Deflabbify

Got a perfect score on Wii Fit Soccer Ball Heading

I just about scared the collar off of one of my dogs when I yelled "YEEEAAAHHHHH!" at the top of my lungs, though.

Five hundred fifty-five points on beginner level.  The advanced level is still eating me for lunch.  I cracked 300 points once and most of my other tries were in the low 200s — a far cry from the maximum 655 points.

You’re reading this, and you might be thinking, whoopee, good for you, let me share my excitement, nah I’m not really excited, that’s lame.

Have I mentioned that it’s really easy to slack off on exercising?  I’ve put in a half-hour tonight and last night but there was a pretty big hiatus, as in a few weeks.  As it was, tonight I just did balance games — which is exercise but not a huge amount of exercise.

I was in good shape in graduate school ten years ago, but I was putting in 45 minutes to an hour, five or six days a week, on an elliptic trainer.  That’s a fairly hefty routine.  Now an accomplishment is playing Tilt Board, Penguin Slide, and Soccer Ball Heading a few times, not breaking a sweat, and writing about it.  This wasn’t what I was doing ten years ago, or even two months ago.

Oh well. maybe I’ll get a bunch of exercise cleaning up after the storm.

How to get a 403% burn rate on Wii Fit Basic Run

I’ve been a slacker on the pushups but I’ve been keeping on with Wii Fit, mainly with the aerobic workouts.  I enjoy the Basic Run Island Lap.  It doesn’t use the Wii Balance Board but it does use the Wii remote: just hold it or stick it in your pocket and it registers your steps like a pedometer.

The metric they use to measure your progress on this exercise is "burn rate," which as far as I can tell is a measure of how consistent the run is.  If I’m just screwing around and shaking the remote up and down while I’m running and making my Mii fall, my burn rate will be in the 10-20% range.  If I give it a good try and do a reasonable job, the burn rate will be higher: 80% to 100%, or more.  When I’m running in place on the floor, I can get a burn rate anywhere from 150% to 250%.  I don’t know how they calculate it but it’s probably inversely related to the variance in the step rate:  the more the running speed changes, the lower the burn rate.  There’s also a speed component: a slower speed seems to give a higher burn rate than a faster speed, even if that faster speed is steady.

I forgot to take a picture of my 403% burn rate Island Lap, but here’s how I did it.  This might be cheating but my calves, ankles, and lower back tell me otherwise.  I bounced for 15 minutes on a trampoline we got at a yard sale.  Nice and steady!  And probably lower impact than running, anyway.

Silver Fit Bank, following dogs, and taking it easy

I just crossed the 20-hour mark in Fit Credits on Wii Fit. My Fit Bank got an upgrade to silver. It’s all shiny and stuff.

Tonight I put over an hour on Wii Fit because my wife found out how to take different routes on the Island Lap run. We had wanted to find the fifteen hidden retro Nintendo characters scattered all over the island (like Mario and the mushrooms from Super Mario Brothers) but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to run the different parts of the island. I knew that I had done it before — that was the frustrating part.

The trick is to follow the dogs. At certain points in the run a dog will com up from behind you. If you pass your guide, then the dog becomes the new guide, and takes you through a different route. What had happened is that I was fooling around during the first couple of times I did the run, and I deliberately passed my guide just to watch my Mii trip and fall. (Simple jokes for simple folks.) But for the past couple of weeks I took my time, and did a nice, steady pace, and saw the exact same route every single time I did the run. Well, my steady pace didn’t let me follow any of the dogs! Bingo! (That’s his name-o.)

I’ve been holding off on the 100 Pushups Challenge for the past week. My chiropractor told me that the hand position for standard pushups can cause the hands and wrists to tighten and become a bit painful to move. Holding off on that during Week 3 helped fix that, but then my right shoulder started to act up. The little pains in my shoulder reminded me of a time a few years ago when I had a likely rotator cuff injury. I was dumb and tried to launch my old dryer drum into the front yard before we took it to the dump. (I took it easy for a week or so and it healed, and remembered not to shock my shoulder like that.) Since basically the only way to heal that kind of injury is to immobilize the shoulder, I’m pretty careful, and if it starts complaining, I take it easy.

Well, that’s my update. How are you doing with your routines?

My three year old daughter is a great coach

She works me hard!

During dinner tonight she asked me to “do boxing” on Wii Fit. This is the Rhythm Boxing cardio workout. She really likes the fast punching at the end, and informs me that I’m “going to go fast later.”

Then, she wanted me to run the Island Lap. Ten minutes of jogging.

Following that, I walked the tightrope.

Finally, six minutes of Super Hula Hoop™. (Yes, it’s pretty amusing to watch me do that.) She made sure I was all right a couple of times when I lost my balance, and threw in a few “go go go Daddy” shouts for good measure.

Thirty-two minutes later, I was spent, but I know that I got a good workout!

And my daughter coached me through that.

My Fit Bank on Wii Fit got an upgrade tonight

Tonight I passed the ten-hour mark on Wii Fit and my “Fit Bank” got a bronze-color upgrade along with a brief fanfare. These little touches are nice and remind me that I’m sticking to this pretty well.

If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, here it is in a nutshell. The Fit Bank is a squarish animated piggy bank of sorts that stores the “Fit Credits” I earn for doing the activities. One minute of activity is one fit credit (FC) and counts as one minute in the Fit Bank. The strength training exercises are usually 1 FC, the yoga exercises are usually 2 FC, and the balance and cardio activities run me anywhere from 1 to 20 FC. The FCs drop into the Fit Bank with a satisfying sound one by one after each exercise.

I’ll need to make this goal a little more formal but I’m on pace to earn 30 minutes worth of FC each week. (I get a short fanfare each day that I put in 30 minutes or more. I’m such a sucker for these little encouragements!)

Having a cheering section really helps

For those of you that already have a Wii, you know that you can make a Mii (pronounced “me”) for yourself that usually can look a great deal like you if you want it to. And so can everyone in your family. And so can all of your friends.

Most of the games in Wii Sports and Wii Fit (and even Wii Play) incorporate other Miis that you know as a cheering section. The skiing events have Miis you know at the bottom of the hill. Step Aerobics has Miis working out right beside you and smiling at you. And so on. It’s a really nice touch that the game designer added, and makes much of the workout feel personal and even a bit social even if no one else is around.

As fun as this is, it really doesn’t compare to having my three-year-old daughter cheering me along as I do the hula-hoop exercise. That’s absolutely priceless.

Working out with the Wii Fit

On Memorial Day we went over to a good friend’s house. There were a lot of kids there and eventually we congregated around the Nintendo Wii. They’ve had the Wii for a while but they had recently gotten the Wii Fit, which is a balance board and scale that is meant to be stood on. Sensors detect how evenly you are bearing your weight both left to right and front to back.

We played with the Wii Fit and had a blast. So much so that we shelled out the dough to get the Wii console and the balance board on eBay.

I had been reluctant to just get a Wii. Sure that’s exercise and my arms were tired after playing baseball with it, but those games were exercising a very limited muscle group. It didn’t seem like that kind of exercise would be worth the money.

Not so with the Wii Fit. The yoga and strength training exercises kick my butt! They’re tough. I’m really sore afterwards! They’re tough for my friend who’s in way better shape than I am. Yes, it’s a video game — and not a cheap one — but it’s a video game that I’m hoping that will keep my interest long enough for me to see some deflabbification.

Here are a few specific reasons why I think it will:

• I’m very competitive at video games. I’m not competitive at team sports, and never really was, but man, get me in front of a video game, and you’re my worst enemy. That, and I get pretty frustrated when I’ve done better before at a particular exercise or balance game. I’ll try several more times until I’ve given it a good shot at beating my high score. Meanwhile, I’m exercising, which is the whole point, right?
• It’s graduated. They make you ease into things pretty slowly by unlocking easy activities first. The game encourages you not to overdo your workout.
• No additional work to record progress. It keeps track of how much, how often, as well as how much you weigh.
• It covers a lot of territory. Stretching, balance, strength training, aerobic workout — it’s all there.
• There’s a neat reward system. The more you use it, the more games you get. Each exercise gives you “fit credits” that drop into a futuristic piggy bank — which I respond to well, considering I also write on personal finance.
• It will be a long time before I beat these games. Some games you can finish, or you get good enough at them that they’re no longer a challenge. This will be challenging for me for a long time.
• The games are fun. Frustrating at times, but it’s almost always because I don’t have good enough control over my body’s movements to do well. Overall they’re a blast to play.

Here are a few things I need to watch out for, though:

• I’m very competitive at video games. I have to watch that I don’t break the thing. I’m serious!
• It is possible to cheat the system. But isn’t that possible with just about anything? I’ve used it honestly so far and need to continue doing so. I’m only fooling myself if I cheat.
• I may lose interest. At this point I just need to take it for the exercise it is and keep at it. Hopefully this will be easier if I’ve developed the habit of exercising by then. I don’t see it getting old within the next couple of months. And hopefully I’ll be down around ten pounds.

Anyway, this is going to be a fairly big part of my exercise program. I’ll keep you posted.