Wii Active Personal Trainer from EA Games

Well I bought this for the Wii this past week. The first day I didn't get through many of the exercises and my knees absolutely killed me. It took me a few days to recover. I bombed on the squats with sharp pains and a grinding in my knees.

Attempt number 2 was today. I worked out for 14m 55s, burned 85.8 calories and did all 15 exercises. I have a good sweat. So here is my initial review while on my goal towards my 30 day challenge.

The exercises are fairly difficult, but in a good way. The most challenging thing though is technical. While running I found the strap for the nunchuck sliding off of my thigh, and also occasionally the nunchuck itself would escape it's precocious pouch on my front thigh and flail wantonly through the air in slow motion before whipping itself back at my head trying to decapitate me. Luckily for me though, I have a strong grasp on the obvious and just stopped for a second and reattached it before it happened again. The problem being the cord being loose gets caught on the wiimote while pumping your arms hard. I may have to go buy the wireless attachment for the nunchuck...or perhaps i'm trying too hard :) I'll have to run to the store for refreshments later ...

The other technical difficulty is the constant pulling out and insertion of the nunchuck in the pouch in between exercises. Ok, so this shouldn't be such a big deal right? Well it isn't unless you forget which way the nunchuck actually goes into the pouch. While doing the inline skating, I found that when i squatted to gain speed, nothing happened, so I had to pull the nunchuck out and turn it around. It's very particular about that.

There is the bicep curl, arm lift and back row which all affect your shoulders and upper back. My shoulders, neck and back are still weak after an accident on the interstate a few years back which forced me into temporary retirement from my taekwondo activities (I reinjured my neck and shoulders enough times attempting to do minimal exercises for the year following my accident that I had to stop all upper body workout altogether with the exception of my clubswinging.) These, while hard are manageable on the easy level I started out on. There is plenty of time inbetween motions for these.

The squats could not defeat me this time, I was on a mission! Without pain in my knees today I totally annihilated my trainer. Ok, so I didn't go ALL the way over to the sides on the lunges, that was tough on my knees so they were more like squats as well. The biggest thing I ran into on these is that the first time through on easy, you have to keep waiting for the next move or it thinks you are retarded and aren't doing the movements.