Reflection on Video Games and a 10K

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When I embarked on this exergaming campaign at the end of 2010, I had two goals

1)      To find out if a person (me) actually could lose weight by using video games; and

2)      To lose weight.

As I’ve discussed, I really did have quite a bit of skepticism that one could actually, really, honest to goodness lose weight using video games. It didn’t equate for me at all. I honestly thought it was a bunch of marketing phooey.  Since then, I’ve learned better.

I now know that video games make working out a lot of fun, and that one (me) can lose weight by using them. Thus far, I’ve lost 25+ pounds, with my next weight goal coming up in the next couple of weeks. As we hear through the ECA’s Gamers for Health initiative, video games help hundreds of thousands of you lose weight too. They’re that good of a catalyst.

As I’ve discussed, exergames also act as a gateway for many of us, getting us to try other activities, like running as I did. Each season offers a different set of challenges and opportunities for active play inside and outside one’s house.

As the year has progressed, and I’ve gotten thinner, lighter and more fit, the number and breadth of my goals has multiplied. Each week seems to bring a new goal, and each few weeks seem to open up more goals being achieved.

In the last seven days alone I ran a 6.2 mile race – yes, that’s how long a 10K is – and fit into a size smaller jeans. Earlier this year it would not have been possible. Simply *not* *possible*.  Before last week, 6.2 miles was for crazy-insane DISTANCE RUNNER people to run (in my lay person’s estimation); it was not a distance that a *normal* jogger would do (when I did jog, as I considered myself). Now I’m looking forward to running other 10K races THIS FALL and wondering how long it will take me to scale up to run a half marathon. Um, yes. I *did* just write that.

As I just mentioned, I also fit into a size smaller Leavis 501s. Now, for me, this particular size jeans is important, because it was the size I used to steal from boyfriends in college, my 20s, my 30s and now from my husband. They may be a bit snug, but I can fit into them and button them all the way up. A few weeks ago, I couldn’t pull them up one leg all the way. So Dear Husband better either buy more jeans or watch out, as they’re going to start migrating over to me. Perhaps I’ll simply buy a couple of pairs for myself. Hm. We’ll see.

So would any of this be possible without exergames, as a friend recently asked? My early August assessment is, probably not. I still get up off the bed, couch, chair or floor to Zumba and step, which make up the bulk of my weekly workouts.  All of the other fitness and goal achievement flows from it.

How is your workout routine going in this steamy month?

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Zumba Fitness

There are so many places one can begin with Zumba Fitness, but I’ll start with one – it kicks my ass in a completely new way. It’s really not like much of anything I’ve tried before.

It’s the perfect complement to running, since running is all about moving forward with momentum, whereas Zumba is all about swishing side to side with obtainable sexiness. While most workouts involve forward/back action, Zumba mostly involves side to side action, which works new muscles and jiggles normally dormant jiggly bits, in original and interesting ways. To a large extent, you don’t know what’s coming with Zumba and once you’ve gotten there, the routine has moved on to something else.

It took me a while to cruise into it and just be one with the Zumba. At first, I thought I’d try out the “how to” instructional phase. That was interesting. Basically, the instructor says, let’s start slow with this, yes that’s right, lets add this, good…..and then it’s as though she’s been injected into a popcorn machine and begins bouncing all over the screen as though we’re supposed to as well. While I could not keep up, it was so hysterical that I began to laugh very loudly. It was absurd to think that I’d begin moving like that at that velocity that quickly. But even in the laughter, Zumba Fitness pulls you in, because it’s completely disarming. No one expects you to bounce around like a ping pong ball.

The point of this video game is working out and having fun. And once you give in to the rhythm and allow yourself to attempt the moves, it is a lot of fun. I caught myself thinking that this video game would be perfect for a college student or someone in their twenties, because it’s so freeing. But wait, this middle aged woman (me) was feeling the freedom and goin’ for it. Like a 20 year old.

The fact that the music is in Spanish also forces you to simply feel the music and let it move your body.  Thank God it’s a video game that I can do in my bedroom, as opposed to going through the hip grinding, salsa swaying, tush thrusting bits in front of people one doesn’t know, let alone people one does! The first few times I worked out with Zumba Fitness, I had to stop and recalibrate my butt, tummy and thighs. I kept losing the rhythm, because I’d never really experienced anything like it before. It’s kind of like Dirty Dancing and you’re Baby. No one really expects much of you, especially if you’re alone in your bedroom working out, but you can cut loose and have the time of your life.

There’s too much to write about Zumba Fitness, and Zumba in general, for one post, so I’ll end this post here and return with more discussion of the actual sequences and my takes on them in a later post. If you haven’t gotten it yet, do so now; you won’t regret it. It rocks.

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Press & Release

Truth be told, my office took pity on me when I began the Gamers for Health campaign way back in 2010, when I was 25 pounds heavier than I am now. They know what a Luddite I am, and they figured they’d help me out by pre-programming my Wii and Wiimote accessories so that all I had to do was plug everything in to get it going. As I’ve chronicled here, even simply plugging the thing in was a *bit* overwhelming for me. In any case, I’ve been happily exergaming on my Wii ever since…

Until yesterday. Something happened. It may have been a power outage. It may have been that my Wii went on strike. Or perhaps the Wiimotes and other accessories wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The outcome, dear readers, was that my Wiimotes and other accessories, like my step, all of a sudden DID NOT SYNC with my Wii! Dum dum Dum. The HORROR!

After unplugging and re-plugging everything possible a few times last night I finally gave up in exasperation 45 minutes later. It was good that I’d run earlier in the day, as I was not to get in any decent exergame workout yesterday. The plug fiasco exhausted me and made me snappy to DH. Enough was enough.

Today was an off day for running and a full-on exergame day, so I knew that the problem needed to be fixed. I looked up nearby stores where I could go and purchase entire new systems this afternoon if the problem could not be fixed in the morning. Basically, I was spent, at the end of my rope, needed to get my workout in and desperate. I guess I'm kind of fried right now.

Then logic kicked in, along with my second cup of coffee. I walked over to my computer, powered it up and typed “wiimote sync issues” and low and behold, Nintendo’s customer service page popped up – who knew?!?! The truly logical thing would have been to look for that first, but the illogical not tech savvy overworked mind digresses. Great! :-D

I marched back in, thanking the Nintendo folks in my mind and feeling all warm and fuzzy about their wonderful patriarchal company, thinking again about what a wonderful community I work in...and tried to sync my Wiimotes…for 25 minutes. Finally it struck me that Nintendo would not have me standing there developing cramps in my thumbs and pointer fingers as I waited for the first stupid waste of an item Wiimote to sync. I trudged grumbling back into my office to look menacingly at my computer. What the HECK was going on?!?! Upon rereading the instructions, a wee bit of wording came forward in bold to my mind’s eye. “Quickly press and release.”

I felt like the Grinch upon hearing all of WhoVille singing on Christmas morning; my heart grew in my chest. Woops. Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy. So I wasn’t supposed to stand there like an idiot innocent holding the red buttons in for 15 minutes straight. Nintendo, as always, was a bit ahead of me.

I sheepishly skulked back into the other room and tried the quick press and release method. Ahem. It worked. In less than 10 seconds.

The moral of the story is (choose one or more):

·         We all make mistakes.

·         When we’re juggling lots of different things in our lives, we make more of mistakes.

·         There is always help online.

·         Stay calm and carry on.

To Blog or Not to Blog...

Image via Wikipedia

So, you may have noticed. I haven’t blogged in the last couple of weeks or so. So what’s up? What’s going on? Is everything ok?

Everything is fine. It’s been a long and intense few weeks - even more than normal, which is saying a lot.

On top of work, family life, working out, and keeping the house relatively presentable, we needed to plan and shop for our child’s second birthday. We figured we’d play it out like a big group play date for entire families so that dads could participate. It was a heck of a lot of fun for everyone. Our child looked like an explosion of glee on having such a lovely group play date at our place with so many friends.

The morning after the birthday party, the Supreme Court decided the so-called “violent video game” case, Brown v EMA. To say that we at ECA, and everyone in the industry, had been waiting for the decision would be an understatement.  People were getting ulcers over the thing. Not me, mind, you, but other folks. I had hope. Clearly everyone, or nearly everyone, in the industry was on IM, SCOTUS blog live feed and multiple phones all morning waiting for the decision to come out and discussing as it was coming out. I know I was! For gamer geeks in the industry, this was the Super Bowl. For lawyer gamer geeks, even more so.

It would also be an understatement to say that life fell into a vortex in the two weeks following the decision. This decision is a game changer on a number of levels. I’ve discussed it a number of places, and will not do so here. But yes, Virginia, this is monumental.

In trying to regroup after the post-decision, we’ve also been working on many other issues at ECA. One of which is S. 978, the anti-streaming bill before Congress, which could criminalize video game streaming. Not so lovely for consumers. Check out our campaign.

Which by way of nothing brings me to current results and working out. I’m still working out. 1-1.5 hours 5 days a week. About half of the workouts are video games and half are jogging. I’m up to 5.2 miles and training for a 10K (6.2 mile) race August 6^th. My weight is presently 25 pounds lost, with my next weight loss goal of 30 lost overall by the third week in August.

How are you all doing?

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Next Goal Very Near

I'll be speaking at Games for Health (GfH) in ten days in Boston, MA. I'm one pound from my next goal, which is twenty pounds down by GfH. Can I make it?

Technical Knowledge, Or Lack Thereof

There are many reasons I'm a lawyer. Some of them include always having wanted to be a lawyer; having been an English Literature major in college; and being fairly good at editing and, to a lesser degree, writing. Those are a few of my "pull" reasons. Ie - the positives.

Some of the "push" reasons are being poor at math; frustration at becoming lost in numbers complex calculations; not being able to visualize numbers in my head the way I can with words; and not liking quantum mechanics, even though I've always loved theoretical science and math, and been quite good at both.

So why am I waffling on about this? Well, you may have noticed that the wee picture next to my URL has changed. A month ago, a friend of mine explained that it's called a favicon and that it CAN be altered. As she said, "it's fairly easy." Ahem. Well, a month later, having worked on it (on and off) the entire month, it's finally changed. My favicon may not be the grooviest on the web, but it's mine and it's there. Today, someone I rely on for tech knowledge gave me a link to this site. I'm linking to it, because I've tried following many other directions on other sites and none of them worked - for me.  This one took me about 10 minutes and my personal favicon was up and running.

My difficulty figuring out what technical folks find so easy, and programmers think is so straightforward, also hobbles me when it come to many video games. I simply have a finite amount of time in which I can either play a game or use one to workout. I simply do not have the patience or “buy in” to stop the game I want to play to figure out the simultaneous finger movements to make Lara kill-with-ax-while-flipping-in-air. I’d rather move Lara at a leisurely pace and have her, and myself, think through issues as much as possible. Similarly, I don’t have it in me to blow through my workout time by searching in vain for “easy” information like my The Biggest Loser Challenge calendar, so that I can move backwards and redo a workout or look at an overview of the week to see which days my program wants me to workout. Both of these products would like me, and women like me, to buy more of them. To encourage us to keep coming back, it’s incumbent upon publishers to make games a little more “obvious” and the play “buy in” easier. I’d like my exhaustion to come at the end of my The Biggest Loser Challenge workouts, not before.

Full Disclosure: THQ gave me a copy of The Biggest Loser Challenge to try out and use.

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Wii Fit Balance Board & CTA Digital Step Raiser

I’ve been using the Wii balance board (aka step) for the last three months. It was one of my Christmas presents, along with the Wii Fit program, so I started using the step and the program about a month into my Losing Gamer campaign. It was pretty easy to set up, even for me.

In a future post, I’ll discuss my initial thoughts on the Wii Fit program, but this post concentrates on the Wii balance board and CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System.

The balance board itself looks like a short aerobic step. It syncs up with the Wii system and helps track your balance, weight, and accuracy in doing different exercises with various exergames. One would think it’s pretty straight forward, but I’ve had a few issues with the balance board.

First, its weight calibration is off. I thought something was odd the first few times I used it to weigh myself. Then I had the brilliant idea of testing it with some known-weight objects, such as five and twenty-five pound bags of flour. Each time, the scale found the object two pounds heavier than the object’s stated weight. The Wii Fit program allows for clothing weights of two and four pounds, so weighing oneself naked and saying one was wearing two pounds of clothing was a relatively easy fix. A better fix could be for Nintendo to program a nob or other calibration in the program to allow for incorrect weights without a consumer having to use the clothing allowance for that.

Secondly, the center of gravity is off. Wii Fit and other exergaming programs have many uses for one’s gravity – it helps ascertain how fit you are, whether you’re holding yourself up straight, whether you’re doing different exercises correctly, and the list goes on. It seemed odd to me that I was listing a few degrees to the left every single time I was on the balance board – even when I actively leaned waaaaay over to the left, but I really didn’t think much of it other than I must be THAT off balance. You see, as a left-handed person, my left side is my dominant side. I assumed that over time I’d simply shifted my center of balance that far over to the left….but it did seem odd.

Then, one morning I got a call while I was about to stand on the balance board to measure my balance. I had to take the call, so I stood behind the board talking on the phone. To my amazement, the empty board registered my center of gravity as five percent over to the left.  After my call, I tried wiggling the four balance board feet, removing and reattaching them, placing things to one side or the other to see if I could fix the gravity issue. Basically, I couldn’t. To this day, my balance board registers a list to the left and I take that into account and compensate when necessary in order to get the job and workout done.

Finally, the balance board height is annoyingly low. I had assumed it would be the same height as a regular aerobic step, because it’s shaped the same as a step and looks like it’s modeled on a step. But, alas, it’s much shorter. Generally aerobic steps are about four inches higher than the Wii balance board. But certain innovative companies have found a fix for us.

CTA Digital has been around since 1992 and they’re an excellent example of a company that does well making accessories for video games. While they’re not a video game publisher, they “live” in the video game space and they employ many people, helping lift the economy. I’ve discussed companies like CTA Digital quite often with legislators, when violent video game bills come down the pike. Often legislators see video games as “games” and not industries of people employing people to create art as well as accessories for that art. But getting back to their step…

I love it!

It’s really easy to put together. I didn’t even need the instructions to try out the 4” and 6” levels.
It’s stable. The feet of the balance board rest in depressions in the riser so that it stays in place. I did balance exercises for the Wii Fit, EA Sports Active 2, and some self programmed step aerobics classes and it didn’t slide, topple or make me nervous.

It bulked up my work out! I could feel the extra burn of the taller step, and the EA Sports Active 2 heart rate monitor showed a 10-30 beat per minute lift in my heart rate from when I did the same exercises without the riser.

If you’re looking for a fix on the Wii balance board height, CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System is the way to go.

Buy It.


Full Disclosure: CTA Digital gave me their step system to try out and use.

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Turn and Face the Change

Change is always a sad and exciting opportunity. With every ending comes a fresh beginning, even though the transition can be a bit destabilizing.

This is my final week of EA Sports Active 2 for Wii for quite a while, and I'm feeling a bit of sadness and anxiety about the transition. As these last weeks have catalogued, I’ve come to rely on my cheerful  trainer, the ache of yet another set of 75 mountainclimbers, and tremendous numbers of squats and strength sets. Basically, I love to loathe the challenge, the sweat, the tears and the near collapses. EA Sports Active 2 is a superb all around butt kicker for some – for me – and I’ve come to feel very protective of my little healthy desert oasis.

But, alas, the Losing Gamer challenge is not about one particular exergame, it is about exergaming in general and whether video games can be used to help one lose weight and get fit. So next week I move on to The Biggest Loser 2 for Wii. I’ll be starting their 12 week program. While I’ve watched Gillian and Bob kick contestants’ butts on their TV show, I’m concerned that the video game may not live up to the show or EA Sports Active 2, which I love to loathe. Please check back next week as I discuss my overall results using EA Sports Active 2 for Wii as well as my initial thoughts on The Biggest Loser 2 for Wii.

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Endurance (2.17.11)

We all start someplace. Some of us already can do fifteen or more toes pushups (ie - the boy kind), whereas some of us can only do one knees pushup (ie – the girl kind). That’s me.

Or rather, that was me. When I began EA Sports Active 2, nearly six weeks ago, I was able to do one measly fake half knees pushup. I started low with kind of bent arms, wiggled lower down a wee bit and called it a satisfactory effort. Honestly, it’s all my puny-yet-flabby arms would allow. A repeat effort didn’t quite go "as well" as the first so I moved on to a short water break and called that my first pushup set. Ahem. Yes, I’m admitting that. As I said, we all begin someplace.

Well, I’m happy to report that today my EASA2 routine called for two sets of ten and I did complete two full sets of ten. It was pretty amazing actually, also in that not only did I complete twenty pushups, but they were full straight arm extensions to nose touching floor and then aaaaallllll the way back up. I didn’t even fall sideways once.

I was somewhat moved (no pun intended) while I was completing them, the two sets of fifty-five mountain climbers, and all the other exercises today in how far I’ve come in a skimpy five and a half weeks on EASA2. It got me to thinking what else I can do, and how much farther I will be, in a few more weeks with committed effort. The ability to measure progress in small bits, like with pushups or mountain climbers, definitely has advantages for one’s psyche.

Just like we all start someplace, our own place, we’re all also all going someplace; exergaming helps us move ourselves in the direction we’d like to go.

Full Disclosure: EA Sports provided me an EA Sports Active 2 for free to try.

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