I’ve been using WiiFit for right around two months now and I’ve got to say, so far it’s really played an instrumental part in motivating me to focus and try to workout more often … in fact, as of recent I’m currently up to about 13 days in a row! And go figure, according to the numbers it looks like it might actually be finally starting to pay off…
The Tracking
The biggest element for me is definitely how WiiFit adds that whole competitive video game element to working out, not so much in pushing myself to work harder because that’s not really what WiiFit is all about, but more so in striving for consistency from working out every single day. As odd as it sounds, I actually feel obligated to workout at this point simply so that I can put that little stamp on the calendar after each Body Test … something that I actually used to simulate years ago just marking off days on a calendar. But WiiFit also does a good job of tracking and graphing results like weigh-ins, time spent, and calories burned, too, so that’s cool.
The Yoga
Believe it or not, this is actually my favorite thing to do in WiiFit – I don’t really feel like I’m strong enough to do the strength exercises yet, but for a while now I’ve wanted to add stretching to my workout routines … I just never actually knew what to do! At one point I even tried looking up stuff online and printed some instructions out, but do you have any idea how hard it is to follow along and maintain the proper posture at the same time?! Right now I’ve got about 8 different poses that I try to go through every night, and it does seem to loosen me up a little more than just pretending to know how to stretch before working out!
The Games
Now as for the “fun side” of WiiFit, I will admit that some of the games are sort of hit-or-miss – I’m not very good at the hula-hoop one, and let’s face it, the one where you dress up like a penguin is just ridiculous, but others like the Marble Madness-ish one and even the soccer one are fun now that I’ve got the hang of it. Sara even recently got me to try the obstacle course, which I’ve yet to actually finish, but it’s still amusing despite watching myself get hit with a giant metal ball over and over! All together, they seem to be enough to keep me busy for another 10-15 minutes so that I can break the 30-minute mark each day, so that’s a plus.
And granted, I should probably add that I do have a couple of less than positive things to say about WiiFit as well – it’s certainly not perfect, but I suppose we’ll get into those another day. Still, at this point pretty much anything that motivates me to stick it out another day is a winner in my book … we’ll see if I’m still doing WiiFit this summer or if I’ll have moved on to something else by then…