Thursday, January 17, 2013

Fitness Update

I first wrote about my body issues and fitness a year ago.  Since then the tendons in my knee have largely healed.  In Fall 2011 a steep flight of stairs left me in pain for weeks.  Last summer I could hike (with frequent stops) for two days before it would give out.  Now I can do an hour or so of moderate exercise a day with it only twinging.  Of course that leg is week and I'm still hauling around my pregnancy weight, but I can work on those things now.

We got Wii Fit Plus for Christmas.  Wow, feedback, what a novel concept!  Apparently I'm not nearly as out of shape as I thought I was, although I haven't tried most of the exercises that involve standing on one leg.  The yoga and strength training segments are good, but  the cardio's pretty light.  I got Gold's Gym Dance Workout, and the Latin Dance and "cardio boxing" handle the cardio segments well.  I'd prefer bellydancing, but I can see where that would be difficult for the Wiimote to pick up.  Since the goal of bellydancing is to isolate movements to one part of the body, you'd have to adorn yourself with motion sensors like a Christmas tree.

Brighteyes likes the Latin Dance segments.  Sunshine prefers Shaun White Snowboarding.  Owl likes to beat me at the 2-player race from Wii Fit Plus (their algorithm gives everyone the same stride length, so it's how fast you can pitter-patter that counts).

The weight loss chatter hasn't been nearly as triggery as I feared, although apparently I accidentally turned off a lot of that feature in WFP.  It's nice to see that program makers have learned to turn it down.  They weren't telling us anything we didn't know already.

3 comments:

Sarah said...

I need to get some more exercise stuff for our Wii and/or Xbox. Since I can't make it to the gym, I've been using the EA Sports Active 2. It's pretty good, and you can tailor workouts to tone one section of your body if you need to.

Lioness said...

I'm working my way up to that one. I heard it was harder, and steep learning curves scare me when it comes to fitness.

Lioness said...

http://www.nutwiisystem.com/ reviews exercise games and publishes lists of the best ones.