Got a Wii Fit!

Been a while since I wrote something.  A lot's changed in the intervening 8 months, but unfortunately, not a lot I can write about.  However, after being chastized by a friend for being so lousy with the blog, I thought I'd give it a quick update.

First, a few new photos!  
My friends Kariann and Alina got married, and chose me to be their photographer, which was awesome.  We went to Mammoth Mountain a few weekends ago, where Serena and Josh got engaged.  I didn't shoot shots of them doing that (Melodie did, actually, but that's another story), but I did get some of the countryside, shown here, and some of us can be found here.


But the real thing I wanted to write about was the new Wii Fit that I got from my parents as a pre-birthday present.

In short, the Wii Fit is pretty awesome.  Construction wise, it feels pretty sturdy and present, despite being made entirely of plastic, in a way I haven't come to expect from consumer electronics.   I suppose being able to support the weight of a 200 pound guy reasonably would require that it be sturdy.

One nitpick-- Wii wireless networking doesn't support encryption, at least from what I can tell, which is just plain irresponsible on Nintendo's part.  That was the only unexpectedly irritating thing I noticed during setting this system up, that I'll need to get a wired LAN adapter.

The Fit itself is pretty fun to use.  I went through the incredibly ... blunt setup process, which informed me that I was a fat bastard (6'2.5", rounded to 6'3", 203 pounds) who clearly had never gotten off of the couch in his life.  I could defend myself here-- I do have a black belt (though I haven't trained in three months), I bike to school, etc, etc, but better, I suppose, to let the tiny Japanese make judgements on my apparently enormous Caucasian frame and just get it over with.  Besides, I have a secret weapon-- I've been letting my hair grow long, and once I cut it, I'll probably drop a pound.  Hah!  How's that for manipulating the scales?

My first day on the Wii after that was interesting.  My balance isn't all that it could be (or once was, I suppose), which the thing let me know by telling me my age was 44, coupled with a picture of my Mii as an old man, holding his back.  I started with some Yoga poses, which was very interesting, and scored from 1 to 100 based on how wobbly you are.  Two of the three poses I'd never done before: Half-Moon and Tree.  For those poses, I earned about 35 to 50 points, as my balance was way off.  Half-Moon was particularly interesting, because as I started to do it, muscles I hadn't stretched in a long while started to scream in protest.  Already off to a good start, stretching things I'd forgotten I had.  Warrior pose was incredibly easy, so much so that I wonder if the board was misconfigured or something-- it was the only time my balance never moved, and I got a score of 99.  I've been doing that pose for some eight years now, so it might also have been experience.

Then, on to strength training.  This part was more interesting.  I'd never been able to satisfactorily do a pushup, and the Wii's introductory push-up regimen includes planking (a different plant than what I was used to, in that I was used to resting on my elbows, not my hands).  Plus, my shoulders are a bit broad for the thing; my hands needed to rest on the very edges of the board, so someone much bigger than me might have serious issues doing that part of the workout.  My strength results varied from "couch potato" (1 star) to "bodybuilder" (4 stars), depending on whether I worked my legs (strong from the kicking) or my arms (weak like a t-rex).  One very frustrating exercise was the backwards row-- I just could not get the balance right for that exercise.  Apparently, you have to be back on your heels while you do it?  Regardless, the Wii stated that I hadn't done any reps by the time I was done, which was frustrating, since I was doing them as demonstrated.  The second time around, I figured that by standing on the back edge of the board, I could get the full number of reps, but that seems like cheating to me.

Speaking of being back on your heels as a balance position, that's generally a bad place to be, sparring-wise.  I haven't really sparred in a year or so, so that's about as weak an excuse as I can get, but it felt entirely unnatural to move my balance into such a weak position.  The other thing that's a bad idea to do is just to move your head, rather than move your entire body, when dodging things.  So, when it came time to do the soccer balance game, I sucked at it, because I was used to moving my entire body out of the way, and not leading with my head.  Either I need to empty the cup (a la Zen and the Martial Arts) or I need to avoid that particular exercise.  For now, after trying multiple times and getting my score to 55, I'm got to avoid.

But I had a load of fun with the ski jump game (got 256 yards after my third try!) and was really challenged by the balls-rolling-into-holes game (90 points on the first try!).

I avoided aerobics, because I hate aerobics-- but I guess I'll have to stop avoiding them at some point, if I want to unlock all the games.

Overall, on this first day, I did 36 minutes of actual exercising, and an hour and 20 minutes all told (due to watching demos of the exercises, etc).

I'm psyched to keep this up.