Fitness Quest Week 4

Exciting news! I got a new HD Capture box, so I can take video and screenshots of Xbox 360 gameplay! No more iPhone pictures of PlayFit screens at strange angles! Other than that, busy week, saw family just about every day, but still found time for exercise. To the goals!

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all affiliated games I own. I finally finished up one of the more ambitious achievements in Your Shape 2012:

Basically, you need to complete each type of activity (around 40 of them) eight times. It works out to around 70ish% of the total content in the game, and it took me several months and 28,000+ calories burned to do it. And, since I have new video capture capabilities, I snagged a video of the achievement pop:

When I started the fitness quest, my in-game calorie count in Your Shape 2012 was around 18,000. Now it’s passed 28,000; this means I burned 10,000 in-game calories in under a month. I need to burn 200,000 to get all the achievements in the game, but 10k a month is a pretty good pace to make that happen.

Other than that, I’ve been playing Dance Central 2 on Hard a decent amount. I made a chart to help keep track of what songs I still need to 5-star (which is most of them):

I’m kind of a spreadsheet nerd.

Goal 2) I will be number one in the world on the PlayFit leaderboards.

Number 62! If you don’t feel like clicking back to last week’s post, I was 76 at the time, so this is clear improvement.

Goal 3) I will lose weight. Since last week, I lost .4 pounds. Not a ton! But still, any week when I lose weight instead of gaining weight is a good week. I made a graph!

Goal 4) I will beat the average calorie burn burn 250 calories every day until I achieve at least one of the above goals. I changed this goal a bit for a couple reasons.

One, “beat the average” was sort of an arbitrary figure I came up with. I think I mentioned in my first post that I have tried similar things in the past, and it didn’t work for me – one major cause of my previous failures was that I always would require “do at least something every day”, so I would do a 2 minute workout or even just sit motionless in front of the kinect to “do it” for the day. Left to my own devices, I will frequently do the bare minimum, so I wanted to set the bare minimum high. Changing it from “beat the average” to “250 calories” still accomplishes this. In fact, the way I came up with the 250 number is that it’s frequently where the average will land, so from the “forcing me to do work” angle, it’s functionally identical.

Two, “the average” sucks, because the “average” changes day to day for no particular reason. Some days the average will just randomly be 50 calories higher than the day before, forcing me to do more work, for no real conceivable reason. Also, the “average” changes fairly substantially throughout the day – there have been days where I would beat the average by a small margin somewhat early in the night, then log in the next day to find that after I finished, the average went up, meaning that after succeeding, I retroactively failed. That’s a pretty shenanigans scenario, and it’s really my fault for coming up with the poor wording of the goal. New goal, as I said, is roughly identical, but is STATIC, which will be much nicer.

Also, I’m not sure that the “average” was really the average. On day one – launch day – I earned just over the so-called “average” and wound up in the top 3% Global Rank. While there are some mathematical definitions of “average” that could fit that scenario, it’s not awhat most people would probably consider to be average. An outliers-removed mean, or a median average would be better than a straight-up arithmetic mean, which is what I am assuming the number is (if not completely made up). That’s like saying the average American is a Millionaire, because there are a few Billionaires in this country.

Worst of all though, the average isn’t measurable – it’s not enumerated anywhere in the program, other than an unlabeled bar graph. Sure, you can tell that the average for a given day might be “around 250″, but there is no way to get the exact number, which makes it terrible to measure against. you just have to make sure the blue bar is bigger than the green bar every day, and that’s a dumb sounding goal.

So, with all that said, the new goal is “250 calories a day”. And I succeeded at that!

If that raw data is overwhelming, you can just take my word for it, thats a success.

Anyway, TWENTY EIGHT days in is basically a month, so go team Evan. Be sure to come back next week, as I’m pretty sure to cross at least one exciting threshold!