Wii Exercise Experiment – Day 15 – My Routine

I’m a little over two full weeks into my 30 day Wii Exercise Challenge and I have to admit, I think this is probably the longest I’ve stuck with a New Years Resolution Exercise Routine. That tells you, the reader, two things:

1. I’m a fat, lazy load who really doesn’t like exercise.

2. The Nintendo Wii, and especially Wii Sports, is an incredibly fun machine if it is still holding my interest.

Both are true.

I’ve been doing this long enough to kind of work out a regular Wii Sports routine that I go through most days. I mix it up a little bit, but I generally stick to this pattern:

1. Boot up the Nintendo Wii and strap on the wrist weights.

2. Stretch for a minute or two, just to kind of get myself woken up. I almost always exercise first thing in the morning.

3. I’m right-handed, so I play a “Best of 5″ match of Wii Tennis with my Mii that is right-handed. In the beginning my matches didn’t last very long, but now I’m up to around the 850 – 950 skill level so my matches last about 10-15 minutes.

4. I then switch to a left-handed Mii that I made and play another Best of 5 match. Curiosly, my skill level as a left-handed tennis player always seems to be higher than my right-handed tennis player. I think I just tend to put more spin on the ball when I’m playing left handed. This match also takes 10 – 15 minutes most days.

5. Based on a comment by one of my readers, I started playing some of the boxing training exercises, especially the punching bag one. I learned a lot and now I often tack on a quick round of boxing against a computer opponent onto the end of my work out.

6. If I have time (with a newborn in the house I sometimes don’t) I’ll take the Wii Fitness test. Though my skill level has obviously gotten better over the last two weeks the steaming pile of poo called the “Wii Fitness Test” doesn’t usually reflect that. I could get an age of “29″ one day and a “58″ the next day, all based on the tests I happen to draw by luck. My skill level is kind of spotty in baseball and I’m just mediocre at bowling.

I try to move as much as possible, shuffling my feet, swinging my arms, keeping both my arms in a “raised and ready” position at the waist while playing tennis so that I’m still hoisting the wrist weights. I tend to move by body left and right a lot and sometimes I even pull in my stomach muscles for short bursts while playing.

All of this gives me a light but decent workout. As long as I’m wearing my wrist weights I really am pretty worn out by the end of the 30 minutes. I tried my routine without the weights and found that though I was a bit faster at tennis, I didn’t really get nearly the workout I thought I would. I barely broke a sweat without weights. Even more disturbing, I found myself wanting to wear the weights just to add some resistance and “realism” to Wii sports.

Oh, and I’ve lost about 10 pounds since I started. The rate of weight loss is slowing down a bit, but that’s to be expected. The initial weight loss was probably mostly water weight and adjusting to the new regimen. I’ll post all my exercise times and calorie and weight charts at the end of the 30 days.