Fun. Health. Games.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I don’t want to go to the gym, I hate looking at myself in all the mirrors” or, “I hate the gym and all the losers checking themselves out in the mirror.” I have, plenty of times. Both of these can certainly be valid concerns, and are without doubt held by a lot of people. You may feel uncomfortable looking in the mirror at the gym, or perhaps you’re a little overweight & it makes you feel self conscious. Fair enough. I can let that slide as we’re all human and by nature we avoid things that make us uncomfortable.

However, what I won’t let slide is the gym’s that are popping up promoting the fact they’re mirror free. I believe this shows two things… One- The owner’s know how to listen to people’s fears. No worries, that’s ok. But more importantly, it shows a lack of care, expertise, and a lack of brains. A lack of care because mirrors are not there for huge muscle bound guys and girls to show off and act like clowns or indulge their ego. And a lack of expertise because they should be well aware of that fact.

What are mirrors there for then? Despite your hatred of gym mirrors, they are useful, and they should be required pieces of equipment because it increases gym safety by allowing gym-goers to practice better form. Not to mention bodybuilders are actually sports people too. Mirrors are required to perfect poses they use in competition, and despite their professionalism body builders also need mirrors to perfect their form and remain uninjured.

There’s no troubles if your gym contains machines only… the machine will dictate what form you use, but if your gym has free weights (as good gyms do), you need mirrors where you can monitor your form, and reduce your risk of injury.

To get over your fear of mirrors, I can suggest a few things:

• Just face it. Fear has been called “False Evidence Appearing Real”. Get out in front of that mirror, amongst the big guys (if there are any), and just get on with it. Facing your fear is the best and perhaps only way to conquer it. You might even find out that they’re not all a bunch of idiot meat heads after all (but some inevitably will be- welcome to humanity).
• Go gym shopping for a few months. Most gyms will offer you a week or two of free membership so you can try it out before committing. Use this to your advantage and find a gym that isn’t full of massive steroid pumping guys and make it your home. The only problem with this idea is that “meat heads” as we stereotypically call them, seek out well equipped gyms, therefore we can pretty accurately assume something is wrong with the gym if there’s no “meat heads” in sight.
• You may be able to avoid the meat head and bicep ogling population by choosing different times of day. Experiment.
• If you’re a female, and you’re more concerned about being the only gal amongst a bunch of testosterone jacked guys with no other eye candy in sight, join a female only gym, or hunt for a gym with a female gym-going population. They do exist. Or see option 1. Face your fear.
• The last & worst option is- don’t work out at a gym with mirrors. Just do like everyone else does and do steady state cardio for an hour, and then wonder why your weight fluctuates so much and you don’t permanently keep it off. See what I’m ranting about, here.

I hope you enjoyed today’s soap box. And I hope you find it useful. Remember, while I like to say everything you do should be based in having a bit of fun, avoiding the mirror may sabotage you in more ways than one.

If you haven’t yet entered for my favorite competition in the world, “Ruckus Nation“, by HopeLab, you better hop to it! The deadline for entry is only 5 short days away as I write this… but that still gives you until the 20th of November to think up something amazing. Remember, if you come up with that one great idea… you might just make $75,000 in 5 days, and help a ton of kids lose a ton of weight. And that would make anyone feel great, right?

Put on your thinking caps- I’m sure you can come up with something great if you expend a little brain power. I can even help you out on that hard part (the thinking) with an article I wrote, here. It can give you a head start on coming up with an idea, or it might even give you the edge to win a prize! Check it out, and all the best.

Oh, and before I forget, you can help out HopeLab and the Ruckus Nation competition organizers by becoming a judge if you don’t have your own idea. Your input might just help select the greatest weight loss aid for our kids we’ve seen in our lifetimes… that’ll make you feel pretty good I imagine! Enter as a judge, right here. I already have!

If you’re one of the many, many people out there that struggle to remember how to perform particular exercises, or how to execute common weight training movements, then check out the fantastic and free website from The Training Station Inc.

You’ll find over one-hundred animated figures that quickly give you a no-nonsense and surprisingly accurate idea of how to perform a range of exercises. For example, the dumbbell pullover animation correctly shows that you need to keep the dumbbell level with your head, and keep your elbows bent.

Clearly, if you still aren’t sure on what you should be doing after watching these animations, ask your personal trainer… If you’ve found a good one that is! If you haven’t, maybe you should see my previous article on the subject.

Otherwise, check out arguably the best book available on performing exercises with perfect form: Strength Training Anatomy, by Frederick Delavier. It’ll show you exactly how to perform the core movement to avoid injury, as well as exactly what muscles you’re activating. If you’d also like to incorporate variation into your movements to shock, confuse & abuse your body into losing fat or gaining muscle, Fred’s book will show you how.

I’ve used this book for years and can personally attest to how valuable it can be when it comes to designing your own programs, or rechecking that the technique you’ve settled into is in fact the correct, safe technique!

Are you letting your ill-founded notions of progress get in your way at the gym? Have you started your exercise program or gym-going schedule only three or four months ago, but already becoming frustrated with your lack of progress? Cut yourself some slack, your frustration & apparent lack of progress might be the only thing getting in your way.

A quick lesson on fat. If you’re into exercise to lose fat & look good, hear this: The unsightly fat that hangs around beneath your skin (called subcutaneous fat) is not the only fat you’ll find (or lose via exercise) in your body. Did you know you have reserves of fat inside your body too? You also have intramuscular fat, and visceral fat. Intramuscular fat is the fat found in your muscles (think fat marbling in a cut of steak), and visceral fat is fat found around your organs.

Why the lesson on fat? Well, I just want you to realize that fat won’t just drop off your body from exactly where it’ll make you look best in your new dress, or make your gut look good in your new suit. In fact, fat can be very stubborn when it comes to coming off the “problem areas”, such as the stomach for men, and the hips and bum for the girls. Thanks very much, DNA!

So after all this bad news, what have I got for you? Just some very basic and I believe, effective advice. Forget about the scales, just keep learning about safe and effective ways to exercise and eat healthily, and above all, make your program fun and a long term lifestyle choice. Your fat will eventually come off. Its just a matter of persistence, and when your exercise is fun, that persistence will be all the more easy to maintain.

90% of success is persistence. The other 10% is learning how to use the exercise time your persistence brings you.

Avoiding bad personal trainers is key to your health, and your future as a fit, healthy human being in control of your body. I count very few people I know who see a personal trainer regularly. Why? Because they aren’t educated on what makes a personal trainer great, and because there aren’t many great personal trainers out there!

The main problem though, is education. How do you suppose you’ll choose a personal trainer who is interested in not only making you fit, but ensuring that you stay healthy and stay injury free, without knowing what to avoid when you’re shopping for one?

Our health is without question our most valuable thing we own. Even if you’re a billionaire, you’re not going to be enjoying your wealth if you have agonizing neck or lower back pain… which is why I believe we all need to educate ourselves to a basic level on what to avoid, and what to know when looking for a personal trainer.

Firstly, I believe the most important trait when choosing a personal trainer is their passion for training. Not how they jump up and down and smile the most, but how passionate they are about making people fit and healthy. Ask them, “Why do you like personal training?” On some level they should give you a response which involves helping people, but you need to go a little deeper…

If they’re passionate, wouldn’t you think they also seek to educate themselves to the utmost, in order to meet their claims about helping people? After all, how committed would you say a trainer is who did an online course, and hasn’t read anything else about training methods since they completed the course last year… or at the end of the last century?

You need to, for your own sake, ask them where and how they keep their knowledge up to date. Do they subscribe to industry journals? Do they consume books written by experts every month? Do they go to seminars or consume information regarding cutting edge techniques? Even Joe Lunchbox can accumulate a better understanding of training principles than most trainers by reading a book written by an expert in exercise every month, so why isn’t your trainer updating & expanding their knowledge too?

This personal trainer you hire is putting your body at risk, for probably less than $50 an hour. Think about that. You can’t put a price on your health.

There’s a bunch of other ways you can avoid hiring a bad personal trainer, but I believe that just by interrogating your trainer (in a friendly way of course!), you’ll be able to work out if they want to train people because they’re passionate about it, or because it gives them spare change to go out and get drunk on the weekend.

Here’s a few other ways you can tell your trainer is as useless as a bicep curl in a squat rack:

• You aren’t given a detailed screening upon seeing your trainer, including but certainly not limited to- your exercise history, your injury history, your goals, and any health risks you have.
• They make you do cardio during their personal training session. Unless its a special kind of cardio, like High Intensity Interval Training… they’re wasting your money and your time.
• Your trainer doesn’t track your progress, or worse, doesn’t show YOU how to track your OWN progress.
• Your trainer doesn’t bother changing your exercise program. Bring on the end of your exercise program due to a massive boredom attack. Exercise needs to be fun.
• Your trainer doesn’t explain why you’re doing particular exercises. I’ve always believed a good personal trainer’s end goal should be to “eliminate” their clients, one by one, by educating them properly about how to train optimally, and how to nourish themselves with proper food.
• Which leads me to my next tip. Is your trainer teaching you about food? How do you expect to lose weight when the advice you get is, “eat healthy”. A good trainer should offer to come to your house & raid your fridge & cupboards, and go shopping with you. A good client (i.e. you) should be prepared to pay for this vital service.
• Your trainer watches and chats up the hot guys & girls on the treadmill while they assign you half an hour of cardio.
• Your trainer is overweight, dangerously underweight (and they aren’t marathon runners) or you catch them smoking in the car park. Do they look the part? Why not? Is it because they really aren’t that passionate about it at all?
• Your perfectly good question (I’m 99.9% sure it was a good question) is handled by your idiot personal trainer with the response, “ah, don’t worry about that”. Again, we need to find a great trainer who wants to see us go one day, because we don’t need them anymore! Don’t worry… these highly evolved individuals almost always have more clients than they can handle, because they get lots of happy customers giving referrals.
• Your trainer (again with the education I know!) doesn’t make a point of getting back to you if they don’t know the answer to your questions. Or better yet, they don’t know and make up an answer. You get suspicious- and your google search reveals they were wrong. Avoid this trainer like the plague, their ego is getting in the way of your progress, and it might end up hurting you. Permanently.
• Your trainer never goes near the free weights, and just assigns you to the machines. You know, the ones with detailed pictures & instructions written on them already… that you can read… without your useless personal trainer. Free weights have many, many, benefits over machines that you can find googling “free weights vs machines”.
• Your trainer has you work all the ’show’ muscles, and never any of the ‘go’ muscles. What are show muscles you ask? The beach muscles- arms, chest, abs. The go muscles? They’re the ones that stop you from becoming unbalanced and injured- back, legs, buttocks, postural muscles.

If your personal trainer avoids my list of shame above, they might actually be one of the good ones. But as I say, we want education for you, and education and passion from your personal trainer. Without both, you’re bound to progress slower, or worse, hurt yourself unnecessarily.

What do motivated people have that you do not? A better body, that’s what! I’m sure you, like a lot of people, ask yourself how the lean and mean gym goers you see every week keep their motivation up. That forceful drive of motivation is all they really need to stay looking like Greek Gods and Goddesses year round. This article will help you supercharge your own motivation, driving you down the fast road to attain your perfect figure!

Asking yourself, “Why?” will make you fit, and help you lose weight by determining what exactly you want out of an exercise program. So many people I know go to the gym once, maybe twice a week, on and off again for years at a time, never quite making their gym visits a habit. The key to developing a habit in the early stages is to make yourself aware of WHY you are exercising in the first place.

I’m certain many of you are just rolling your eyes now, thinking, “of course I know why I go to the gym, to lose weight“. I’m asking you to look further past the obvious here. Ask yourself the deeper reasons for why you want to lose weight. And after you’ve done this, continue through these questions deeper and deeper until you arrive at the most basic reason, for example:

You ask yourself, “Why do I want to lose weight?” … Because I’ve gained weight over the past few years and I don’t think members of the opposite sex find me attractive anymore.

That’s a fine answer, then go deeper, “Why do I care if people don’t find me attractive any more?” … Because I like looking good.

Deeper, “Why do I like looking good?” … Because I feel confident and respect myself.

And deeper, “Any other reasons why I want to look good?” … Because if I don’t look better, I might never find someone to be in a fulfilling long term relationship with.

And obviously we can go further, and say that after all is said and done, if you don’t find a partner, and don’t respect yourself or feel confident, you won’t be as happy on a day to day basis.

Asking yourself these kinds of questions helps you get to the heart of the reasons why you want to lose weight, so that you can challenge yourself at any time during your life! For example, you don’t want to go to the gym because its nice and warm in bed. You’ve previously had an in depth conversation with yourself as to why you want to lose weight, and now you can use these extremely good reasons to eject yourself out of bed. Still can’t get out of bed? Force yourself to imagine how your life will be if you don’t. Make yourself amplify and intensify how miserable you’ll be if you keep your current habits, keep gaining weight, and never feel confident or sexy. Really feel the emotions that you’d feel if in 20 years you were even further from your goal than you are now.

You can use these techniques to motivate yourself to lose weight if you go far enough with your personal questioning. Just remember: the best things in life can come from enjoying a fit healthy body, you just might have to go through a bit of imaginary hell to get there!

At the invaluable traineo forums I came across a fantastic post by a friendly fella by the name of Matt. He’s come up with the kind of workout I think is key to maintaining motivation, and helping you have fun while you workout.

The best thing about this routine is that you’re competing against yourself. When you fail, you work hard… Which motivates you to concentrate on your basketball shots and creates a bit of tension with yourself. Its also highly versatile and can be tweaked & altered to your hearts content. Over to Matt’s unaltered post from traineo!

“Hello all,

I, like many others, get very bored with regular workout routines. I came up with a fun cardio routine and I thought I’d share it with everyone. The nice thing about this routine is it can be done at my University’s free field house. (or any old basketball court! -J)

1. Jog 2 warmup laps.
2. Shoot hoops, mostly freethrows
3. The first time I miss 3 in a row, I do sprints down the court 4 times
4. The second time I miss 3 in a row, I run a lap
5. The third time I miss 3 in a row I do sprints again
6. The fourth time is another lap
7. The fifth time is a brisk walking lap (lower hr)
8. Repeat

Obviously if you are an ace at basketball, then this is not a good cardio session, but when you are pretty awful (like me), its a fun way to get your heart rate up and improve your free throw %! ”

Thanks Matt! Nice, simple and easy to remember. Here’s a variation on Matt’s routine.

1. Jog 2 warmup laps.
2. Do layups, from side to side, never letting the basketball touch the ground (you can jump every time you put the ball up for an extra workout)
3. The first time you miss 2 in a row, do as many push ups as you can
4. The second time you miss 2 in a row, run 3 laps
5. The third time you miss 2 in a row jump as high as you can, and bring your knees to your chest as you do so, 10 reps should do it
6. The fourth time is another 2 laps
7. The fifth time is 20 jump shots from the 3 point line. Jump high!
8. Repeat

Got any suggestions yourself? Let us know via comments below! Thanks again Matt!

Ever since I bought my Nintendo Wii to look into its exercise potential, I’ve been struck by how much it reminds me of pianos. Thats right, pianos. Do you remember as a kid gathering around the piano with your family to sing songs and have fun bonding with them? No? Me either… but I saw it in a movie once and thought it looked boring. Welcome society’s new and vastly improved piano, the Nintendo Wii.

When this thought struck me, that Wii’s are like pianos, I questioned myself. Are they really? Aren’t they just the same as television, where we all gather around and stare like zombies at the “tube”? Aren’t they just promoting the often referred demise of the family unit by encouraging more of this behavior? Firstly, I don’t have a degree in social anthropology, but I believe the perception of the so called demise of the family unit is just that, a perception. What!? Its not just a perception, its a fact! You cry. Without rambling on about it, we get that perception from the media- its more interesting to hear about dysfunctional families than functional ones. I mean, someone please tell me what the difference is between a large concert full of people watching the opera, and millions of people watching a soap opera behind their t.v.’s with their families? There is none, it is our perception of it that’s different.

What’s this got to to do with the Wii? Well, my whole social anthropology spiel above is to make a point that the family isn’t dead or fundamentally wrong these days, it’s just changed so quickly that people perceive it to be worse than before. But you know, its all apples & oranges. Today’s family is very different to the classic 1950’s image of happy families. And the new society it lives in includes a culture which loves gadgets, things and toys, and loves entertainment. That leaves our piano out in the cold and the Nintendo Wii at the 21st century “fire place” that is the television.

Why do I keep referring to the Wii as the new piano? Because it’s sorta similar to the fireplace or television… you all gather around and talk, but there’s a bit more that makes the Wii a piano, its that it gets us interacting and bonding over a new shared activity.

Have you noticed how you’ll speak to your family while you watch the t.v. about what you’ve just watched? You discuss it, remark about how good or bad a sitcom is or about starving people in Africa, but you rarely ever share an experience like you do sitting around the piano. Everyone used to get involved around the piano- one person woud play while the rest would gather around and sing. Do you notice any similarities yet? Every time the Wii comes out in my house, whether it be friends or family that are around, a similar pattern emerges. A couple of us play and the rest gather around and talk about it. We instruct each other, we compete against each other and we enjoy a brand new experience together much like singing songs on a piano.

Nintendo Wii: The New Piano… Only more space friendly… and more Fun!

Wiiano, anyone?

Now that our week long project is over and many a game ground up under my disdainful review-heel, I thought a “hardcore” guide might be just what the sweat doctor ordered- a guide that multiplies the effect of any Wii workout you want to do.

I think you want something… extra… out of your Wii workouts. I think you might be feeling like a bit of a weakling now that you’ve dropped a few days from your gym workouts because you’re playing so much Wii Tennis or Wii Boxing. Tut-tut. This guide will show you a way to workout with the Wii that you might never have considered, the Wii Hardcore way!

But first, I’ve come up with a list of gear that you can use to push your Wii workouts to the extreme:

• Wrist weights
• Ankle weights
• Weight vest
• Therabands
• Fitballs
• Heart rate monitor
• A thick sweat absorbent towel

And from the fun side of life…

• A pair of huge wall mounted wide screen televisions
• Dolby 5.1 Surround sound system
• Two or more Wiimotes and nun-chucks
• Plenty of friends
• Alcoho… I mean… nothing… forget I said that!

As an example of what you might try, fire up Wii Boxing, put on your weight vest, your wrist weights, and put your heart rate monitor on. You want to track this to see how hard your heart works now, and to compare yourself down the road.

Make sure you warm up and do all that good stuff like checking with personal trainers & doctors before you try this. If you don’t warm up you’ll regret it- this workout is for fit people only with exercise history!

Grab your theraband with your left hand, wrap it around your back and under your arm pits, and then grab it with your right arm. Each punch will now need to contend with both the theraband resistance and your wrist weights as you punch outwards. Buy the heaviest theraband you can punch with constantly and alter that resistance by gripping it so its prestretched, or preferably make up a theraband by tying two ready to use loops in each end.

Here’s what I want you to do:

• Fire up Wii Boxing, preferably with a pro level Mii, and just go nuts.
• We’re trying to simulate something close to high intensity interval training, so try and knock that other Mii out in record time.
• Be sure to add a boxer’s bounce, and lean side to side strongly and swiftly to avoid punches.
• Go for a combination of jabs, uppercuts, and roundhouse punches.
• Throw them hard and fast.
• If you’re knocked down by your opponent, get down and bust out push ups until you get back up.
• If you knock your opponent down crank out as many deep squats as you can before he gets back up.
• If all is going well by the time the bell goes you’ll really need some down time. Take as much as you need and walk around your room/house slowly to keep your blood circulating.
• Once you’re good to go, cue the game again and repeat.
• … if that’s not a hardcore exergaming workout, I don’t know what is!

Stay tuned for more hardcore ideas, or if you have some of your own, let me know.

Now… if anyone wants me to review their weight vest, wrist weights, or if I have to, large plasma screen t.v.’s, let me know! I’m kidding… sorta…

The first Wii Workout Week comes to an end with a review of the thoroughly enjoyable release title for the Wii: Red Steel. We should have all heard plenty about this game, a familiar feeling shooter that also has samurai sword fighting as an interesting aside to the normal shoot em up game play. You won’t be able to call this one an exergaming title unfortunately, but at least it’ll get you off the couch and upright for some good bad guy blasting fun.

Fitness:

Its a pity Red Steel doesn’t make greater use of its sword fighting sections, I mean… The fighting sections are great, but I think we’d all like to be making sweeping slashing movements with a samurai sword to dispatch the enemy rather than merely making small flicks of our wrist. If only it was more like Wii Sports baseball, where you make large powerful strikes. Or perhaps I’m just being overly critical of the game, because I’d like to see everyone working a little harder when they play games..!

There’s no scope in Red Steel to get creative with our exercise either unfortunately- the game is non-stop action, but that action only has you making very small precise movements with your Wiimote. I’d love to see a shooter take a page out of Call of Duty’s book and use both a novel aiming solution, and a reloading mechanic which has the player mimic shot gun reloads with the nunchuck, or mimicking pushing the bolt forward in machine guns. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the next generation of motion sensitive console.

Fun:

Despite the lack of exercise here, the game is great fun and follows a tried and tested first person shoot em up formula that has you wielding a variety of classic weapons such as the pistol, uzi and shotgun. The game has a good sense of desperation to it as you’re given objectives through out the game to save your fiancé, sometimes including time based objectives that really make you panic as you chase after the yakuza.

All the environments in the game are presented authentically, the level design makes you feel like you’re really in a high rise building and the sounds and atmosphere make good use of the Wii’s hardware capabilities.

You could probably call Red Steel a tad on the toned down side for violence, which is probably a good point if you don’t like your kids splattering enemy blood all over the walls, but not so good if you’re an adult who likes to indulge in a realistic shoot em up experience… so to speak!

Motivation:

Red Steel is a solid story based title, and if like most gamers you like a good story line and unlocking new weapons, this game will definitely keep you coming back for more. However, if you’re after a Wii title to get your heart rate elevated & limbs flailing, Red Steel isn’t it.

If my review hasn’t convinced you otherwise, support placeintheground.com’s fun fitness focus and buy Red Steel from Amazon, here.

That concludes our first Wii Workout Week! The majority of the games reviewed this week have been release titles, which means you can probably buy them quite cheaply today, and still get a workout out of them… at least in the case of Mario Strikers if you get creative, and Rayman Raving Rabbids for some furious arm pumping fun.

Speaking of Rayman Raving Rabbids, it scores our first Wii Workout Week title as best fitness game, followed by Mario Strikers if you follow our workout suggestions. In fact, you can get a better workout from Mario if you throw in our suggestions, but the aim of this week was to test out a few well known games to determine how effective they are without doing any tweaking. Struggling to fit a program around a game won’t appeal to many people, but fun will. Congrats Rayman!

If you enjoyed this series please let me know, and feel free to let me know of a game that you’d like reviewed for future Wii Workout Weeks. Until then, enjoy your Wii’s and look out for other fun workout ideas on placeintheground.com.