The End of One Challenge: The Beginning of the Next

And so ends my self-imposed 6 week challenge on the stepper. How was it? Well I gained 4 pounds which kind of ticks me off since I was wanting to LOSE weight and I can tell myself "muscle weighs more than fat" but it doesn't cut it. I have noticed a diff in upper body strength especially. On that note, I gotta say, I didn't work out ONCE this week. I was too swamped but I'm still calling it SIX weeks! :P

The next challenge will be a 4 weeker of Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009. It's Wii Board compatible but not mandatory but you do need either 2 remotes or one remote with a nunchuck regardless if you have the board.

There are 4 types of 'training':

Weight Loss
Intervals
Strength Training
Hill Climb

You also have a choice of Light, Medium, or Hard and can set the duration for 5-60 minutes. I did the weight loss at light and set the duration for 30 minutes so I can't comment on the other types.

You begin with a run and after every game you run again. Every time you finish a run you can either pick a preselected game (push the right arrow on the remote) or a 'surprise' game (push the left arrow).

The games are fun and indicative of what you would find in boot camp like monkey bars, kayaking, log jumping and the book mentions other games like paint grenade toss, cannon attack, handcar pump, tire trail, rowing, boxing, punching bag dodge etc... During each game it also displays how much longer you have. One game I couldn't get the hang of was the jumping through tires. The log balancing seemed kind of pointless since even if you didn't move, there was no way you could fall off the log. The rest were easy to figure out without reading the instructions.

It does provide a graph similar to Wii Fit and tracks the calories burnt but not BMI. It also doesn't have the 'attitude' that Fit has and your avatar looks human and isn't based on your weight.

The music is pretty decent and I'm just reading now that you can go in to the Music Player by holding the B button during a game to bring up the player and select what genre you want to listen to (I'll have to do that next time). Most of the music was random, some of them I knew... One of them sounded like hillbilly music!

By the end I was sweating like a pig which has to be good, right? The running gets boring after doing it for an accumulative 19:05 minutes. My cat thought kayaking was interesting and now I'm done a workout for the day. As a side-note, there's a multiplayer function too which you can't use the board for. It appears you have all the same functionality for choosing the workout type, difficulty, and duration. Looks like that'll be fun to try too!

Tip:

For the first time trying this, I had a bit of a problem getting my avatar to run. The trick is to hold the remote loosely in your hand near the bottom of the remote. This will basically exagerate your movement if the receiver doesn't pick up your movements that well.

Not so good:

It doesn't display your ongoing time. I chose a 30 minute workout and I had no clue how much longer I had to go. In an effort to find out, I paused the first game and selected Back to Camp. I had lost all my progress and had to start a new game (I did another 30 minute workout so yes, I completed the whole thing). :(