#oneaday Day 596: Back in the Saddle

(As an aside, I heard the song “Back in the Saddle Again” the other day for the first time and I thought it was incredibly dull. This means nothing to the following blog post, I just thought I’d share it.)

In the next few days/weeks/months I will be resuming some sort of fitness plan. I went out and investigated local gyms the other day — there are two nearby, one of which has a slightly inferior gym but also has a swimming pool, jacuzzi and sauna, while the other has a much larger, superior gym and a significantly more “hardcore” attitude, from the looks of things.

Hopefully after payday Andie and I will be joining one of the two (likely the former, as we both like swimming) and torturing ourselves into something resembling shape. Or at least slightly more fit. We shall see.

In the meantime, I found a cheap copy of EA Sports Active 2 for PS3 on Amazon, so I snapped it up while I had the chance. The original for Wii was very good (though I must confess to never having finished the “30 day challenge” mode) but slightly marred by a resistance band which offered very little in the way of resistance and a leg strap which repeatedly fell off. Having a Nunchuk and Wii Remote wired around your hands while faffing around with the resistance band was a bit of a pain, too. The PS3 version comes with its own arm and leg bands that can’t get tangled up in anything — apparently the leg strap is still a little prone to slipping off but I can live with that — and also doesn’t require any additional hardware, unlike the Xbox version, which requires Kinect.

I enjoy exercising with games and have done ever since EyeToy Kinetic brought the idea to my attention. EyeToy Kinetic wasn’t perfect by any means — though this was more down to the limitations of EyeToy than anything else — but it was proof that video games can get you up off the couch and moving around. That’s not to say (as some people assume) that all games must get you up off the couch and moving around. But if a few can, that’s good for everyone, surely.

Wii Fit was similarly good, though disappointingly lacking in structure and challenge — before I came across the first EA Sports Active title I took to doing the 30 minute stepping programme with my own music on (a combination of Space Channel 5 and Persona if I remember correctly) in order to up the challenge factor a bit. The muscle exercises were good but without the game forcing you to do specific ones it was easy to fall into the habit of avoiding the “painful” ones and doing the “easy” ones all the time. EA Sports Active, on the other hand, puts together a programme for you each day and you follow it. Sure, you can build your own to avoid the difficult ones again, but since the structure is there in the first place you feel more inclined to follow it.

I’m looking forward to trying it, anyway. It should be here in the next couple of days, and then I can support any work I do at the gym with EA Sports Active days. If the pre-made programmes work anything like the original, there’ll be “rest” days which I fully intend on using the gym on so the two things will hopefully complement each other nicely.

We’ll see. Good intentions and all that.