Well, I finished the new EA Sports Active 6-week challenge two weeks ago, just before heading out to Farpoint. I was doing the medium level challenge, since I remembered how I’d fared doing the hard level challenge in EASA’s previous incarnation. I can say I did finish the challenge within 6 weeks. However, once again I did not lose weight. I was losing weight for the first four weeks, but then the last two weeks I had some problems. First off, I hit a high stress month, and I missed a lot of my regular non-EASA workouts as a result. Second, my hormones are all out of whack right now, probably a hangover from the previous quarter’s fertility treatments and my age. I’m 40, very soon to be 41. I expect my body to do wonky things like suddenly pack on 6 pounds. And the stress of so much going on this month did not help with my eating habits. I don’t care what anybody says, eating right takes a lot of work, and it’s hard to maintain healthy habits under stress.

But I completed the challenge, so my big question is, “Now what?” EASA recommends I do another challenge at the next higher level, of course. I’m not keen on that idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that EASA’s 6 week challenge requires four workouts every week. It’s hard for me to fit that in along with regular water aerobics classes and karate classes. Those classes take up my mornings most days, leaving me unable to do anything else until the evening. I could do 20 minutes or so of exercise in the evenings, but even that is hard to fit in. Princess has needed more supervision recently for her homework, which eats into my evening time. Plus, I really need to get back into cleaning the house. I can either do 20 minutes of exercise or 20 minutes of cleaning, but not both during the evenings. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’d have to live a very regimented life to do that, and that’s not possible with kids.

My other problem is that the workouts for the EASA challenge got longer the farther I got into the 6 weeks. Initially, the workouts where only 20 minutes long. Toward the end, they ran as long as 38 minutes. That’s a lot of time to devote in the evenings to a workout! And again, very hard to accomplish when I’ve got homework to supervise, a house to clean, dinner to make, children to read to, etc.

So what to do now? I figure with my schedule I could do 3 regular workouts a week, on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The Sunday and Wednesday workouts would be on days I have nothing else scheduled, exercise-wise, so I can afford to spend more time on a Wii workout. As much as 45 minutes, even. The Friday workout would be on an evening when I don’t have to worry about homework or cook dinner. That’s pizza and movie night, so I can easily squeeze in 20-30 minutes.

The question is though, do I stick with EASA for these 3 workouts a week, or do something else?

I’m thinking of doing something else. I’ve done EASA for 6 weeks straight, and while the latest incarnation is better than the previous, I am still getting bored with it after so many weeks. I’d like to cycle back to Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout and Wii Fit Plus. Gold’s Gym really lets me work up a sweat in very little time. And Wii Fit Plus would let me work on my core muscles and balance, as well as have fun with the games. So I’m thinking of using primarily those two programs on Sunday and Friday. I might still use EASA for Wednesday, but I’ll need to figure out if I’m going to build my own workouts or use some of the pre-programmed ones.

Of course, I could always check to see if there are any new Wii workout games out there. But for now, I’m moving back to Gold’s Gym and Wii Fit Plus. I don’t know if I’ll lose any weight with this, but the goal these days is to just keep moving and stay as healthy as I can.

Yes, I’m getting this post out late today. My apologies. I had planned to get it written yesterday and then schedule it to run first thing this morning, but I got hit with a ton of deadlines. I have four e-chapbooks (smaller than an e-book, bigger than a breadbox), coming out in the next week or so, and I had to get a lot of stuff done to make sure that happens.

So today’s post is late, but that’s okay because the whole day was sort of thrown out of whack when Pixie woke up this morning sounding like she’d swallowed the granddaddy of all bullfrogs. My poor little pooter has a mild fever, a runny nose, and a nagging cough. None of this is slowing her down, mind you, but it is enough to keep her out of preschool for today and tomorrow. Can’t be too careful with the H1N1 virus running around, I suppose.

So I unexpectedly have a child home today, a sick child whom I cannot take to the Y nursery anymore than I could send to preschool, and that puts all my carefully laid out plans for the day into the trashcan. Or does it?

I actually look forward to the days the kids are home sick. It somehow lifts the burden off of me to meet any other responsibilities beyond bringing my baby warm ginger ale to sip and watching Disney movies on the couch with her. I call these days “Blow Off Days,” because I have the perfect excuse to blow off work, exercise, what have you. Depending on the severity of illness and my desire to take a break from the usual routine, I may blow off everything or just a few select items on my daily to-do list.

Since Pixie’s really not all that ill and since I’m gung-ho to catch up on a lot of stuff I’ve been putting off all summer, I opted to only skip a few things today. Rather than hit the Y this afternoon for a lengthy karate practice, I pulled out EA Sports Active (yes, my one month moratorium on that game is up) and did a short 20 minute workout. Then I popped a Disney movie in the DVD player for Pixie and hit the office. While she played downstairs and watched her movie, I worked on finances, e-mail, and other odds and ends. I took a break every now and then to check on my little poot, but she was doing fine, so I let her be.

At lunch, I decided to pop Pixie in the jog stroller and I took her for a nice walk around the neighborhood. Nothing too fast, just a chance to get outside for some fresh air. We stopped at the local playground for a bit and played there, then returned home. Pixie is in bed now with some of her Barbies while I finish up more work in the office.

I did not get the hard-charging workout I had planned for today, but that’s okay. I had other options, and I think that’s what’s important. It’s hard to keep up with kids, work, AND exercise if you don’t give yourself options. And while I might miss the sweat inducing activity I had planned, let’s face it. If my kid is sick, I may be sick too soon. Taking a bit of a break right now instead of running myself into the ground might not be a bad idea.

Pixie will be home again tomorrow; she has to be fever-free for 24 hours before she can go back to school (again, can’t be too careful). But that’s okay. She’ll be well enough that I can take her to the dojo with me tomorrow for kobudo class. I have a kobudo test coming up this Saturday, so I need the class. But I won’t be staying for the class of open-hand karate following afterward.

After all, I got a sick kid, and we could use the break.

*****

I believe on October 4th, Nintendo releases the new Wii Fit Plus. I’m chomping at the bit for this one. I love Wii Fit, but I’ve done it almost to death at this point. I need something new. EA Sports is also releasing an update to EA Sports Active, which includes new exercises and workouts. I had thought about pre-ordering this, but decided I’d rather look into some other Wii fitness games instead, like My Fitness Coach. This game actually looks like it might include some stretching exercises, something that both Wii Fit and EASA have so far ignored. Although, maybe the new Wii Fit will surprise me in that aspect. One can hope.

Dear EA Sports Active,

I want you to know, we’ve had a lovely couple of months together. Really, I’ve had such a great time with your 30 day challenge and daily journal. But I think it’s time we take a break. Now before you panic, this is a break, not a break-up. It’s just that I need some time away from you to figure things out, like why my knees have been feeling like crap ever since we’ve been together, or why I’ve done nothing but gain weight since you came into my life. I know, these are difficult questions, and you’re not necessarily at fault. In fact, I don’t want to blame you, but I need to start looking for solutions to these two very troubling problems, and that means cutting back on possible contributors. Again, notice I say possible, not definite. I’m not blaming you. Really, it’s not you at all, it’s me, me and my bum knees.

I expect you won’t see me for about a month. While we’re apart, I want you to know I will be revisiting old friends, and yes, that includes Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution. I know you may not be comfortable with this, but I want to be upfront and about what I’m doing. And you are certainly free to hang out with whomever you choose. I don’t want you to be jealous, but I’ve always felt close to Wii Fit, and my knees are certainly more comfortable with the balance board than they are with your lunges and jumping, so I think maybe this is the right thing to do.

Again, we’ve had a wonderful couple of months together. All those training exercises, the upper body workouts, the volley ball and the tennis and other games… All that will remain very precious to me, and I’m certain that at the end of a month you and I will be seeing each other again, although maybe not as much as we had been seeing each other before. After all, Fall is coming up, and with the kids going back to school I’ll be hitting the Y more often to swim and lift real weights…

Oh, I’m sorry! Your weight training program is great, really! You should be proud of it!

Anyway, I have to go. I’ve got a weigh in at the balance board coming up, and I don’t want to miss that. Wii Fit gets so prissy if I miss a weigh in. I’ll see you in a month, I promise.

Yours truly,

Helen

Oy! I’ve been busting ass lately, trying to lose those LAST 10 POUNDS, and have had no success. In fact, the scale is actually tipping in the opposite direction. I weigh more now than I have in a while. However…

My clothes still fit fine. And I can see more muscle definition in my legs, arms, and pretty much everywhere else. AND, most importantly, Hubster says I look goooooooooood.

I know, that last part is pretty shallow. I shouldn’t depend on someone else’s opinion of how I look to validate that I do look good. But the fact is, I can’t see my own ass without a 3-way mirror and I know he stares at it all day when he’s home, so I consult with the expert on that matter. If he likes it, it’s fine.

But the not-losing-weight thing. What’s going on there? I’ve increased the amount of water I drink, hoping to stave off excess water weight gain at those certain times of the month. I’ve upped my intake of fruits and vegetables, in an effort to fill up on healthy stuff and prevent me overeating meat and other not-so-good for me things. I’m certainly doing more activity around the house. I spent a few hours this week scraping the old vinyl linoleum off the kitchen floor, and let me tell you, that ain’t no picnic. That activity alone should have caused me to sweat off a few pounds, but no, it didn’t. I’ve put in over four hours at the dojo this week, 2-3 hours on the Wii (EASA and Wii Fit). I’ve spent two hours on yard work, three hours on dedicated house cleaning. I’ve been pretty much go, go, go all week.

And yet my weight has gone up, up, up. Huh.

One thing I’ve also notice is that I’ve been getting some seriously rough, dry patches of skin on my forehead. One minute, my face is fine, the next it looks like it belongs to a monitor lizard in molting season. This leads me to think that something is going on with my hormones, and since my weight fluctuation seems tied to my menstrual cycle, I’m wondering if that’s what’s going on here. It could be. Or I could be sneaking in a few too many bits of chocolate, that extra soda here and there, dinner out last week…

I dunno. All I know is, I don’t want to starve myself, I do want to keep exercising, and I still fit into my favorite pair of jeans. Oh, and Hubster says I look gooooooooooood.

On to other things. I’ve found the more I play with EA Sports Active, the better I like it. Now that I’m no longer chained to that bloody 30 Day Challenge, I feel free to create my own routines. Remember how I said you couldn’t get a decent cardio workout from EASA? Well, it turns out you can. What you do is create a new workout and fill it with the cardio activities and all the sports activities. I’ve made up three of these workouts already, mixing and matching the dancing, running, boxing, and other sports together. The workouts I make range from 18-30 minutes, burning from 90-140 calories. I find I tend to burn more calories than EASA predicts, which is good, though the workouts also run a bit longer than EASA predicts (not a huge problem there unless I’m tight for time that day). I’m usually sweating like crazy after one of these cardio workouts, so that’s a good sign.

As for the strength training exercises in EASA, I’ve found I have to limit how much of the lower body exercises I do per workout. I can fill up a workout on upper body with no problem, cranking out reps of biceps curls, shoulder presses, etc. But do one too many sets of lunges and I pay for it the rest of the day, and probably the next. So, to make sure I get a lower body workout, I’m going to make some workout routines that mix just a few of the lunges and squats and jumps with the sports and cardio. It’ll work like this: cardio/sport, cardio/sport, lunges, cardio/sport, cardio/sport, squats, etc. That’s two aerobic exercises for every lower body exercise. And keep in mind the roller blading exercises in EASA count as lower body exercises, not aerobic.

Final thought for the day — I wish someone would make an adventure exercise game. I recently got Wii Sports Resort, and I love it, but only a few of the mini-games offer any sort of exercise, and those, not as much as I’d like. I’d love to see someone come up with a Wii game that combines exercise with an adventure or game of some sort. Like say, an ancient Olympics game, where you represent one of the original Greek city states in a competition. You have to out run, out lift, out throw yourr opponents to win medals. Or something along the lines of the Lego Star Wars or Indiana Jones games, where instead of operating your character via a remote while sitting on your assets on the couch, your character only runs when you run, fights when you fight, etc. Isn’t that what the Wii was supposed to do in the first place anyway?

Okay, that’s it for me today. I’ll be in Chicago next week, so I don’t know if there’ll be a Move It Mama Monday blog post or not. Will depend on my schedule while I’m there.

The 30th day of my 30-day fitness challenge on EA Sports Active has come and gone, and I now feel ready to render final judgment on which is better: Wii Fit or EA Sports Active.

Drum roll, please…

Wii Fit, hands down, is the better program.

Why, you may ask? There are a number of reasons. The first, and most important in my book, is that I actually gained weight this past month, an extra three pounds that I’m now going to have to work on losing. Sports Active did not give me the workouts I needed to burn calories. Each workout in the 30-day challenge ran 25 minutes, on average, the longest workout running 28 minutes. Most of those workouts concentrated on strength building exercises, which are important, but don’t burn the calories like cardio exercises do. And except for the medium and long run exercises in EA Sports Active, there’s not really any cardio to speak of. The aerobic dance segments barely get my heart rate going (and honestly, I think they’re a joke, when compared to Wii Fit’s step routine). The boxing is nice, but doesn’t last nearly long enough to keep my heart rate up. The baseball, basketball, tennis and volley ball drills don’t last long either, and they don’t pop up nearly often enough in the workouts for the 30-day challenge to make a difference, in my opinion.

(And keep in mind, this is all in my opinion. You’ll see as we go today that I expect certain things from my workouts which may not appeal to everyone.)

Another big problem I had with EA Sports Active was its emphasis on lunges, squats, and jumping. I have bad knees. Wii Fit actually improved my knees dramatically. Prior to using Wii Fit, I had problems getting into and holding many positions in my karate classes because my knees couldn’t handle the stances. A few weeks on Wii Fit fixed that. I expect it’s the focus on balance and posture that did the trick, correcting problems with how I stand in general to the point that the muscles I needed to compensate for my knee problems finally got the workout they needed. EA Sports Active doesn’t have that focus. It’s all strength training, and while the repeated lunges, squats, and jumping did strengthen my outer thighs, they did damned little for those muscles that actually support my knees. As I type this review, I can feel my knees swelling from today’s workout. And the crunching noise they make when I go up and down the stairs is just as bad as it was six months ago, before I started on Wii Fit. It’s terrible, I tell ya.

My third issue with EA Sports Active is the exercise band. The one thing I looked forward to in EA Sports Active was the upper body workout. This is one area where Wii Fit falls flat. Aside from a few moves in the strength training section, Wii Fit focuses all its attention on core muscle building. My arms were starting to get flabby. EA Sports should have taken care of that, but the exercise band they packaged with the game is pretty much useless. It’s one of the lightest-weight bands you can find, and offered very little resistance for me during workouts. EA Sports Active advises that if you need more resistance, you can double up the band and stand on it. This shortened band will provide the resistance you need. Well, it sort of does that. The problem with that fix is that I sometimes had to stand almost on the handles to make the band short enough for some exercises. Also, it was too easy to get the band uneven in the folding, thus leading to uneven resistance between arms. Finally, I managed to tear a hole in my band by the fourth week of working out, and I think it happened because of how far I had to double up the band to get the resistance I needed.

Fortunately, I did have another band on hand, one that offers four times the resistance of the band that arrived with the game. I’m definitely getting that arm workout now. But I would have liked to have had this band from the start. Better yet, I would have liked to have had a variety of bands from the start, with handles to go with them. I’m thinking of ordering some extra bands and handles to solve that problem. I’ve looked online, but have yet to see a package of such bands offered by EA Sports Active. They seriously ought to consider putting one together and selling it as an accessory.

Now that I’ve bashed poor EA Sports Active, let me say what I liked about it. It does offer strength training beyond the core muscles. I especially like that I have the option to do more upper body exercises than just the push ups and plank poses offered by Wii Fit. And I like EA Sports Active’s journal feature. By filling it out each day, I have a regular reminder to eat more fruits and vegetables, drink more water, and stay away from sugary drinks and fast food. Those are probably my biggest downfalls when it comes to losing weight, and that gentle reminder is nice to have.

Wii Fit, on the other hand, doesn’t really look at nutrition, unless you suddenly gain 2 lbs, and then the snarky little bitch wants to know why you’re so fat all of a sudden. Unfortunately, Wii Fit will only accept a certain select list of excuses, many of which have nothing to do with why I gain weight suddenly (Wii Fit does not believe in water weight gain). And once you select your excuse, you have to listen to a lecture on the evils of what you did wrong. Annoying. As is Wii Fit’s comments when you miss a day or two or more. Guess what? I can’t help missing a week when I’m out of town! It’s not like I’m going to pack the whole Wii with Balance Board and Wii Fit disk and take it on the road with me! EA Sports Active, on the other hand, simply labels any days you take off as rest days. Maybe this is a cop out. Maybe I do need the nagging reminders and the lectures that Wii Fit hands out when I miss a few days or when my weight suddenly balloons, but you know what? I don’t like it!

My final analysis is this. I prefer Wii Fit, but EA Sports Active has something to offer, if I use it right. I think what I’ll probably end up doing is abandoning the 30-day challenge from here on out and make up my own workouts in EA Sports Active, to supplement what I do in Wii Fit. I’d like to try putting together a series of 15-minute routines that use those strength training exercises, but scaling back on the lunging and jumping so I don’t continue to kill my knees. I can use the long run to warm up, or even do a few minutes on our elliptical machine, then do strength training with EA Sports Active. After that, I can switch to Wii Fit, do my heavy duty cardio there (about 20-25 minutes straight), and then throw in 10-15 minutes of yoga, strength training, and balance games to workout those core muscles and strengthen my poor knees. I may even consider doing extra balance games later in the day as a pick-me-up in the afternoons. I have a tendency to get tired right before sitting down to work, and this might help me perk up. Or I could pull out the DDR mat and do some of that for a few minutes to get my blood pumping before I sit down at the computer.

One final thought before I sign off. The 30-day challenge might have worked for me and helped me lose, or at least maintain, weight if I had done two things. The first is attempting to complete all 20 workouts in 30 days. I actually missed the deadline by a week; I had five workouts left to go when day 30 rolled around. But I realize now there was no way I was going to complete 20 workouts in 30 days and still do karate and swimming during that time. What can I say? I like variety in my workouts, so I continued to space out EA Sports Active with those other activities, and thus blew my deadline. Second, I might have lost more weight if I had opted for the high intensity program rather than medium. That level of intensity might have made the difference. I might have seen more aerobic exercises mixed into the workouts, or I might have done longer, more intense workouts. However, I also fear that doing that level of workout for 30 days would have completely destroyed my knees, so perhaps it’s best I didn’t go that route..

I should finish up the last two workouts of my 30-day challenge by Wednesday, then I plan to finish up the week with Wii Fit only. On Monday, I’ll start doing custom workouts mixed with Wii Fit and we’ll see how that goes for a month.