Active vs. Fit

Well, I finished my 30 Day Challenge the other day. According to the software, it was four days before the projected deadline, which is nice. I also met my weight goal right on schedule as well, despite the fact that I don’t like how I’m hovering at 155 lbs. So now seems like as good a time as any to put these two programs against each other.

Nintendo’s Wii Fit vs. EA SPORTS’ Active

The way we will go about doing this is by category. I’ll compare each of the software products based on what they have in common with each other and then announce the better of the two in said category. I’ll tally the scores at the end, and the one with the most points wins. Seems like a fair way to judge between the two.

Exercises
I’ll be doing this in two parts, but both will count as a collective whole.

Both products offer a wide variety of exercises that range from cardio to yoga to muscle building. They even offer mini-games to trick you into working out certain areas of your body. However, when it comes to a full set of honest exercises that will kick your fat ass into shape, Active is the clear winner by how much it offers. You have boxing, volleyball, track running, and a whole collection of others. Meanwhile, Wii Fit only has yoga and a series of isometric exercises like push ups and sit ups. Strangely enough, the exercises that Active is missing can be found on Wii Fit.

But variety is nothing if the exercises are not very effective. While both will cause your muscles to ache, Active will cause you to wake up sore the next morning. Not once did I fill like my thighs were going to explode with Wii Fit. What I do with most games I get is that I devote a whole day to them. After 12 hours of Wii Fit, I woke up the following morning feeling no pain. After 10 hours of Active, I was lucky I could walk. Furthermore, I’ve begin to notice definite form in my muscles, particularly my arms, as a direct result of Active. Wii Fit’s posture-based methods have done nothing to prevent me from slouching in my chair as I type this.

Winner: EA SPORTS’ Active
It knows how to kick my fat ass and how hard to kick it so many ways that it’s not even funny.

Workouts
Wait, there’s a difference? For these programs, yes. Both consider the individual exercise just that: individual exercises and not full workouts.

As of right now, Wii Fit doesn’t offer a workout program in the same sense as Active does, but this will be taken care of in Wii Fit Plus due out sometime next year in the US. What Wii Fit does offer as of now are suggested workouts for you to do, mostly two or three exercises that go well with each other. However, you cannot access them one after the other and must quit to the exercise menu and select it again.

Active has at least 40 preset workout programs of various difficulties that target areas you would be interested in. It has a program to help your arms, get your heart pumping, low impact on your lower body, and even a marathon run that puts you throw the entire collection of exercises over the course of an hour! Still not enough? Well, you have the option to create your own workout session based on whatever the hell criteria you want. And if you are not that creative, just click on the check mark on any of the preset programs to opt out of the exercise. No running? No problem!

Winner: EA SPORTS’ Active
At least until Wii Fit Plus releases…

Goal Setting
What good is exercising without a goal? (Don’t answer that. I know it was rhetorical.)

Wii Fit does not have that many options to keep you goal oriented. The product likes to tease you if you missed a day of checking in even for something as silly as a Body Test, which is their fancy way of saying “checking your weight.” The first time you start the program, you’ll be asked to make a weight goal of either losing or gaining a certain number of pounds over a period of time. It does a really good job of telling you when your goal is unrealistic, so I’ll give it that much credit. But after meeting your weight goal, you’re asked to make another one. Why? I met my goal. Well, if you set it to zero, the software then tracks to see how far you’ve gained or loss from your goal weight. Anything over a single pound in either direction is a bad thing for the program. God!

Active has about four different ways you can keep yourself goal oriented. The three you are introduced first are the basic calorie burned, workout time, and number of workout goals. Like Wii Fit, you can set how much/many you want to do over a period of time. The only drawback is that there is no telling if your goals are unrealistic or not, so don’t be surprise if you actually fail to reach a goal when the deadline rolls around. After each workout, you are given a screen that shows these goal and how close you are to completing them. The fourth way Active keeps you goal oriented is by awarding you trophies for various fitness achievements. You don’t need some kind of cheat wiki in order to find out how to unlock these trophies, as they are pretty much given to you from the start what you need to do. There’s no real benefit either to gaining trophies. It’s just a special land marker for you to feel good about.

Winner: EA SPORTS’ Active
There’s something so satisfying about seeing a progress bar fill up to 100% that doesn’t compare to a line graph that looks like the back of a cartoon alligator.

Charting Your Progress
One of the big elements to any fitness program is keeping a record of your progress to help you know if you are keeping on track with your goals.

Wii Fit offers only four charts, and unfortunately two of them are the same thing. It can track your Body Mass Index (BMI), your weight, your Fitness Age, and how long you’ve worked out. Within the last graph is a color code system to show how much of that time was devoted to one of five categories. You even have the option of logging in outside activities, though the benefits of doing so are non-existent. Wii Fit does have a calendar option to help you keep track of your progress on a daily basis, but to be honest, it’s not needed. The only good that the calendar does is track where your center of balance was on that particular day’s test. Not that interesting. And because all the data is what it collects from the Wii Balance Board, it’s kind of difficult to fudge around your true weight.

Active goes into overload mode with how it charts you. You have a chart for outside activities, food intake, water intake, sleep, stress, and even one where you can rate how important working out is to you for the day! Not to mention the four ways in the category above. In addition, you have a daily medal you can earn based on your performance that is recorded on a calendar. These medals are then averaged out with the results posted on yet another chart that shows you how many total calories you’ve burned, hours you’ve logged, and even your average rating for outside activities since you started the program! With all these charts, what could possibly go wrong? Well, all the charts are very subjective. It’s very easy to cheat when inputting data to be logged. The most annoying thing is that the questions it asks to help log specific data is often very vague. Example: How many balanced meals did you have today? What would this program consider a balanced meal? Hitting all four food groups? It got to the point where I was interpreting the question as “how many times did you eat?” On top of that, I’m not convinced that the calories I burned are the actual number I burned. If anything, Active just estimates it based on your height, age, and weight you input yourself.

Winner: Nintendo’s Wii Fit
Because you can’t lie! You can’t lie to Nintendo!!

Encouragement/Critiquing
The reason you would want a personal trainer of any kind is to help push you along to your fitness goals. And it helps if you have someone that is actually encouraging.

Wii Fit seems to have taken the tactic of both gentle pointing out your flaws and bombarding you with posture propaganda. If you don’t mind the playful teasing it does for missing just even one day of checking in for a test or workout, this gets really annoying really fast. The audio library is also rather limited. This results in not really encouraging you so much as repeating the same line of praise or critique you’ve heard before.

Active takes a more dynamic approach. If you suck as a particular exercise consistently, it will gently encourage you to try harder. However, if are consistently good at an exercise and then suddenly start to fall apart, it will resort to boot camp tactics of pushing you. There’s no real middle ground. If there is, I haven’t found it. The audio library is just as limited, but it still manages to somehow have at least two unique lines per exercise. You’ll still get the generic lines you’ve heard before cycle through, but every so often you’ll hear something different that you may not have heard for at least two days.

Winner: EA SPORTS’ Active
If only because it is less annoying than Wii Fit.

Equipment
The reason why the price tag is so freaking high is because of the equipment that comes with the product. And both are designed specifically for the product’s use.

The Wii Balance Board is, like one person I overheard has said, a glorified bathroom scale. It’s about as big, the same color white, and all I’ve been using it for is to track my weight. Within Wii Fit, it is so sensitive, it’s mind blowing! The tiniest of shifts are noted, even the ones you don’t feel! Its response time is surprisingly very quick too, which means it’s your own damn fault for not being able to move fast enough to head butt the soccer ball flying towards you. But in the actual fitness areas, specifically the yoga exercises, the it doesn’t really do much other than point out that your balance is off.

Active comes with a leg strap and a resistance band. The leg strap is designed to keep the Nun-chuck close to your thigh in order to help the program track your lower body movements during exercises like squats and lunges. The resistance band is designed to enhance the upper body exercises by offering, well, resistance so you don’t have to resort to free weights and fumbling around with how to hold the controllers comfortably. However, both items are what I would consider “outside of the program” and do not directly supply input to the program. On top of that, the supplied resistance band has been the focus of a lot of heat from consumers. Outside of my own experience of tearing and snapping it and a replacement band, others have said that it doesn’t even supply any kind of tension. Thankfully, because this item is outside of Active’s programming, a lot of users have just replaced it with more resistant bands.

Winner: Tie
They both get the job done, but they also have their flaws.

Overall Verdict
Final Score: Wii Fit: 2 – Active: 5

While both may be gimmicky, the fact of the matter is that EA SPORTS’ Active program will get you the results you will probably want out of a home fitness program that isn’t a DVD where you are passively watching the screen and the trainer puts you on the honor system of doing the exercises. Yes, Active still maintains that level of cheese, but because it is (dare I say it for the first time) a video game, you are required by design to interact with it. That alone makes it better than the cardio and strength training DVDs you can buy that tell you what exercises to try. Even the ones with similar equipments!

EA SPORTS Active's 30 Day Challenge - Day 12

Balance Board day, which is the second time I've used that. It would have been the third, but I accidently turned the Balance Board option off when the second day came aorund.

I kind of like the Balance Board exercises. It's essentially getting two birds with one stone. I get my lunges in as well as whatever upper body movement the software is making me do. Today it was tennis and vollyball, both of which are made harder with the Balance Board.

I have eight more workout sessions to go before the challenge is over, and I'm aiming to get this done by the 16th of this month if not sooner. When that happens, I'll have my full review on the product.

EA SPORTS Active's 30 Day Challenge - Day 11

Technically, Day 17 Workout 11, but you get the idea.

Mostly sports drills with some upper body resistance band stuff. Was forced to do squats back-to-back against jump squats. Kind of hurt, to be honest, but not as bad as the jumping lunges from the last week. Barely made the calorie burn goal for that workout, but I think it is because I burn the most calories on the track than anywhere else in the program. Go figure that running away from my problems would turn into a health benifit.

Wii Fit has me at 155 lbs. today. Hopefully, I will stay there or at least get closer to 150 by the end of the challenge. Other than that, I'm feeling really good right now. Hopefully that's the change that I need to get everything else rolling, or at least get some self-confidence back.

EA SPORTS Active's 30 Day Challenge - The Half-Way Point

I got my replacement band from EA but is very hesitant of using it. In the meantime, I’ve forced myself to use the medium intensity Pilates band that I bought when the band first broke. Upon my second set of shoulder presses, I noticed the band got looser. I’m worried that this may be the first sign of it potentially snapping on me like its easier brother did several days earlier.

In any event, I’ve completed Workout 10 of the 30 Day Challenge, but noticed that my progress has fallen behind. The calendar cataloguing your progress showed me at Day 16 out of 30, which essentially means I’m a day behind now. In order to catch up and finish this challenge on time, I need to do the last half without a break day. I can probably squeeze in one or two break days, but any more and I won’t finish on time.

The thing about this program is that it is very forgiving in the 30 Day Challenge. It didn’t tell me that I was a day behind. I just noticed it on my own. If you can’t complete the 30 Day Challenge in 30 days or less, it doesn’t really care from the looks of it. Just try again and hopefully you can do it the second or third time around. It’s similar to how the game tries to lock you out of working out on break days. It prompts you with information as to why it is important, but ultimately, it’s your decision to work out or not.

Wii Fit says I’m hovering at 156. I took my Wii Fitness Age, which is a gimmicky version of finding out your physical fitness age, and it claimed that I was 20. Last time I took it was a month ago, and it said I was 23. Mom took it, and it said she was 30 years younger than she really is, which is very good for a senior citizen.

On a related note, Wii Fit PLUS was announced at E3 recently. It’s the sequal to Wii Fit offering similar options to Active, mainly the creating a customized workout that will go from one exercise into the other for however long you wish to work out. That alone is reason enough for me to consider it, as I now finally have a simple and easy way of incorporating yoga into my daily fitness routine. Strangely enough, with that announcement, I came to the epiphany that I’m more interested in fitness games now than I am in, say, the upcoming Ghostbusters game or even my copy of Punch-Out!! First a dropping interest in porn, and then a dropping interest in video games. I can only wonder where my interests will be when I get Spore: Galactic Adventures in the mail next month.