EA Sports Active for the Wii

The other day (no, not that one, the other one) Jenna and I became interested in EA Sports Active for the Wii, after she found a review of it online and thought it looked interesting. After watching some reviews and clips and whatnot, we decided it was totally worth getting and ran to Wal-Mart to pick it up. Here's what we've found so far:

EA Sports Active is what WiiFit should've been. Let me compare and contrast these bad boys for you.

First, WiiFit involves the balance board, the Wiimote, the Nunchuk and your very own personal body. EA Active involves these things plus a resistance band and a leg holster thingy. Adding a resistance band means you add...wait for it...resistance! Anyone who's done even a minimal amount of research into health and human physiology knows that resistance-based exercises are really good for you and are totally necessary for good health. Can you get resistance by doing pushups, situps, stretches or leg lifts? Yup. Can you get better results by doing these same motions with increased resistance? Yup. Even though I'm not a fan of the band EA included with the game (I feel like I'm going to break it) you can easily exchange a heavier band or whatever if you like (which I did). Doing shoulder press with the weight of the Wiimote? Lame. Doing them with a decent resistance band makes a world of difference as far as your workout goes. The leg band thingy is pretty neat. It helps the game determine how hard you're running based on your leg movement, or how deeply you're squatting, or whether you're doing your lunges properly. It just barely fits around my Herculean man-thighs but it still works. You just have to get it strapped pretty tight and pretty high so it doesn't slide down while you're doing stuff. I like this feature because about half of my workout shorts don't have pockets, so I ended up just holding the Wiimote in my hand for WiiFit jogging. That gives a fair indication of how much my right arm is moving, but pretty much none on whether my legs are moving. With EA Active, you have the Wiimote in your hand and the Nunchuk attached to your leg, so the game requires you to be moving your upper and lower body together to get your character running on screen. It's a much better method, I think.

That's the first thing. Here's the second thing: setting up a workout in advance and just rolling through the exercises keeps your heart rate up and provides a much stronger workout. With WiiFit, you pick an exercise and then do the exercise. When it's over, you head back to the menu and find another exercise you'd like to try, then pick it and do it. With each exercise lasting no more than a minute or two, that's a lot of heading back to the menu. It kills your momentum in a big way, and it lets your heart rate drop way too much. EA Active has set workout routines based on time and intensity (20 minutes easy/med/hard, 60 min easy/med/hard, etc.) and allows you to customize your own workouts. If you have bad knees, you can kick out any exercise that involves jumping. If you want to work on upper body, you can build your own all upper body workout program, and even include short jogs at the beginning and end for warmup and cooldown. Having a workout set up in advance means less time spent fiddling around with the game before you can get going. To me, that means a few more minutes of sleep in the morning, but it also means am ore efficient workout.

Here's the third thing: WiiFit is freakin' mean to you. I'm a dude with a pretty thick skin, but if I have to hear "You're obese!" in a little electronic game voice every day, that's going to kill my desire to play that game very quickly. I'm not obese. I'm 6'3" and 250 pounds. I'm not the skinniest person in most any room, but I'm also not the person in the worst shape in most any room. I'm a guy with a large frame with a reasonable amount of muscle and some extra fat mostly in my middle region. WiiFit is based on BMI, which is the single stupidest system of health rating I've ever heard of. Anyone with even a decent amount of muscle on their frame will come up as overweight. Anyone with a large frame with muscle and maybe a bit more fat than they'd like will come up as obese. That's lame. If they could incorporate any other system of measuring your body type into the mix, it would be infinitely superior to the way it is now. Add in a wrist circumference to get a concept of frame size, or add in a body shape matching system or something, but straight BMI is terrible. EA Active is very encouraging, which is nice. I'm not going to be riding high all day because my electronic trainer said "You really nailed that lunge! Way to go!" but I'm also not going to be pissed at the game for calling me names. It's not a huge deal, but it makes a difference to me. Even if I got down to the ideal weight for my body type, with a body fat percentage somewhere around 9% and a goodly amount of muscle, WiiFit would keep telling me that I'm overweight or obese every day. That's not cool.

The last thing, and something I think is extremely important, is that WiiFit thinks that your posture and balance are the keys to your health. They don't seem to worry much about strength, endurance, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, or any of the other aspects of health, they just focus on balance. Since the game is designed to be used with the Wii balance Board and balance is just about the only thing it can measure, I'm sort of okay with it as a known weakness going in. But with a system designed to help increase fitness, there's only so much you can tell with balance. EA Active actually rates your caloric burn rate based on your stats and the exercise you're doing. EA Active takes a much more American view of fitness, I think is the main difference. You're not just standing in one place leaning, or working as hard as you can to stand perfectly still (there's an intense workout for you) you're actually moving, doing fun things, and working hard. When I've done the EA Active 30 minute hard course, I end up sweaty and tired, almost as sweaty and tired as I feel after an intense jiu-jitsu class. That's an extremely difficult thing to do with a game and EA Active manages well. I don't like to do a workout that feels like a waste of time. I like to work out very hard for as short a period of time as possible, to get my workout done efficiently and effectively. If I can get a solid workout with a resistance band and a video game without even having to leave my house, I'm all for it.

So anyway, those are my thoughts. EA Active may be what WiiFit should've been, but I do think WiiFit was a necessary precursor to EA Active. WiiFit is still fun, and it does have some worthwhile games and stuff. It actually has a pretty decent yoga trainer, if you're interested in that sort of thing. I just wouldn't get WiiFit expecting it to get you in shape unless you're willing to spend a lot of time and energy just trying to spend a lot of energy. EA Active is the shortest path to the same goal, and I think you'd see a much greater change after a month with EA Active than you would with WiiFit. You also wouldn't have any deep seated self esteem issues stemming from your video game calling you a fatty.