I Am Seb

A week ago, in a bout of fool­ish zeal for get­ting back into shape, I pur­chased Wii Fit.

I thought at the time that I had a pretty good idea of what I was let­ting myself in for. It’s a games con­sole, I told myself. How hard can it be?

As it turns out, the answer is very hard indeed.

Wii Fit fea­tures a very wide range of games and exer­cises, far more so than I exepcted. There are Yoga Exercises for pos­ture, strength and bal­ance, Muscle Exercises for strength, Aerobic Games for burn­ing off the cal­or­ies and build­ing endur­ance, and Balance Games for bal­ance and swear­ing loudly at the TV. With a dozen or more vary­ing activ­it­ies in each cat­egory, and sev­eral levels of dif­fi­culty for each, there’s an awful lot to keep both mind and body occupied.

I spent the first couple of days gently eas­ing my way into the new regime with an hour or so on the aer­obic and bal­ance games, and after a shaky start star­ted rack­ing up decent scores on the easi­est levels. The yoga and muscle exer­cises looked just a little too bor­ing (and frankly, intim­id­at­ing) for me to get into them until yesterday.

I assumed that the yoga and muscle exer­cises would not involve the Balance Board (the handy peri­pheral that makes Wii Fit pos­sible in the first place). Again, I was proven wrong when I loaded up the first Deep Breathing exer­cise. Asked to stand as still as pos­sible whilst main­tain­ing an even breath­ing rhythm, I found myself sway­ing slightly with each breath, a little indic­ator of my centre of grav­ity weav­ing from side to side as I over-compensated try­ing to keep it within the tar­get area.

I’d write more, but right now a skinny vir­tual woman is needs to kick my ass with some impossible yoga poses.