My neck, my back...

Yesterday I finally got started on the Dance Central challenge for week 2. If you want details on how you can participate in this challenge check out the article on The Married Gamers. Kelly Brown is the one who is writing about and participating in this challenge and we have been challenging each other and cheering each other on. This week we are supposed to dance the same song THIRTEEN times in a row! And while I don't completely blame Kelly Brown for the fact that my back is screaming at me today, I do like how gaming can help friends accomplish their fitness goals even if they are on opposite coasts. I see what you did there Dance Central, I'm so on to you!

I selected Cascada's Evacuate The Dance Floor for my torture yesterday. I figured since it was a one bar song on difficulty that it would be easy, so I did the challenge on the "hard" setting. What I did not anticipate was that that one evil move (can't remember the name) would have me sweating and dying. After the first song I immediately changed clothes. You really do need to wear comfortable workout-style clothing when doing this. You don't want to be hitching up your pants or trying to recover your bra strap while focusing on the moves. So I paused and tossed on some yoga pants, sports bra, and a shirt I didn't mind stinking up with sweat...and yes...I got sweaty.

My first playthrough was pathetic, only scoring 175K. However, by the 6th time I was getting the moves down a little better and found my score had gradually progressed to a mildly impressive 488K. Practice makes perfect right? It never went higher...lol. The score started dropping as I got exhausted. The "freestyle" breaks were spent catching my breath and dashing to chug water. The only thing that got me through was knowing that Kelly did her song 13 times in a row, and if she could do it then I could do it and I was NOT giving up. I gave it one final push on the 13th and last time and got 4 stars and 444K. Not great, but much better than my first attempt.

What throws me for a loop is the way they track how many calories you burn. I worked out for 25 minutes. I'm sweating and panting, and had to pop some aspirin last night because my back was so sore and they're telling me I only burned 125 calories?!?!? OH hellz no!

So I hopped on my iPad to the myfitnesspal app that I love and adore and have been using daily and did a search for general aerobics. 25 minutes is 221 calories on there and that sounded better to me so that's what I logged for my cardio for the day on my diary.

I will do my challenge again today. Kelly said the Lady GaGa song Marry The Night is a great arm work-out and that she was able to do it on Medium, so I'm going to try to one-up her and do it on hard.

I need some help picking my song for Friday though. I'll give you all three choices (in order of increasing difficulty) and let you guys pick, just leave it in the comments section:

Sandstorm - Darude

I Know You Want Me - Pitbull

Fire Burning - Sean Kingston

You have until noon tomorrow (Friday) to cast your vote!

And finally I want to add a little blurb about MyFitnessPal (yes again). I made some chili yesterday in the slow cooker and finally took advantage of the feature on MyFitnessPal that allows you to figure out your calories for a recipe you create. All I had to do was scan the things I used in my recipe. So using my iPhone, I scanned the lean ground beef, canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, seasoning, etc and it gave me not only accurate calories to log per serving, but the proper nutritional value for my batch of chili. I found this super helpful and look forward to using this feature more in the future.

I still find the iPhone easier to use for scanning. I can never remember where my camera is on the back of my iPad...lol. But I still like the layout of the iPad a little better for other things. If any of you are using or want to start using the app make sure to add me "Jaxboxchick" and we can cheer each other on.