Want to know what an obese 25 year-old looks like while playing an intense fitness game for the Wii? Of course you do! Many thanks to the helpful sadists at EA for making the game and my lovely boyfriend for photographing the whole thing.
Not all EA Sports Active 2 workouts have these exact same activities, but there's always a series of warm-up activities, a mix of cardio exercises, strength training, fun fitness activities, core moves, and a cool-down.
This was the last work-out of the first phase (of three) of the nine-week fitness program.
Warm Up:
It started innocently enough, as it always does, with some warm ups. This is me performing a
windmill. On days when we perform these, we're usually asked to do eight, or four touches to each foot.
We continued warming up with a stretch the game calls a "good morning," though there's already an exercise called that that doesn't resemble it at all. Basically, the EASA2 good morning is a warm-up stretch where you lower into a squat with your hands on your feet, lift your hips and butt up, then follow by lifting your chest and arms. This next picture is of the end of the stretch, where you lift your arms above your head and stretch back a bit.
I wish this warm-up was performed a bit slower on the screen, as I occasionally find myself hurrying to catch up with my in-game trainer, who seems to move a little unnaturally quickly. You can also see our bench and barbell in the background.
The Workout:
Next, I was challenged to a sprint against three in-game competitors. Two of your fellow runners tend to have a rather slow and steady pace, while the third, your trainer, tends to speed up and slow down right around your character no matter how quick you're doing. In this shot, I'm sprinting at the very end to beat my trainer. It's amazing how competitive I am against fake, video game people!
There are a lot of straight-up cardio activities in this game, including running in place, but I love the intensity of the races. It elevates a basic calorie-burning exercise into a more intense activity in which the heart rate is elevated more than it would be because you just want to win the race.
Here I'm performing an alternating reverse lunge. These are ROUGH! Especially in the middle of a workout that's lower-body intensive, these can be serious killers. Unlike with the traditional lunge, these require you to step backward, and seem much more reliant on balance. Phase one of the EASA2 nine-week program asks participants to do 16 reps of this, eight for each leg.
Sorry for the blurring in this picture, but this a typical shot of me performing what is perhaps my least favorite exercise, mountain climbers. These are evil. With that fact out of the way, it really is great to see how much I've improved in these. The game calls this activity cardio, but it feels a lot more like a rapidly performed bodyweight-based strength-training move. From the push-up position, one moves his or her legs up and. down in alternating steps. It's like some kind of nightmare bending over lunge. But I'm getting better! I haven't cried during mountain climbers in a week at least. Yaaaaaay!
More lunges! This is a shot of me performing a side lunge, which was only one of 16 or so I had to perform during this exercise. Not much to say about this picture other than that I look like a total badass, and rightly so.
Another blurry cardio shot! In this picture, I'm performing foot fires, a pretty fun exercise where one pops from the ball of one foot to another rapidly. The game isn't 100% accurate in gauging exactly how many bounces you've performed from one foot to another, but you're aiming for 180 recorded foot fires, in this phase of the workout plan.
This is part one of a squat jump, a wicked exercise that utilizes the lower-body killing move of the squat with an explosive jump. I don't remember exactly how many of these I performed (because I was dying), but I think it was around 12.
I'm mountainboarding! This is such a fun and punishing fitness activity. In this exercise, you squat to move your on-screen character down the mountain quicker, jump from one side to another to grind down a rail and collect medallions for points, jump over barriers, and run once you hit parts of the mountain that are uphill. It's intense. In many cases, you're holding a squat for five to ten seconds, jumping, holding another long squat, and jumping again for as many as eight times before you get a "break" to RUN UP A MOUNTAIN. It sounds crazy, but after holding squats alternating with precisely-timed jumps, you're begging to stand up straight and run.
How sleek, sexy, and capable do I look here, huh? I know, I'm looking a bit rough, but at this point I've burned over 200 calories and am being forced to do one of my least favorite things: core work. In this shot I'm performing a leg lift, an exercise that wouldn't be so awful if, when asked to put my legs back down, I wasn't instructed by the game to hover them above the darn ground while waiting to lift my legs again.
Cool Down:
Pretzels! This is part of the four-part cool-down process of the workout. Since this workout, I've started doing my pretzels sitting up more and with my leg closer into my body. The stretch, which I'm not really crazy about (but looks so cool, am I right?) feels more effective that way.
It's Over!
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! I finished phase one! Just two more (more difficult) phases to go! The game awards milestones for certain achievements, from hitting certain amounts of calories burned to time spent working out in the game. It's like "achievements" that gamers earn playing regular games on the XBox. It's satisfying to collect these, like this one I got for completing phase one.
Glug glug glug! Workout over!
So what do you think? Sound like the kind of exercise you'd like to do, or game you'd like to play? Anyone else hate mountain climbers as much as I do?
