DDR workout update

November 30th, 2007

I’ve been chatting about this off and on in the discussion thread for the previous entry, but I figured I’d give all y’all a more official update on my Dance Dance Revolution workout experiment. Since my initial post, I’ve transitioned over from Konamix to the GameCube’s Mario Mix. I seem to get a little extra kick out of dancing along to classic Mario tunes (though my favorite song in the game is the “Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka”-inspired “Always Smiling”), and the songs tend to skew a little easier than DDR games proper. It felt good to be able to ace the whole set of Hard mode songs and get a workout out of the deal too. I’ve reached a bit of a stopping point in terms of personal advancement; I got an ‘A’ in every song on Very Hard except for Bowser’s Castle (that green ‘B’ mocks me!), but the Super Hard songs seem to generally be beyond my ability to get above a ‘C’.

My initial goal was to burn at least 100 calories in a half-hour exercise session. I’m proud to say that I’ve improved well enough to obtain this goal well within the time frame (usually 7 or 8 songs can hit the mark, since I tend to stick to the World 4 songs, Very Hard, Mush Mode off), and often am not even breaking a sweat at the end! So today I decided to try and bump it up to 120 calories. If I can’t make it work in that timeframe, I’ll do my best to wake up a little earlier in the morning, but I’m very excited by what I see as a marked improvement in my workout times.

On top of that, I found out that I have access to a scale in my house! I don’t know how much of a good thing that is, but maybe it’ll give me a better indication of progress. We’ll see how that goes!

[discuss]