Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Exhausting computer games

Last night I subjected myself to the fitness test on the Kinect Nike Fitness game, which consists mainly of me doing press-ups incorrectly and then hopping from one leg to the other. And swearing when the Kinect isn't as good as you'd expect at recognising human body parts.

That would be exhausting enough on its own, but I then did the fitness test a second time, because my Xbox was so unimpressed by my hopping/press-ups/indiscriminate swearing that it actually graded my fitness as worse than when I'd started using the Kinect. Thankfully, a second go allowed me to increase my score by about 2%, which was enough to satisfy my ego.

Strangely, this morning I couldn't get out of bed. It couldn't possibly be overtraining, could it? I put my alarm on snooze more times than is reasonable, only left my bed an hour and a half behind schedule, and then struggled with the day.

I got home this evening and figured I'd demonstrate to the Kinect who was boss by doing another cardio session. That made my wife laugh, if only because there's a horrible exercise where you have to crouch down and then leap up in the air, and every time I did that I involuntarily wheezed out the word "wheee!", like a startled piglet. Half an hour of that and I was dripping sweat all over the floor, but I was dumb enough to then try out another workout pack I'd downloaded from Xbox Live, which in turn was another fifteen minutes of a sweaty computerised bloke telling me to jump up and down.

One flaw with Kinect Fitness is that it doesn't recognise if you're incapable of an exercise. It was trying to make me switch between planks and press-ups, and I was now so sweaty it was all I could do not to slide across the floor and smash my face, so I stopped, but Mr Kinect kept raising and lowering himself and cajoling me, and never seemed to notice that I was beyond repair. If you struggle with the controller you'll find a way to skip the exercise, but that rather breaks the control metaphor its taught you up until then.

Now, I'm shattered again. This was meant to be a fairly easy week, but perhaps that isn't meant to be. Two more days at the office, then, before the weekend, and then we'll see if all that Nike Fitness translates into real fitness or not.

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