I blog when I go abroad, and occasionally when I do stuff in the UK too. There's a nicer interface over here.

Monday, August 04, 2008

Regime change

What responses there have been about my last post (public and private) have concentrated on the Wii aspect. That's predominantly my fault, given how I phrased everything, and it means we all missed the point: Wii Fit is first and foremost a measurement tool. It's not a game in the sense that practice or learning techniques in themselves could get me better scores; the nature of the gameplay is such that they will only get better if you do actually get fitter (which, yes, the games themselves are supposed to do). As for the two activities I do the most, I don't aim to jog a particular distance or get a particular score in the boxing, and being the only player in my household there is no competitive aspect to the charts.

The balance board is good at measuring. As scales they are accurate, and as daft as the "Wii Fit age" thing is, any activity you repeat at roughly the same time every day which uses a consistent measure is useful as a way of determining progress. So for the sake of argument let's remove Wii Fit's training games from the equation -- pretend the graph is a set of results from normal bathroom scales, and say that 4 weeks ago I started a fitness regime which primarily involves a 3km jog five times a week. How long should it take for me to lose some inches/weight, and/or feel noticeably different?

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