Wii Fit - Day 1

On Tuesday I celebrated my birthday... not a milestone by any stretch of the imagination but my family made it special anyway, by coming and spending the evening with me (and cooking me a yummy supper).

Cory and the kids (although Alex said "hey, I didn't pick that out!) gave me a Wii Fit to go with the Wii we gave Cory for Father's Day/Birthday in June. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. My brother set it up for me after supper and bravely volunteered to be the first one to set up a profile, while we all watched. I'm not sure how accurate it is because he has a Wii fit age of 40 (he's 28 and a personal trainer at a gym and in no way is overweight) whereas I am 33, hanging diligently on to my baby weight, and not the least bit active (going for a brisk walk for me entails walking at the pace of a 2 year old who likes to stop and pick up rocks every 20 seconds) and had a Wii fit age of 39... which is about 20 years younger than my Wii Sports age, mind you.

My 5 year old has an age of 26 (his sports age is 80, LOL) and my 2 year old... well, the machine declared him "2", so he was pretty pleased with that.

So... nothing overly scientific here, and a pretty inaccurate way of assessing people's level of fitness, but still kind of fun.

So we spent the evening of my birthday eating cake and messing around on the Wii Fit, taking turns using Eric's profile (cause I wasn't going to step on the scale and create my own until my family was out the door). We even got my Dad up doing the stretching excercises and ski jumps. It was fun, and really is a video game system the whole family can enjoy without too much guilt.

I have decided to give the Wii Fit a serious try. I really don't get much exercise with the kids around. If I go for a walk or bike ride, they are with me so we go their pace. I bought a treadmill in February, instead of joining a gym and I really was doing well with it until I returned to work. I haven't touched it since. Right now it's an expensive place to rest the remote controls for the television in the basement. So, because I've been given this fun gift, I've decided to try to use the Wii Fit every day, and see what kind of progress I can make. According to a certain person who doesn't have children in the home and has all the time in the world to clean hers (Flylady), it takes 30 days to establish a habit... so I'm setting a goal of daily use for 30 days. And because I know that public humiliation is a great weight loss tool (I was rather successful in 03 when I attended Weight Watchers and had complete strangers weighing me), I am going to record my attempt here.

So...

Wii Fit, Day 1:

I did the fitness test again tonight, and earned my little footprint stamp on the calendar (with the comment "you must have been too busy to work out yesterday"). My Wii age today is 43. I'm not going to tell you my weight (I'm not that motivated by public humiliation) but I will say that I have set a goal of 22 pounds of weight loss (that's the most it would let me choose) over 3 months (this is what I achieved at WW).

I decided to do a cardio regimen today. I learned, from Tuesday's experimenting, that the Wii Fit doesn't really set up a program for you to follow, you just pick and choose what you want to do. Not good for people like me that don't have a clue how to start.

So... I decided I could do whatever I wanted in AEROBICS as long as I kept moving in between games. Here's what I managed to accomplish in 30 minutes:
1. Warm up doing the running in place (short distance) --- I used my treadmill for this because I don't like running in place on the floor, and it worked fabulously. So yay for me, I brushed some dust off of it!

2. Hula Hoop - 2 rounds of this. It's hard on the knees, but fun catching the hoops.

3. Running in place (short distance but a faster speed) again on the treadmill.

4. Stepping - I found this one a bit disruptive because the computer kept stopping and reminding me to follow the other Mii's lead... thinking I was confused, rather than just horribly uncoordinated. I did get the hang of it, though, by the third set I managed to unlock an advanced step class, which I failed miserably at. Still, I had no audience, so who cares! :)

5. Running in place (on the treadmill) around the island. This took 7 minutes. It was fun. I had to follow a dog. Weird.

By this time I had hit the 30 minute mark and was really sweating, so I treated myself to two balance games and called it a night. Then, as a reward for my hard work, I played 30 minutes of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, a Sega game I remember liking as a teenager, that Cory bought from the Wii Shop Channel.

Tomorrow I'm contemplating doing strength training exercises, but I'll see how I feel after the kids are in bed.

The trickiest thing for me was keeping my heart-rate up between games, as I had a hard time aiming the remote while I jogged in place.

Anyway, that's my Wii Fit experiment, Day 1. I'm aiming for 30 days, but I also know myself well enough to admit that I'll probably hit about day 5 and that's the last you'll hear of me.

We'll see! :)