Lately I’ve had more time on my hands and have decided to get back on the exercise train of fail. Well this time it won’t be fail. I was actually doing pretty good last fall, I was doing the dance games on the Wii, with the dance pads and all. Yeah, the music about killed me and my metal listening ears but my rear took more priority. Things happen, as they always do. I got very stressed, over worked, had a hard time finding the time or energy and slowly the dancing stopped. I liked it though, but I need better music. For real.
Anyways, a couple of months ago I got EA Active 2. I was skeptical, but it was cheap and I was willing to see if EA fixed all the problems I didn’t like about the first one. (The review is available on this blog somewhere.) But my ass isn’t getting any smaller and now that my stress levels have diminished, it is time to get serious about getting fit thing, I’m not getting any younger after all.
Well, they didn’t. Fix it that is.
So, I’m at my 2 week interval and thought this was a good time to get my thoughts down about it. Well here goes:
I like the heart rate monitor (hate the fact that it takes alkaline batteries though), but I’m not sure it is accurate. For instance today, my heart rate was about 130 for a steady 5 minutes then boom it went down to 90 for a couple of minutes then went back up. Either there is a malfunction or I’m going to need to make an appointment with a heart surgeon soon (I prefer not to think of that as an option!). Spiking up is one thing, getting slower seems well…odd.
The exercises got much harder from what I can tell. There is a limited number of them as well. I have the choice of REALLY hard kill my back crunch or nothing at all. Sorry, injuring myself is not an option. So it feels like I am missing options that I might need.
They still have those son of a gun preplanned exercise plans. Where they do low reps of many things and go back to them numerous times. Seriously?
Of course then it’s that resistance band. I used it for ONE workout. That’s right, that first workout to give it a chance, but quickly decided that it’s too much of a pain to bother with it. Is it tight enough? And then switching it from an exercise with or without it. What a hassle. It’s just discouraging. That said, I have been working out without the use of that resistance band.
The sports are really frustrating, it’s kind of amazing that they would release the game with such terrible faults. Does anyone who is trying to lose weight understand that trying to get the damn screen to recognize that you’ve done something is horrible? You don’t want to do more reps, because you are waiting for the “ding.”
I still love the woman’s voice (same one as the first version) but come on, the comments are ridiculous. “Your footwork is just awesome today!” Always seems to happen when you just missed 5 aerobic steps. Or how you were just told how awesome you are, but then you get lectured about how it’s okay to miss a few steps – when you didn’t.
I’ve been sticking to a warm up, boxing, 30 minutes of step aerobics and then a cool down. My own little addition is some crunches, because well yeah I need them. I burn almost 400 calories per session and work up quite a sweat. Less chance of injuring myself and so far so good.
So do I like EA Active 2? I’m not sure, but I’ll continue doing it and see if it helps any. Wish me luck.
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