a lot more pleasant when you set a decent pace.  In the game, you’ll follow one Mii[2] or another.  If you push too hard to finish too face, you fall down.  You’re supposed to slow it down enough to keep a sane pace.

Does this mean I’ll ever try “real” running?

I doubt it.  But the little 3-5 minute runs you do in the game are actually pleasant for me.  Laugh all you like, but it’s true.

Wii Fit Day One

I bought a Wii Fit Plus.  Winter is coming on, all signs show it’s going to be a rough one, and I wanted to work out on WuHu Island[1] for the winter instead of trudge to the gym.

Oh, yeah, the gym.

I’m quitting my gym job.  Being there to open the gym was interfering with other things I wanted to do. You know, really trivial stuff like getting to a class on time to teach it?  Yeah, that. Many of my clients want me to start class earlier than other clients did when I first took the gym job. I can open the gym, put in the shift, then haul ass to class and get there early enough to set up – in the summer.  When there’s snow on the road?  Not so much. I needed to be able to leave when I judged there’d be enough time to get there rather than rushing after my shift and hoping.[2]

Instead of buying a gym membership, since neither I nor my family were using the one I was working for anyway, I decided to get something I’d been wanting for a long time – a Wii Fit balance board and the game package.

I worked out 60 minutes the first day.  Since that’s 60 minutes more than I’d worked out the day before, I count that as a serious positive.

While I’d played Wii Fit a bit before, I did use today to kind of screw around, explore, and play games. Yes, I did two short runs around WuHu Island, and I did the step dance thing four or five times, so that was kinda neat.  I experimented with some of the Yoga and found I can’t even do some of the poses, but who cares?  It’s fun to try.

I have the “worked out” feeling of elevated mood, and I can feel it a bit in my thighs from doing the ski jumping so much.

The one thing I don’t like is being scolded about my weight.  I’m going to do the body test each time just for more data points, but for those of you who want to skip that, go for it.  I chalk the chirpy lectures up to the cultural differences of the designers, what with them being Japanese and all, and don’t let it throw me.

The one thing I note about the Wii Fit is that if you weigh over 330, you’re too heavy for the balance board.  While not a concern for me, I assume that this might be something many potential ScrewSkinny readers might want to know about.

Wii Fit Doesn’t Improve Fitness

I did read an article about a professor doing a study to prove that the Wii Fit doesn’t help with weight loss or fitness.

I read the results of the study.  Basically, the dewd gave out these balance boards to several families for six weeks and had them track how much people exercised on them.  There was no significant fitness improvement, so the Wii Fit was a failure.

Let’s look at the data: Average exercise per person was 22 minutes a day at the start of the study and four minutes a day at the end.

Ummm…  I think that’s an implementation error, don’t you?

Does anyone think that you can get fit without exercising?  You’re still going to have to do that if you want to fitness improvements.  The claim was that people got bored and didn’t use the device.  Okay, ya know, I can see that.  I find exercise essentially boring, myself.  It’s one of the reasons my bursts of fitness focus tend to be on very very technical activities.  ‘Cause, well… I get bored.

And you know what?  Your body still needs to move.  If you find a walk mind-numbing, you’ll probably find the Wii fit the same after a while.  If that’s what’s keeping you from exercising, well… okay, you’re a grown-up.  Learning to tolerate routine boredom enough to keep exercise a habit is a problem for me, too.  But for now, the Wii Fit is fun and the novelty will keep me moving for a while.  If I keep it up for more than two months,[3] it’s still cheaper than a membership at my local gym.

I’m okay with that.

I’m getting back into weight training again. You’d think I’d be doing it at the gym, but I’m not. Why? Mostly because I suppose that working there makes the place less attractive and I can’t be arsed to pack my bag, change into gym clothes, do the workout, have my “professional” face on (I work there, so I’ve got to be cordial and friendly even if I’m not feeling that way at the moment), then shower and do whatever else I was going to do that day.

When I work out at home, it’s a lot simpler. I often just strip down to my underwear and do my workout. I mean, it’s still weights. I lift things up and put them down. Truly, a dumbbell workout is a beautiful thing.

Speaking of lifting things up and putting them down, that idiotic Planet Fitness commercial misses an incredible point about weight training. For all that people who treat bodybuilding as a hobby try to make it sound like rocket science, getting functionally strong isn’t. You… lift things up and put them down. Sometimes simplicity is the way to go. You wanna go to a gym, awesome. You wanna work out in your underwear, dandy. You want to toss around logs, or swing around a sledgehammer, knock yourself out. (Well, figuratively speaking, of course).

But at the end of the day?

You lift things up and put them down.

This is a random fitness test I pulled off the Internet. You swim as fast and far as you can for twelve minutes. I’m older than is taken into account for this chart, for the record.

So, “good” means one can swim at least a quarter of a mile in twelve minutes.

I’m not very in -shape, but my regular, not trying excessively hard, and certainly breaking it up with slower strokes than the crawl swimming pace is about 12 minutes on a quarter of a mile. An all-out effort using only the crawl? Yeah, I’d break that 550 yards, no problem.

Either I am in considerably better shape than I give myself credit for, or this test might be a bit inaccurate. I’d love to think I’m in good shape and all, but I have this nagging feeling that if I take this as accurate, I’m kinda fooling myself.

I thought that there was no lap swimming after I’d be getting home for teaching, so I prepped to lift weight, instead.

No, I didn’t work out first thing in the morning. On days when I’m teaching in the morning and opening the gym, I don’t work out before I do all that. I’m all for getting a workout done right away, but my cutoff for how early I’m willing to arise for non-emergency purposes is four in the morning. So no, won’t be working out before I open the gym.

Yes, I lifted for about a half an hour.

I hate going into a busy weight room when I don’t know the guys there. It’s just this thing I have going. And it was busy with some guys working with some trainer I’d never met.

So, I creep over to the bench press, get in my sets, then get over to my non-favorite squat rack (my favorite on was in use) and load up the bar to lift. I’m getting all these looks and it’s really distracting, but I go on with my workout. I know it can’t be because of how much I’m lifting. I can name six female gym patrons who regularly squat twice the weight I was working out with. I ignored it and concentrated on Savatage while I got on with my set.

After I’m done an unloading the bar, the coach dewd comes over to help me do so. I had to bite my tongue not to say, “For a ten pound plate. REALLY?”

Well, as it turns out, it was actually a good thing I bit my tongue. His comment, “You’ve got a good squat. What’s your sport?”

Okay, for the non weightlifters, being complimented on squat form is a high-order thing at the free weights. Being asked what my sport is makes me a bit giddy, what wit me having none. I don’t know for sure, but I’m half wondering if the looks were because my form was being pointed out.

I thanked him and commented that I don’t really have one, but I swim a lot. He told me he thought I ought to get into Olympic lifting.

Well…

In reality, I’m not strong enough to consider competing, and my focus really does need to be regularity of workout over competitions. But still, it was pretty damn flattering.

Though, I need to remember that half a bowl of oatmeal at quarter to five, while a so-so breakfast, is not going to be enough fuel for a weight-lifting session at quarter to one after teaching a class. I need to pack a bento on days I intend to work out AFTER I teach. I intend to avoid that, as I prefer to work out first thing in the morning, but still, I got it out of the way before I came home. So now I can relax with a good conscience.