EA Sports Active, part the second

So I’ve played with it a little more. This morning I put together a little stupid quickie workout:

1. Heavy bag: beat the hell out of a heavy bag; I had to punch it 300 times this time around, which goes faster than it sounds, really
2. Inline skating: basically, squat jumps with emphasis on the squat, which is where you stay most of the time. The lower you squat, the faster you go. Then when you hit the green part of a ramp, you jump to do tricks
3. Easy dance: Stupid easy DDR for your hands, at this level. Arrow comes down, you point the Wiimote or Nunchuk in the direction it tells you to point it and occasionally do some other goofy moves
4. Running: Once around a virtual track this time, running in place with the Nunchuk in the little thigh thingy. The faster you run, the less stupid your avatar looks. Really.

This took about five minutes to do this morning before I went to Academy on a mission to replace the weaksauce resistance band. Which I did, at a cost of about $14 for a pack of three–the lightest one in the pack is still heavier than the one the game comes with, and just for shits and giggles I just pulled the heaviest one out of the pack, tugged on it a little, went “LOL SHIT” and put it away for now.

Fair warning: if you get heavier bands, you’re probably going to want to use some kind of gloves or tape or some means of protecting your hand from the naked nylon strap handle rubbing against the tender webbing between your thumb and fingers–and the more cushiony handles that come with exercise tubing sets won’t work if you have tiny hands like mine, because you still have to be able to hold the Wiimote and Nunchuk. The heavier band did not quite rub a blister when I went back to do an upper body workout a few minutes ago, but a few more sets of whatever and it might have.

Also the concern was raised on the official forum that using a different band might render the in-game calorie burn count inaccurate, but a) it’s going to show you burning less than you actually burned, not trick you into thinking you’ve burned more than you actually have, which is fine by me, and b) WHO CARES, MY ASS IS OFF THE COUCH, LET’S BE HAPPY WITH THAT AND NOT SPLIT HAIRS OKAY.

Anyway, I got bored a little while ago and fired up the preset easy upper body workout. This was about a 20-minute mixture of resistance band stuff and boxing. This time, I got to beat up targets. If you hit them hard enough, they break. This is good, because punching shit and making it break is fun. And then you hit a heavy bag a hundred times or so and go back to band stuff and repeat this a few times. See, the big difference between this and My Fitness Coach: when you ask it for a 30-minute upper body workout, you are going to get 30 minutes of upper body workout, not 10 minutes of cardio and 5-10 minutes of surprise crunches. (which reminds me of one of this game’s few shortcomings, but I’ll get to that in a bit)

I am not an Amazon by any stretch of the imagination, but I can lift some fairly heavy shit if called upon to do so. My arms are about to fall off. And I did the easy upper body workout. Yow.

Now one small problem: the assortment of exercises is great, but it fails in one area–there’s upper body and lower body and cardio, but there’s no core. Well, there’s the cross knee punches, and some twists and stuff, but as for crunches and such, there are none. No pushups either. But hell, people, we all know how to do those things, right? And really, squeezing a few crunches in here and there is not a problem.

And finally, you could probably fool the system into thinking you’re doing the exercises by wiggling the Wiimote in just the right way, but hell, if you’re going to go to that much trouble you might as well just suck it up and do the damn exercises.

In conclusion: IT’S A KEEPER

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.

One down

Today I finished week 1 of Couch to 5K and did not die, so I went and had pancakes.

On Day 1, I did just short of two miles, dragged my ass home, hung out downstairs to pet stray kittens for a while, dragged my ass upstairs, chugged some water, and did not move for the rest of the night.

Today I did just over two miles with a blister (dammit, self, you know better than to do anything serious in shoes the day after you buy them–at least it’s a little blister in a spot that’s easily band-aided), came home, came straight upstairs, hopped in the shower, got on the bike, and went straight to IHOP.

So… yeah, I think I’m ready for Week 2. \o/

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.