Physical Fitness & Training!

For me, I'd known I was out of shape since 2006, at the least. Unless of course "pear" is a desirable shape to be in. My stamina had never really recovered after having severe bunions removed on both feet, one after the other. Before that, I regularly would walk from one end of the city to the other without a thought. And I could pedal a bike at least 2/3 of the way up the steeper hills before I had to get off and push. All the way if there was no traffic and I could weave back and forth in the street. Afterwords, walking half way across town once would wipe me out, and I would have to get off my bike to push up most hills after going up at most a quarter of the hill. I'd have to do so nearly instantly on the steepest hill.

I'd been trying to lose weight and get back in shape for years. When the Xbox 360 Kinect came out, I picked one up along with a very good piece of exercise software for it. **bleep** good exercise software at that. it can teach you tai chi, and act as a personal trainer and correct your posture and performance in real time with exercises. The problem is... even the lowest impact workout routine was simply too much. I could barely make it through a third of the routine before collapsing in exhaustion. And that is... rather demoralizing. Even doing a session of tai chi was too much for me, and I'd collapse in exhaustion very early in the routine. Which lead to me over time abandoning it. I wasn't having fun, which made it hard to keep up. And there was no recognizable progress being made. Even worse, I'd not only collapse in exhaustion early in each workout routine, but I'd then be so sore I could barely move for 2 to 3 days afterwords.

That's okay, I had other kinect games which were fun to play, and would get me exercising as a matter of course. Except, I could barely play them for 5 or 6 minutes before I'd be collapsing in exhaustion. Which is demoralizing, and would lead to me preferring to play other games. And so the kinect got relegated to being used for bowling, voice chat on Xbox Live, and watching Netflix when I was too lazy to grab the controller.

I found one of those "shake weights" in the As Seen On TV section of a local grocery store, and picked up one of those as well as a resistance gym you hang on a door that was also in the isle. The shake weight was awkward to use, and not particularly effective. Not to mention shaking it like you're suppose to is tiring in the extreme, so it ended up gathering dust. I eventually donated it to Good Will. The resistance gym was better, but still not very good. There was only 2 levels of resistance available, and both required that you be standing pretty far away from the door. Those resistance levels were "almost none" and "maybe a little". It still could have been decent, but it didn't include any guides for what sort of exercises you can do using it or how to do them. It ended up just sitting there acting as a decoration due to it not being a particularly good piece of exercise equipment.

I then later picked up some dumbbells. I have a couple 5 pound weights, and a single 15 pound weight. Never got around to getting a second one. And to be honest, without a exercise bench it's kind of hard to do most of the weight lifing exercises I do know. It also does nothing for my legs. Then there's the demoralizing fact that I was so out of shape that doing a single set of 10 reps each with 5 pounds for 3 different arm exercises would leave my arms feeling like sore noodles, and I'd be nearly useless the next day. Those too have mostly been gathering dust since I got them.

So yes, I've known for years I need to get back in shape and lose weight. And I've been trying, but traditional methods just haven't been working. I'm so out of shape that I can't do a full workout, which demoralizes me, and I eventually give up. That came to a head last year. In January of 2020 my doctor gave me an ultimatum. Lose weight, or I'd have to start taking medicine for my high cholesterol. At the time, I weighted 260 pounds.

So I started tracking my calories, and trying to limit my caloric intake. The calculators I use for this are this one for calories per day and this one for calculating body fat percentage. Even so, I was not doing a good job sticking to a diet. By the time I got a bathroom scale in the middle of February, my weight had skyrocketed up to 300 pounds. YIKES! Now that I own a scale, I weigh myself every day after using the toilet and before I get dressed, to make sure there are no variables other then my own weight. I then log that in a spread sheet that I also use to track calories consumed at each meal and if I've exercised that day. I also plug that daily weighing into first the body fat calculator then the calorie calculator to help guide my daily intake.

Once I was weighing myself every day, I was finally able to start losing weight, slowly. But getting a Quest and starting to play Beat Saber has turbo charged things, for a given definition of "turbo charged". By July I had gotten my weight down to 245 pounds. Which my doctor thought was very good... until I admitted that my weight had gone up to 300 pounds by the middle of February. At which point he was very impressed. And so am I. For a while I was struggling to break the "220 pound" barrier. But I've finally managed to push past that.

One thing, above and beyond actually sticking to a diet, that's helped me is that Beat Saber and other room scale VR games are great cardio exercise, without feeling like cardio exercise. I can barely do 5 minutes of a 15 minute exercise routine before collapsing in exhaustion. But Beat Saber? Just as physically active, yet I can push past that barrier without really noticing it.

I started exclusively doing songs on Easy difficulty. Then after a while I transitioned to doing them on Normal difficulty because they felt too easy. Then started doing a few songs on Hard on occasion, although I mostly stick to Normal or Easy difficulty... depending on the song. Most songs by Imagine Dragons are a bit too much for me on Normal.

15 minute workout? That's a breeze. My initial exercise playlist was carefully chosen to include squats and lunges and be 15 minutes long. At first I'd have to push myself to finish the playlist, with my arms and legs being so tired by the end. But now I barely even have to think about it anymore. In fact, today I ended up doing a 40 minute long workout because I wasn't watching the clock. I was just jamming out to some of my favorite Imagine Dragons songs while slicing boxes like there's no tomorrow. Last week I spent 2 or 3 hours in Waltz of the Wizard doing the revamped tower exploration stuff. That means ducking and weaving to avoid arrow traps, dancing around golems, and flailing around to cast spells and fight back. It was fun, it was tiring, and it was an intense workout that I never noticed I was getting.

And that I think is the true magic of VR when it comes to exercise. So much of what you're doing in VR is a great cardio workout, but you never notice because you're having so much fun.