Lose Weight in the Dancing Revolution

I've had DDR Hottest Party 2 in the box since Christmas. I am a terrible dancer and have horrendous rythem. I've played some version of Dance Dance Revolution a few times before for a song or two and the results were what you would have expected: Boos from the croud. But since it was bad weather outside, and I didn't want to go to the gym and do anything too heavy because of my back, I decided it was finally time to break this out. I am as bad as I remember.

Is It Fun?
I played for over an hour and was entertained and simotaneously frustrated to the max throughout. There are 4 levels of difficulity: beginner, basic, difficult, and expert. I started on beginner and scored a few C's and D's, then switched to basic where D's were the norm but I worked to a C on most songs after a few tries. The harder the difficulity the faster and more complex the steps are. I think these types of games are much more fun when playing with others, but even though I was playing alone, I enjoyed it the entire time.

Is It Exercise?
I averaged 3.4 METs playing on the easy side of the difficulity settings. For me, that means buring 272 calories an hour versus the 80 I would burn sitting playing solitare for an hour. I haven't gone for a walk in my GoWear yet(I will update this when I do), but the ExerciseCalculator in BodyMedia's Activity Manager rates walking at 3 mph at 3.3 METs. Based on that, Playing DDR on basic difficulity is slightly better for weight loss than a 3 mph walk, and in my opinion, lots more entertaining and probably doubly so when done with a friend or your kids!

And that is just on basic difficulity. Get better and increase the difficulity and the calorie burn will go up. I accidently started one song on the expert mode, and the arrows(step indicators) were flying up the screen faster than I could reckognize them. Keep up with that and it would not surprise me if you were well over 5 METs.

Does the Research Agree?
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, conducted a study using DDR Extreme 2 on the PS2 using participants that were proficient or at least praticed the game. For the Adults, aged 20-25, they reported the following results:

	Cals/hour		Heart Rate(bpm)		VO2(ml/kg/min)
	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean	SD
Light	372	±95	117	±12	17.7	±2.68
Standard	462	±152	128	±12	21.3	±3.75
Difficult	564	±155	144	±16	26.7	±5.18

Read more about it here.

West Virginia University & West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency conducted a 24 week study with 50 children 7-12 years old with a BMI in the 85th percentile. Participants played DDR for at least 30 minutes, 5 times a week. Many measured health risk factors improved; and while weight loss was not demonstrated, a decrease in BMI was observed(remember these are growing 7-12 year olds).

So break out your Wii and get to dancing the weight off.

Who Didn't See This Coming, Yo-Yo Sleeping?

After a huge night of oversleeping, Sunday's night of sleep was a whopping 5 hours. On average, the total is about right for 2 days worth of sleep, but I don't think you can borrow and trade sleep like that. I ignored the 5:30 wakeup call, but my sore back would not have allowed any "real" training and more sleep was way more important than a very light workout would have been.

Sleep, Sleep, Sleep
It is one thing I need to do better, but so far it has also dominated the content of my blog, my training, health and fitness, and weight loss blog. Partially because it is the first thing that jumped out at me after looking at a weeks worth of data from the GoWear Fit, but also largely due to my injured back which has regulated training to rehab. Don't worry though, things will get more exciting around here.

Woe Is Me

Being sidelined sucks. I did almost nothing Saturday. I was up past 1:00 AM working Friday night, but got a decent sleep. I got up at 8:30 and scrambled to get the rest of my work done before noon. Once that was done, I went to watch a local rugby game. A few hours of standing made my back ache as if I was out on the field getting knocked around. I paced around at about a whopping 600 steps an hour, and that is about all I did on Saturday.
In my 9 hours of being up, I averaged 1.81 METs. Putting me well under my target activity level and therefor target calories.

Why Only 9 Hours With Activity?
I got up at a decent time for a Saturday, 8:30; but after standing up watching a few hours of rugby, I came home sore and not wanting to do anything. I watched a bit of TV, then forced myself to get up and do something. I worked around the house for about an hour, but then laid back down and quickly fell asleep. This was at 6:00 PM. I woke up around 10:00 PM but didn't really feel like getting up and doing anything. So I watched some TV till I fell back asleep, pretty intermittently till I woke up for about an hour at 7:00 AM then on and off till about 9:30.

I got over 10 hours of sleep over a 15.5 hour period. So Saturday I was up only 9 hours, and now it is late Sunday night, but I am not tired and need to get up at 5:30 Mondy morning. In my last post about sleep, I mentioned getting more consistent. I utterly failed this weekend, and hope it doesn't take me too long to recover. The only good thing is that it won't hurt my traing since I am taking some time off to heal my back and hip.

Pain in the Butt

Well actually it is in my hip and back, but it is affecting my training, my activity, and my sleep. I don't know if it is an injury from rugby 2 Thursdays ago. Or if it is a result of bad mechanics working their way up from my busted ankle, which doesn't hurt too much, but does affect my gait sometimes. It has been getting worse over the last 10 days or so, but I am taking a few days off rugby and volleyball, and spending some extra time stretching and doing specific exercises to make it better.

Activity Down
Last week compared to the previous, my vigerous activity was down 50%, and my moderate activity down about 25% According to the GoWear Fit, I burned over 400 calories per day less last week than the previous week. Sleep was a win loose this week. I ended up with about the same sleep last week compared to the previous. There were 3 factors involved in this. The pain made sleeping worse, some improvements in my schedule and environment made things better, and I slept way too much Saturday and Saturday night.

10 Days: Paramount Realization

I don't get enough sleep!
I think one of the coolest features of the GoWear Fit is the sleep tracking. Being able to, in fact being forced to, see how much time I am(or am not) laying down and sleeping each night has been the most eye-opening thing I have noticed in my first 10 days. It is easy to think back to the previous night and remember going to bed around 11:00 and with the alarm set at 7:00, I got about 8 hours of sleep right? Wrong! What really happened is that the TV show I was watching ended at 11:00, then I started getting ready for bed, maybe checked eMail, maybe got a snack, maybe wasted 30 minutes. Laying in bed watching TV, awake another 10 to 90 minutes - wasted time. It was something enguaging on the History channel, but I don't remember it the next morning, it stole some of my sleep time, it wasn't worth it. No more TV in bed.

Research suggests that most healthy adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.
We have all heard this, and many of us think we are getting it done. 3 major problems. One I mentioned above, are you really going to sleep and waking up when you think you are? After seeing my data, I realize that I have not been. Another bad assumption is that you are sleeping from when you fall asleep to when you wake up. Well technically you are, for each time you fall asleep and wake up, but how often do you do that each night? Zero? Yeah I thought that about myself too! The 3rd error people use when justifying their amount of sleep: "7-9 hours is enough, I can get by on 7." We all know what a bell curve looks like, but it seems like almost everyone thinks that they themself are on the favorable edge of it. 50% of us are on the wrong side of 8 hours, 90% of us are undersleeping at 7 hours.

I have got to do better.
And using the GoWear Fit will help me. Being able to see when I am actually getting to sleep will help me realize that I need to get started earlier. I also need to work on being more consistent. I have a 6:00 AM workout on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; I slept through Wednesday this week. I think it would help if I get up at 5:30 every day. On Tuesday and Thursday I should spend that time doing some work in the morning. Forcing myself to get up early will also hopefully assist in convincing me to go to bed earlier - see what happened Friday night, and Monday night(also an early morning). On Saturday moning I woke up at 5:30 but since I was behind on sleep I stayed in bed. In the next 4 hours I only got 2 hours of sleep - again waisting 2 hours, not sleeping, not doing anything. Should have gotten up and then I probably would have gotten to bed earlier Saturday night.
I wish this view was an option in the summary view!

About GoAthlete Fit

GoAthlete Fit is a blog for those of us interested in health and fitness from weight loss to athletic training. I am a gadget guy, and my newest toy is the BodyMedia's GoWear Fit (similar to the BodyBugg). The data from it is going to be a big part of the focus of this blog. I love numbers and data and finding ways to use them to improve efficiency, entertainment, motivation, and whatever else they can help with.

Who are you?
I am a healthy and fit 31 year old male. I keep very active working out and playing and competing in team sports. I have gained and lost weight for different reasons, but always have kept fit and "in shape." I like to keep myself read up on the fitness industry, and find many aspects of it very fascinating.

I have been playing sports since I could walk. As a kid and through high school, soccer was my primary sport: year round, indoor and outdoor. I sprinkled in a little cross-country running during high school, but nothing serious. I decided against playing collegete soccer, but that didn't cause any problems in keeping active. I played a lot of intramural and pick-up soccer and even a competitive town league a few semesters. But most of college was spent learing and playing beach volleyball.

For the last 9 years, I have been playing indoor and town league soccer, pick-up indoor volleyball, occasional competitive indoor volleyball, varying amounts of AAA level beach volleyball, and occasional extras such as intramural flag football. Beach volleyball requires a significant amount of travel and a regular, similar level partner, or group to play and to train with. Unfortunatelly, that hasn't been much of an option the last few years, so serious competitive play hasn't been irregular the last few summers and isn't looking much better this year. I will probably travel to a few tournaments and play with some previous parteners, but without high level training it can be difficult to keep up. So to fill the need of a sport to practice and play competitevly, I took up rugby this spring with Blacksburg RFC. Having never even held a rugby ball before, these guys were very welcoming. As a traveling team that pratices 2-3 times a week(real training, not just getting together for some pick-up) and has hopes of winning their division, it is exactly the level of competitiveness I was looking for. And after playng for a few months now, I can truly say I love the sport.

So now I have the GoWear Fit device, and I am going to put it through the lifestyle of an active athlete to see where it can be benificial, what I like and don't like about it, and how both me and you can use it to reach our goals better.

About the GoWear Fit

BodyMedia describes the GoWear fit as "a lifestyle and calorie management system that helps consumers monitor their body and improve their health." The Multi-Sensor Armband is a small wearable monitoring system(computer) that measures a variety of physical characteristics, including motion, steps, galvanic skin response, skin temperature, and heat flux. The armband is used in conjunction with the Online Activity Manager and an optional watch-like Display. Using the measurements from the armband, the system reports:

• Calorie burn
• Physical activity
• Steps taken
• Sleep duration
• Sleep efficiency

Like most fitness products the primary market leans heavily towards customers interested in weight loss, and by association health and lifestyle.

Combining the information that the armband reports to the online activity monitor with either, BodyMedia's Nutrition Assessment or the new daily food logging provides a recepie for healthy weight management. Daily stats and extended reports of calories in, calories out, activity, and sleep tell you everything you need to know about your current lifestyle that there are no more excuses. It is time for action!

I am far from BodyMedia's typical customer. I am a healthy and fit 31 year old male. I keep very active working out and playing and competing in team sports. But being a gadget geek and also very interested in the health and fitness industry, I wanted to get one of these things at least to play with. I have lost weight in the past, and don't neet to lose any right now. My objective here is to see what benefit I can get out of the GoWear fit as an athlete; not interested in weight loss, I want to improve in the gym and improve on the field.