So much for goals…

So it has become quite clear that there’s no way in hell I’m achieving the original goal I set a month an a half ago. The day we set up the Fit, I set my goal to lose 10 pounds in two months. I think this is a fair goal, and if I were more concerned about losing the weight, I’m sure I could have reached it. But I now have about 2 weeks left til the deadline and I’m still hovering around my original weight. In fact, I haven’t left a 4 pound radius of my original weight at all.

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It knows where I sleep…

So I’ve had the Wii Fit for about a month now, which means I’m around the time where I would normally start slacking off. Last week, I skipped two days instead of my allowed one per week. I felt guilty, but then I did walk from Murrayfield stadium all the way back into town on one of those days because we went to see a pre-season football(soccer) match and there was pretty much no chance in hell of getting a bus afterwards. It’s a pretty long walk, so I got my exercise.

What I hadn’t been getting was yoga practice, so when I did get back on the Balance Board after two days of absence, I could really tell the difference. So I’ve got to be better about keeping up with the yoga. I’ve unlocked all the different poses now, but I can’t do them all because I either don’t have the balance or I don’t have a mat to do the floor based ones.

I’m not exactly making progress towards the weight goal, but I’m in roughly the same place as I started, so I’m happy with that. Today I’ll be doing a nice long session. I try to do 2 or 3 30 minute sessions a week. My walk to work (two days a week) will be getting quite a bit longer this week too because the office has moved. Hopefully all the extra walking and stuff will allow me to catch up on my health, because I had a bit of an indulgant weekend.

Step, step, step

I’ve unlocked boxing and a longer version of the step game in aerobic exercises, and I’m pretty excited about this.

The boxing instructor has way more personality than the yoga/muscle exercise trainers. He’s a mii instead of a weird attempt at a human, and he’s got this gruff, quite motivating voice. He seems like a pretty nice guy. Plus, I’m way better at boxing to a rhythm than I am at the original Wii Sports boxing, where I tend to get knocked out pretty fast. Perhaps I should try kickboxing.

In step aerobic land, I can only be amused. After a while, I got the hang of all the stepping up and down and back and forth and kick and sideways and yada yada yada, which to me is a feat. I’m terrible at keeping up with games in which you have to stick to a certain beat (PaRappa the Rapper, Donkey Konga, DDR, etc. You name it, I get confused and the program tells me I suck.) so I can’t believe I managed to get this down in one or two practices.

For some reason, you’re on a stage in front of a full audience doing step aerobics. Scott pointed out that pretty much no one would want to go see that, much less pay for it. I couldn’t agree more. Especially when one might be able to sift through one’s mother’s old exercise tapes fromt he early 90s and see professionals doing it on a beach in Hawaii in much more ridiculous clothes and perhaps make a drinking game out of the experience.

In any case, the Wii takes miis from your mii channel to put in the step show/class thing with you. It often decides to put Mii-Liam or Mii-Ridgaway or someone as unlikely as anyone in the world to be standing next to me in a step aerobics class clapping along enthusiastically to the beat. Now, you may not know these friends of mine in real life, but I’m sure you can think of plenty of people who wouldn’t be caught dead doing step aerobics as happily as if they’d invented it yesterday, much less on stage in front of a crowd. So you understand the hilarity of the situation when a whole group of these people appear around you on screen and look as though they’re itching to throw up the jazz hands and step-class their way to heaven.

This is just SO much better than a gym membership.

Weekend hair!

I’ve been pretty good. I skipped Sunday, but I figure one day off a week isn’t bad, as long as it doesn’t turn into two and three and four.

In any case, Scott and I discovered on Saturday that the trainers in the game wear their hair down on weekends. This was after an entire session on Friday making fun of the male trainer’s ponytail. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with guys having ponytails, but this guy’s was just silly. Plus, I like making fun of the trainers. They’re just… awkwardly over-human. Or something.

I’ve unlocked the super hula hoop game, and DAMN, let me tell you, hula hooping (sans actual hula hoop) is a really good workout. And I’m only doing it for three minutes at a time. You do 90 seconds hula-hooping in either direction, and it feels like you’re really getting somewhere in terms of getting your heart going. I always feel a little silly at the end because you feel like you want to keep hulaing. It’s hard to go from hula-60 to zero in a few seconds, so I just end up swaying around for a bit. But it records your balance through the whole thing and you get to see it racing around on the screen at the end in little circles. I just unlocked the 6 minute version, but I’m not sure if I’m ready for that yet.

Also, when you hit 30 minutes of exercise in a day, your pig jumps up and down in happiness. I really do like that pig.

It’s a little addictive

I went swimming today. I go once a week because Edinburgh’s got some awesome public pools and it’s not too expensive compared to what it costs to go to the gym or take a class. The swim center I go to is a nicely restored and renovated victorian bathhouse style pool. It’s even better that I get to go during the day when there’s barely anyone there. I guess that’s one benefit of being in school rather than work.

Anyway, I did something like 30 laps, so I didn’t plan on doing a whole lot of Wii Fit today. I figured I’d just do the body test and a bit of yoga and then I’d be done. The great thing about the Wii Fit is that it lets you record activities you do outside of the game, so I can keep track of my swimming or walking or whatever. Doing a body test every day seems a bit silly. I’ve always been told you shouldn’t really weigh yourself that often because you won’t see results anyway. But it does function as a way to get me to turn the machine on once a day and stay in the habit.

The thing is, once I start, I don’t really want to stop. I’m assuming I’ll be unlocking new activities for quite a while before I’ve got access to them all. After I do a few activities, it’s always giving me something new to try out. I told myself I was only going to do each yoga exercise I’ve unlocked so far once today, and there are about 6. But then I was having fun (even though I’m still rubbish at yoga), so I did the hula hoop aerobic thing for a few minutes and then some of the balance games.

Before I knew it, I’d racked up 20 minutes. And that’s on top of my 30 minute swim workout and 20 minutes walking! And I could have kept going, but this girl needs to make dinner.

A virtual piggy bank of fitness

When you synchronize the Wii Balance Board for the first time, it begs you not to step on it yet. Then  it makes a little noise every time you do step on. A little strange, but I don’t think it will ever stop being amusing.

In any case, my first Body Test was a disaster. I failed to take into account that our floor is slanted. Only by a few degrees mind you, but I had no idea how hard that would make it to balance properly. The dancing balance board on the screen told me how awful my balance was. I told it how awful my floor was and went off to get some bits of cardboard and a spirit level.

Everything in our house is leveled this way. I’ve got cardboard squares cut from the dividers that come packaged with my boyfriend’s actuarial course notes shoved under the legs of dressers, wardrobes, and now under my Wii Fit balance board. It’s not pretty, but it makes all the difference.

I wasn’t expecting a terribly good Wii Fit Age to start, so I wasn’t too miffed when it told me I had the fitness level of a 33 year old. That’s 9 more years than I’ve been on the planet, but 33 is certainly not old.

In any case, Mr. Balance Board helped me set a goal for myself to help lower my BMI, and then I was off on my first Wii Fit adventure.

I thought that perhaps my next Body Test would paint a completely different picture, what with my artificially level floor and all, and I was partially right. My updated Wii Fit age (on day two) is 24, which is my actual age, so that’s good. However, apparently my center of balance is still to the right, even after making sure the board was level, so i guess I have my posture to work on.

I wonder if it’s possible that one of my legs is ever so slightly shorter than the other. Nobody is completely symmetrical, and if a few degrees in the floor can make such a difference, a few millimeters in length surely can as well.

These exercises are fun and short, and I can do a different combination every day, which should do wonders for my interest in continuing. The trainers are a little disturbing in that their mouths don’t move when they talk and they look a bit vacant. The animated balance board actually has more personality, but I’ve always enjoyed Nintendo’s way of personifying inanimate objects. It’s just a shame you can’t be trained by the board instead of the humans. But a balance board can’t exactly demonstrate a yoga pose, and as it tells you itself, you’ll ususally be standing on the guy, so there’s not a whole lot he can do about it.

In any case, I think I’m going to like this Wii Fit stuff. Especially considering a delightful little creature, the fit pig, keeps track of my time. Like a piggy bank, only for my health. I do like piggy banks.