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Week Two: The Plan

Jul 20th, 2009
by James.
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Now that we’re into the second week, we should set up some sort of framework for the next seven days? Right? Come on, whose with me? Baahhh, to hell with you Stanley. On with the planning!

Sekrit Plan - Week 2

Fitness Benchmarks

Wii Sports and Wii Fit both assign you an “age” that is meant to represent your overall health, lower being better. Unfortunately, they’re both pretty useless as a fitness index. Wii Sports is really just measuring how good you are at specific mini games, and Wii Fit is just an assesment of your balance. Both may have some relationship to fitness, but it’s a pretty tenuous one.

For that reason, I’ve added fitness benchmarks to my weekly measurement tracking. These are pretty straightforward. I’ll see how many push ups, crunches, squats, and chin ups I can do before reaching a failure point. Presumably as strength improves and weight from fat drops these numbers should go up. Maybe not substantially, but there should be an upward trend over time.

To get a snapshot of cardio fitness I’ll be tracking resting heart rate. If I understand heart rate correctly, this should go down as fitness improves.

I’ll also be using calipers to measure body fat percentage, along with various other measurements around my body. Some measurements should go down, like belly fat, others should go up or stay the same.

Wii Sports

Each day I’ll be doing the Wii Sports Fitness test which chooses three activities from the Wii Sports mini games. I’ll also play 12 – 15 minutes of one of the more vigorous games – Tennis, Boxing, or Baseball.

Wii Fit

Each day I’ll continue doing the Wii Fit body test and recording the results. In addition I’ll be doing 15 – 45 minutes of exercise using various Wii Fit activities.

EA Sports Active

I will occasionally add EA Sports Active exercises into the mix to get a feel for which ones I enjoy and find effective. I will not be kicking off a structured 30 day challenge just yet. I may in the coming weeks, but I would like to avoid setting up a regimented plan centered around this software at the moment

Punch Out

I will also occasionaly add Punch Out with motion controls and the balance board to the mix. So far I have been playing Punch Out with the traditional NES style control, so it will be interesting to see if playing with motion control is still fun, and if it provides any kind of workout.

Week One: Knowing the Unknowable

Jul 13th, 2009
by James.
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The first week of the project is well underway. You may be wondering what’s on the fitness agenda? Will it be Wii Fit? EA Sports Active? Keeping it real with Wii Sports? Actually, none of the above. Instead, it’s about getting in touch with one of Bill and Ted’s most righteous companions.

The path of self knowledge is the only way to avoid self abuse

Socrates Sez: The path of self knowledge is the only way to avoid self abuse

The goal of this week is not to modify my behavior at all. Instead, I will be going about an ordinary week, and keeping track of my exercise, what I eat, how much I weigh, and so on in a handy dandy google doc – which, by the way, is available for you to check out at any time you’d like.

At the end of the week I’ll be looking over the data to see if I can identify any unhealthy patterns that look like prime culprits in my fattitude. I suspect to find more than a few nasty habits that are clearly in need of change. Those will be the first things to work on.

Once I’ve corrected the big nasties, I think success will be a matter of discipline and regular tweaks along the way.

So, this week isn’t going to be super exciting. And it’s not going to involve a lot of Wii gaming. Instead, it’s about making myself more scrutable. Like the oh so scrutable Sulu.