Wii

8/16/2012

Wii

Recently, in an attempt to exercise more (bleh) but preferring to stay inside the house, I dragged my Wii Fit balance board out from underneath the couch.  Admittedly, it needed a bit of dusting and some new batteries; but after that it was good to go.

You stand on the board and get weighed and your BMI calculated, which can be scary numbers.  What was scarier was my Wii age - 73!  Now that was depressing.  Wii tells me that my body is weaker than it should be (ya think?).

I now try and start every evening doing some yoga.  The first night doing the balance poses I used a broom for support but it has too much wiggle, so I'm now using a chair.  It is amazing to me that the balance board knows that I'm shaky and that one leg is stronger than the other.  Actually, I find it more than amazing, almost a little freaky.

I have ventured into the area of balance games - what a joke that is.  At the end of each game, which lasted oh maybe 10 seconds or so before I was killed, the machine would announce, "you are unbalanced".  Please tell me something I don't already know.

I have also tried to do an aerobic step program with the little Mii's but find it near impossible to keep up.  My feet are always in the wrong position and my Wii tells me that I need to step on and off a little faster and center myself more on the board.  I want to scream at the little Mii that I'm trying, which is the whole purpose of my doing these exercises in the first place.

My latest activity is a 10 minute free "run".  For me, it's more of a light jog/step routine and while I'm getting better still have to stop several times during my "run".  I do manage to do at least a mile in the 10 minutes, so no fear of entering the Senior Olympics anytime soon.

Still, when I'm done and have collapsed on the sofa huffing and puffing I do feel a certain satisfaction and smugness that I have gotten off the sofa long enough to do about 45 minutes of exercise of one form or another.

I know that practice makes perfect so I am hopeful that if I continue to stand on one leg often enough that perhaps I won't need the chair - or at least need the chair constantly.  That's my goal and it's a good one to have.  Oh, the other goal is to get that ridiculous Wii age down to at least something in the 60's.

I have ordered myself a balance board "skin" in fluorescent green that is supposed to cut down on slipping on the board, so I'm going to give that a try.  And, as a bonus your board will stay clean and the reviewers thought that was an added bonus.  I think the biggest advantage of the skin is that having something sitting on your living room floor that is fluorescent green will be pretty hard to ignore night after night. 

I'm trying to make a spot in my busy evenings (foregoing television) for jogging, swiveling, punching and balancing myself into a fitter and hopefully younger me.

“Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.”
― Robert Maynard Hutchins

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