Fitness Quest Week Eight

Wow, this week was a rollercoaster.

The first thing you need to know is that work has been really stressful for me for the last few weeks. The second thing you need to know is that PlayFit support in Your Shape 2012 can be REALLY finicky sometimes – best case scenario it’ll grant you about 80% of the calories you burned in game; worst case is that it’ll give you about 10 calories, regardless of whether you worked out for 2 minutes or 30 minutes. While I’ve noticed some things that tend to lead to shit calorie tracking sometimes, there’s still an inherent randomness to it.

So I’d go to work, come home tired and exhausted, and attempt to do some Your Shape pacing to get my minimum to keep the streak going and wind up spending three or more hours. On a good day, this should take about 30 minutes of Your Shape, but it was consistently 3-4 hours instead – and incredibly frustrating hours, because I had no idea if the work I was doing would actually contribute to me finishing. Frustrating because I had just worked 8 frustrating hours and I wanted to fucking relax, not wrestle with PlayFit. I was too exhausted to do Dance Central – that one requires full cardio, not half-assed pacing (more of a sprint rather than a walk). And “frustrated” is not the mindset you want to play Kinect Sports in, since the tracking can be a bit spotty there (playing baseball it would sometimes track my belly fat as me swinging the bat, which is crazy frustrating). So I was stuck pacing in Your Shape hoping against hope that it would be a short evening, and it never was. “Fitness” had consumed all my free time.

Something had to change. I didn’t want to cycle down the required calories or give myself clemency to skip or modify the program. I know myself well enough to know that once I miss a day or break the streak I’ll use that as an excuse to be lazy forever after that. That said, I didn’t want to continue doing what I had been doing since it had absorbed all of my free time and ramped up my stress level in an already stressful time of my life.

So, on a whim, I decided to buy a new game. A new game would freshen up the experience right? Or it could be just as stressful as the games I have. Ultimately though, I decided that it was worth it to try something new to keep it going – if the new game continued the problems I was having I could reevaluate the plan and goals, but for now I would try getting a new game first. At the very least, it should be a new, different, fresh kind of horrible that would be a change of pace.

The list of PlayFit enabled games is pretty short – the two games I was sort of interested in were Kinect Star Wars and Just Dance 3. I wound up choosing the one that was ten dollars cheaper and came bundled with free Katy Perry DLC.

Just Dance 3 is not a game without its flaws – especially when compared against Dance Central 2. That said, it is exactly the game I needed. The game doesn’t track “calories”, it tracks “sweat points”, so it’s a bit unclear what the ratio is there; that said it seems like every time I play, no matter what, it gives me a fair (and perhaps more than fair) allotment of calories. Things that make Your Shape twitchy – not being recognized by Kinect ID, playing in low light, leaving the play space or becoming obscured at any point, people walking in or out of the play space randomly – none of them seemed to have any detrimental effect on my calorie count. There were a couple times this week where I played for 3-4 hours anyway (more on that below) and was rewarded proportionally for my time. “Working as intended” may not seem like a huge deal, but in this case, it was. It really was.

Using the magic of Just Dance 3, a three day weekend, and a new sense of invigoration, I racked up almost 5,000 calories in PlayFit this week. What started off as the worst week of PlayFit I’d had turned into the best. Crazy times.

I should probably check in on my (totally intact) goals.

Goal 1) I am going to get every achievement in Kinect PlayFit and all PlayFit enabled games I own.

Well, I didn’t get any achievements in PlayFit or in any of the games I already owned, but I did get fifteen achievements in Just Dance 3, including some fairly impressive ones:




This is every achievement that requires me to play at a specific time, or for a specific amount of time, or to do things in one session. I was able to overlap these into one 4.5 hour session, one 3 hour session, and a few normal length session.

There’s still a lot of cumulative achievements, but I’ll be able to work toward them in normal play at whatever pace I want.

There’s also some 4-player skill based achievements that I probably won’t be able to get with chairs wearing shirts or cardboard cutouts of gollum. I will probably need some actual human beings. You know what that means: DANCE PARTY!

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

I have hit number 22 in the world. TWENTY TWO in the entire world. My goal of getting to number one seemed like a nice thing to aspire toward, but I always sort of felt like I would hit some upper bound. Thus far I haven’t.

I don’t know what it is about the number 22, but it’s flipped a switch in my brain. I’ve gone from “that’s impressive” to “HOLY SHIT THATS IMPRESSIVE”. I’ve gone from “maybe I’ll be able to get to #1″ to “I CAN TOTALLY DO THIS.”

Goal 3) I will lose weight.
I gained back just a bit since last week, but that’s likely the result of Rose and I going out to pizza to cap off the three day weekend. A bit of an anomaly that should bubble back down to where I was.

Goal 4) I will burn 250 calories every day until I achieve at least one of the above goals.
I hit my goal every week, but also had a few days where I went over, including one where I went WAY over, hitting 2400 calories.

It’s likely worth noting that a “calorie”, the electronic unit PlayFit tracks is not the same as a calorie, the unit of energy. There’s no way a camera, no matter how advanced, can accurately track calories, so it tracks “calories” instead. Sometimes this count will be lower, sometimes higher. But know that while some people may put a chair in front of the kinect and rack up the “calories”, every “calorie” I burn from this is from me moving in front of the screen, so the numbers aren’t meaningless.