Wiitness the Fitness

“Wow, have you been working out?”

“You must go to the gym a lot”

These are two phrases which have never been said to me, unless with some sort of sarcastic undertone. Now don’t get me wrong, I have gone to the gym, it was a very brief affair. To me the gym seems to be full of people who were apparently born there, spotting each other and giving each other high fives when one of them bench presses the equivalent of a school bus full of terrified children. Now I know that the experience of displays of public exercise can be very different for different people. ‘When I go to the gym there are people who are as unfit as myself’, I’m very much sure there are and you know why you notice them, because they are making a show of themselves all red faced and sweaty wiping down an exercise bike with the last of their dignity. So I chose a different route, well several different routes, firstly weight watchers which I have to say works though you have to get weighed in like a prize pig at the start of each session but I also decided to buy a Wii, a Wii balance board and a copy of Wii fit.

Now, Wii fit sold very very well because it cleverly turned your console into something you can use to humiliate yourself in the privacy of your own home. The balance board is not only great for knowing when you have stepped onto it. It can also weigh you, like a pixelated prize pig. I remember the first time I weighed myself on it, I said to my boyfriend ‘It isn’t going to make my Mii (cutsey avatar) fat is it?’ ‘God no why would it do that?….oh wait, yes, yes it is’. For your information Nintendo some of us women have these things called breasts, they come in more than one size.

Wii fit is an ensemble of various exercise styles from yoga and muscle stretches to balance games and fat burning exercises. You can pick and choose how you want to work out, you could spend your entire time doing the hula hoop game, which is trickier than it sounds. You can weigh in every day and have the talking Wii balance board give out to you for when you put on weight like some Irish Mammy. ‘Now why do you think you gained weight?’ You choose from a list of options. ‘That’s right you gained weight because you were stuffing your face like eating was going out of fashion’. I may be paraphrasing here but you get the idea. The game charts your progress. How your weight and BMI (Body Mass Index) move down as you stick to the exercises and good eating. While you cling to a vain hope of getting your self image panel beaten into something decent. Weight and BMI can also move up as the ‘feck it’ factor comes into play. You return to the game less and less and discover that self image can be blurred by alcohol.

Now don’t get me wrong, Wii fit is a great game, it is great for toning but for any sort of cardio work out it’s difficult, there are things like the dreaded hula game, running and step aerobics. There are no set fitness programs as such, merely suggestions that after doing one exercise you may want to try one related to it. You set goals of weight loss and try to achieve them, which is a great idea but there is not set fitness routine which suggests the best way to achieve this. Sometimes freedom of choice is a bad thing because sometimes you just want to say ‘No’.

Between my getting the Wii fit and now I ventured into the world of actual exercise, I was supplementing virtual reality with the actual reality of walking into work and then I got hounded by those people in work into playing that great summer sport, tag rugby. Team games are good, I spent a good few games with my head behind some young fella’s arse waiting for him to pass the ball back to me, there was lots of running around, sun shining, all very beautiful. That was right up to the point where I broke my fecking leg, a non contact sport ended up being Platoon and I got a metal rod inserted into my shin to hold it together. It’s funny how a small moment in time can undo such good work, you see it being unwoven like some terrible jumper of fitness until all you are left with is you, tangled in the yarn and without a clue how to cross stitch. Back to square one, getting my leg to function somewhere near normal, I did a lot of physiotherapy at home but wanted more, I can walk, my bones are healing with Wolverine speed but without the hair or lycra. Last week my physiotherapist suggested I ‘go swimming’. I’m almost blind and the swans in the canal get awful angry this time of year or ‘cycle’. I work in the city centre, there isn’t a hope of me cycling anywhere. I decided to check out my local gym €355 to join for the prospect of using one of their not one, but two fabulous exercise bikes. I needed a plan B.

When I went for my last Xray the radiographer asked ‘How did you do that to yourself?’ ‘Playing tag rugby which is pretty embarrassing, ah well at least I wasn’t drunk’ ‘Or at least you didn’t break it playing the Nintendo Wii’. Of course why didn’t I think of it before, I should go back to the Wii. Admittedly I didn’t think of it at that point, in fact I would have to be insane to think of it at that point (for your information people break their hands, wrists or arms playing it).

Inspired by Wii fit Electronic Arts have brought out their own fitness game, EA Active Fit. EA have released a long line of sports related games, hence every time I hear EA I think ‘EA Sports, it’s in the game’. Interestingly this game moves more towards people who seriously want to get fit, well as seriously as you can be without leaving your house. IT takes what Wii Fit had and tries to improve on it. Certain fitness routines appear in both games such as running and boxing. Included with the game is a resistance band. A band of elastic which allows you to do exercises like bicep curls with greater benefit than just lifting the controller up and down. This band of elastic can also be used to create a giant sling shot with which you can fire pets/small children into the neighbour’s trees. For the majority of the game you require the wiimote and the nunchuck, connected together like a ligature of fitness. There is also a strap provided which allows you to put the nunchuck against your leg, this allows you to run on the floor rather than on the wii balance board, in fact there aren’t that many occasions where the board is needed, though those that do use the board use it well such as boxing, where you not only have to work your arms but your legs as well.

Issues I have had with the set up is that cables can get tangled when you are moving from one exercise to another. Also for some of the exercises you do get close to strangling yourself unless you wind the cable up somehow. The best thing about the game is you can take part in an 30 day exercise challenge. This involves doing a workout that moves through different exercises, from running to squats to boxing to inline skating. You don’t get a break (the game’s a real slave driver) so it feels physically like you are getting a workout (ie you end up red and sweaty). The game also allows you to design your own avatar so you can lie or be as honest about your body shape as you want. The variety in the exercises is enough that you don’t feel worn down in one area, that the whole ‘feel the burn’ doesn’t leave you panting like a dog trapped in a hot car. The game doesn’t weigh you though, so your progress is made through how many calories you burn in a day and how quickly you progress, in the 30 day challenge you get ‘off’ days where the game doesn’t expect you to take part or it won’t whine at you like a bad boyfriend about ‘Why didn’t you call?’. You can also take the various exercises that are contained in the game to make your own work out routine where the game will tell you what body areas you are working on.

Both of these games are set in the same vein, the ‘Get the hell of the couch and do something’ genre. As much as I’d like to say the more adult approach of EA active fit works best, sometimes you do need exercise to be fun. Nintendo publish family games, which is what Wii fit is, fun family fitness. EA Active fit is more serious face for serious adults.

Bottom line is, the Wii has shown itself to be more than just a gaming console. That there are greater lessons to be learned than ‘where is the best place to shoot a zombie’. Do I feel the benefit of using the Wii to get fit? Definitely. Do I know where to shoot a zombie? Right now it doesn’t matter, because I’m fit enough to run away.