Morning Edition weighs in on Wii Fit

NPR's Morning Edition weighed in this morning (pun is sadly intended) on the effectiveness of Wii-based workout games. They specifically reference Wii Fit and Dance Town. It was a short fluff piece in another bad news day, and the upshot was that while these games are a good start, you really can't substitute Wiirobics for "real" workouts. On the other hand, these games can lead to positive lifestyle changes and get you integrating workouts into your daily routine.

I agree largely with these findings, but I have two things to add. First of all, I worked out with Wii Fit daily for 30-45 minutes almost every day between February '09 and late December '09, and it really made a difference. Of course I supplemented with nearly 3,000 miles on the bike, but I can't imagine anyone who would work out with Wii Fit once a day, then spend the rest of the day popping bon bons while watching daytime TV from the comfort of their barcalounger. Any daily workout routine leads to the desire to work out more, whether it's running, cycling, or poking around in the garden. So there's certainly nothing wrong with Wii Fit, especially when they upgraded to Wii Fit Plus, which allows a more seamless workout routine with less down-time between activities and calorie counting, not to mention the ability to customize workouts and flap your arms like a giant chickadee.

Secondly, EA Active totally works, and it burns calories twice as fast as Wii Fit. You really can get winded  in the running and the lunges and squats are pretty brutal, especially when you're starting out. I've found that I burn around 200 calories for a 30 minute EA Active workout, and I've been supplementing that with cycling on the trainer once or twice a week, and I also do some EA Active two-player sports with my 9-year-old, which is really a blast. Tennis is my favorite, but volleyball, dancing and baseball are a pretty good time as well.

Tomorrow I finish my 30 day EA Active workout, and I look forward to starting another round on Friday. Next on the wish list is EA Active More Workouts, since it addresses a weakness of EA Active, the lack of abdominal workouts. The price is right, coming in at around $40.

Hunkered Down

Snow is in the air! Now that I'm hunkered down and all set up for spinning in the basement with my trusty trainer, let the snow fly, I say. The big challenge now is to keep up the schedule of indoor biking workouts three times weekly through the winter. This is unchartered territory for me, as I've never maintained an indoor training schedule of any kind before. It's so much harder to get motivated to ride with a trainer than to ride on on the road. How do professional athletes do it?

One of the obvious reasons that I slowly gained weight through my 30s and 40s and had such a hard time losing weight is my strong aversion to exercise. For my whole life I've held stubbornly to my position that exercise for exercise sake is just plain boring and that I'll never do that. If it's not fun, I'm not doing it. I've been able to hold true to this mindset all through this year of substantial weight loss and improved fitness by doing a Wii Fit workout almost daily since February in addition to road biking all summer. For those of you who haven't experienced the magic of Wii Fit, you have so much fun working out that you don't resent it. I've never been into gaming, but I can do Wii Fit for an hour or more without getting bored, and the cumulative effect is incredibly beneficial. The Wii Fit experience is data driven, and I've written in prior posts about my obsession with gathering and analyzing data from my rides. Wii Fit Plus improves tremendously on an already fantastic product, with lots of new fun activities like Island Cycling, Obstacle Course, Birds-Eye Bullseye, Skateboarding, Boxing, and Snowball Fight. In addition, it tracks an estimate of calories burned, and analyzing the graph of your weight loss is very motivating.

So why am I rethinking my anti-exercise stance? Wii Fit alone will not keep me in shape over the winter months, given the limited amount of time I have set aside to work out. That leaves the bike trainer, not the most fun thing in the world, so it means...gulp...exercise for exercise sake. Yikes! Can I succeed? I'm definitely motivated, so hopefully that will make all the difference.

Ask any cyclist who has tried riding on even the best trainer—it's a pale substitute to the euphoria of road biking. It's a good workout but you have to work hard on making the environment comfortable and find distractions that work for you. I get bored quickly with my music mixes, so I have to keep on top of this issue and make a few new playlists in anticipation of my next workouts. It's all about mind games, but there's no doubt that my positive state of mind, thanks to many months of intense aerobic workouts, will contribute greatly to the success of this workout strategy.

Data driven cycling with GPS and Google Earth

In the spring of '09 when I finally bought my new road bike, I also budgeted for some cool accessories. The coolest one by far was a Garmin Edge 205. This handy little unit has fundamentally changed the way I ride and where I ride. It has also become the catalyst for reflecting on my rides with friends and total strangers via online social networking tools (Facebook and Twitter) and online route sharing sites such as Everytrail.com and Mapmyride.com. I also import all of my rides into Google Earth, which lets me do a virtual flyover or tour of my ride.

The Garmin Edge 205 is the entry level bike GPS unit. While its capabilities are limited in comparison with to pricier models, it was more than sufficient for my needs. While the main function for car GPS units is to keep from getting lost and find the fastest way to a specific locale, I use my Garmin to monitor my speed, distance, average speed, calories burned, and most importantly, my altitude, percentage of grade on my climbs, and my cumulative vertical feet climbed.

My Garmin accompanied me on most of my rides this year, and really gave each ride a life of its own. Sometimes I would bring a small camera along as well. My typical post-ride routine is to download my GPS data, then use an online converter tool provided linked off of Everytrail.com to convert the file into KMZ format. Then I upload my ride to Everytrail, write up a description, add pictures if available (sometimes I add screen shots from Google Earth), then share the ride with my Facebook and Twitter friends. After that, I upload the KMZ file to Google Earth and view the flyover (tour). I have also started posting videos of my Google Earth tours with narration to YouTube.



Why do all of this? I actually love it, and it allows me to connect riding with other activites that I'm interested, such as blogging, mapping and video editing. I get a chance to reflect on the ride, study my data, try to beat my best average speed on a given ride, and study the maps to look at new possibilities for routes. This has all made me a better cyclist, without a doubt.

This summer I participated in the Le Tour Challenge, an event sponsored by MapMyRide and others. I rode every day that I could that coincided with a Tour de France stage, then uploaded my ride data to MapMyRide. I could see how my data compared with other participating cyclists as well as the Tour cyclists. I ended up with some pretty satisfying results, which drove me to ride even harder. I also won a really nice Polar cyclocomputer with heartrate monitor, which brings me to thoughts about what I'll do with this in the future.

While I like the Polar cyclocomputer's heartrate monitoring function, and really see the value of assessing heartrate data, it seems silly for me to ride with two separate devices (GPS and Polar). It would be hard to justify this, but an upgrade to an Edge 305 (or better) would allow me to capture heartrate data and eliminate the need for the Polar unit. Also, the heartrate data could automatically be added to the Everytrail posts.

I loved watching all of my rides accumulate in Google Earth—it provided very tangible evidence of my progress, and prompted me to explore areas less traveled. In the spring I'll hide all of my rides in Google Earth and repopulate the map all over again.

Four Days Off and Feeling Good

It's a good day. I've been sick for over a week, and off the bike (including indoor rides on the trainer) for four days now. This time of year you have to sneak the rides in whenever you can since you never know when the season will be over, and in spite of the fact that I'm not 100% recovered from an annoying, lingering cold, I decided to do my roundabout commute to work today.

My workplace is less than 1 mile away on completely flat roads, but since last spring I have been exploring increasingly long and convoluted ways of getting to work. My latest and favorite route has me heading up Cascadilla Park Rd. (see picture—this is my favorite Ithaca street, and it makes me think of the Italian Alps), a short, steep and absolutely beautiful road alongside the Cascadilla gorge, then through the Cornell campus, across the campus Fall Creek bridge, then up to Triphammer, past Community Corners to Warren Rd., and then over to the airport, down Dart, past the mall, down Oakcrest to Cayuga Heights Rd., and finally down Sunset and Remington to Lake Ave. and finally the high school. Phew! It's a 10 mile ride with over 800 ft. of vertical climbing, most of it in the first 2 miles. It's a great way to start the work day, and I was already reconciled to the notion that I had already taken this route for the last time of the season.

This morning I discovered that four days out of the saddle can really refresh you and make you somehow feel stronger. I have know idea how this works, but it certainly did in this case. My body is still in recovery mode and I only got 5 hours of sleep last night, yet I felt so good on this ride. I'm puzzled but very grateful for this phenomena.

Since February I have lost 33 pounds without having weight loss as a primary goal. I'm pretty happy about this, since I never thought I could lose this much weight over a number of years, let alone 9 months. I have used Wii Fit almost every day since February, and I think that the weigh-in is a critical factor contributing to this weight loss, as is some changes in my diet and (of course) lots of cycling up steep hills from March until now. At this point, I don't have strong feelings about losing more weight. My primary goals are becoming an even stronger rider and not gaining back any significant weight over the winter months. More than anything, I want to end the outdoor cycling season strong and keep the momentum going for the much less fun indoor cycling season.