According to EA Active, this video may just be the pinnacle of exercise. READ ON TO SEE WHY!

Last week, I gave my background story on why I picked up EA Sports Active, and gave some initial measurements of my fatness. So, how did I fare this week with Active? Did I lose any weight? Did I decide to just hop on a treadmill? Did I realize being fat is awesome in this day and age of triple-bypass surgeries and just binge on doughnuts and whole milk?

…now I want a doughnut…

Anyway, a couple people expressed their interest in Active last week in the comments, and if you do decide to pick up Active, let me give you a piece of advice: DON’T START ON INTENSE. Unless you’ve already started some sort of a fitness regiment, Intense will kill you, as I previously noted. I got through Day One, but I’m fairly certain that overexerting myself that first day was the primary source of my ongoing soreness that lasted until Friday.

So, the numbers for this week. I started off Monday weighing 290 lbs, give or take (if you’ve spent any time on a scale, you know your weight fluctuates throughout the day). Over the course of the week, I spent 2 hours and 44 minutes working out on EA Active, for a total of 1,644.3 calories burned. I managed to lose 3 pounds, bringing my total weight down to 287. In addition to Active, I ran twice on the treadmill for 20 minutes, and did some crunches. During the week, I limited my liquid intake to almost nothing but water, save for a glass of juice per day and the milk I put on my cereal, while avoiding fried foods and fatty foods. Overall, I ate more healthily than I have in the past year or so, though I’m sure there’s some more finetuning I could do with my diet.

To be honest, I’m pretty disappointed with my total weight loss.  This isn’t the first time I’ve decided to lose weight when being this heavy; two summers ago, I started working out and watching what I ate, and in the first week I nearly lost ten pounds.  Maybe I’m not eating as well this time, who knows?  Or, perhaps it could be I’m not exercising enough, or effectively?

Here’s what I mean by effectively; EA Sports Active, from my time with it, did not focus a whole lot on cardio. I would usually start and begin an exercise with some walking and running as a warm-up and cool-down, but there were only a couple of times where my actual exercise would include some form of “real” cardio. I say “real” because there are other forms of supposed “cardio exercises” in the game, such as cardio boxing and dancing (bonus points, EA, for making the first video game that tells me to do the shopping cart as part of a legitimate exercise regimen; A+++++++ would boogy again), but they’re not going to get your heart rate going at all (unless Wii Sports gets your heart pounding). I am by no means a fitness expert, but if you’re someone who is looking to lose some serious poundage as soon as possible, you’re going to need to supplement your time with Active with extra walking or running (or, if you have terribly flat feet and a bad back like me, time on an elliptical). In addition, I imagine most people are like me and looking to lose some flab off their bellies; I’ve only done ONE activity so far that seemed to focus on my stomach (standing crunches), and those weren’t nearly as effective as a good ol’ sit-up or crunch.

As previously said, the bulk of Active is spent doing things like squats, lunges, things with the resistance band, and a whole lot of variations. And, for the most part, if you do the exercises correctly, you’re going to feel some burn. Especially jumping squats and lunges. Holy crap, I could go my whole life without doing any more of those. While these are easily the most effective and appealing exercises in Active, they are also the ones that are most likely going to make you drop the product, because they rely heavily on detecting the location of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.

The thing with Active is, you are probably going to be spending most of your first week really learning how the game works. You need to find the perfect spot on your leg to put the leg-strap to keep it from sliding down all the time, and you need to really learn where to hold the remote and nunchuk for the game to register that you’re doing the correct movement. This is really noticeable on every single exercise, and if you don’t have patience, you’re going to drop this game like a bad habit. On Saturday, I was already cranky and not looking forward to working out, so when the game just refused to register that I was, in fact, doing a bicep curl, and instead was making me stretch the rubber band for extended periods until I put the nunchuk in juuuuuuust the perfect position, I quickly said a choice string of swear words and decided my time would be much better spent on the treadmill that day. If you don’t have patience, don’t get this game, because it demands your full concentration on controlling your body, which isn’t always easy when you’ve got 290 lbs of sweaty, tired body aching for you to stop this madness and eat a damn Twinkie. I tried to use Active on Saturday and Sunday, and both times I got so frustrated with it I either quit altogether or skipped the exercise that was giving me trouble. I just felt like I was wasting time I could be using to, well, exercise, and that Active was actually getting in the way of me getting a good workout (which I’m pretty sure isn’t the point). Granted, I don’t have the best allotment of patience in the world, but it was just frustrating because I had been using the game for five days straight and then, all of a sudden, it wouldn’t recognize anything that I was doing.

I also found myself skipping a lot of the activities that just seemed like a waste of time in general.  To be honest, these things just felt like they were ripped out of Wii Sports, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of fitness acumen.  The boxing, basketball, and tennis games not only failed to get my heart pumping, but they were just boring and not fun at all.

So, here’s the thing about Active. If you are already someone who is in shape and thinks this is something that could replace your gym membership, you’re going to be sorely disappointed by Active. It just can’t offer a really demanding workout that you could get at the gym. But, alternatively, I think it’s a little ridiculous to expect it to offer that. If you’re someone who is in relatively decent shape (a.k.a you lucky people who stay skinny without working out while shoving fries down your throat), you’ll probably like Active as a nice little daily workout to keep those burgers from showing up on your thighs (not like they ever will, little Ms. Perfect Metabolism pants). If you’re like me and looking to lose a lot of weight, Active on its own probably won’t do it for you. It works perfectly for me as something to incorporate into my daily exercise routine as a compliment to more cardio and perhaps more strenuous resistance training.

That isn’t to say I regret buying Active at all; it’s kick-started my new exercise regimen that will hopefully lead to a longer, healthier life. I don’t know if I will continue to keep using Active once I start shedding some serious pounds and am looking for a more strenuous workout, but for now, as stated above, it’s the perfect start to my day (frustrations aside), and helps me stay health-centric as I make choices for what I’m eating, etc. Though I’ve only lost a few pounds, I already feel more energetic, less bloated, and overall just BETTER. So while Active won’t live up to any unrealistic expectations, it could be the kick in the ass you’ve been looking for.

Stay tuned for next week’s update, and if you’re interested in getting daily exercise updates, follow me on Twitter (swanx065).