Thank you to Ubisoft for providing me with a copy of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 and sponsoring this fitness diary series. Please click here to learn more about Ubisoft. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions are my own.

Well, I weighed myself this week.  I’m kind of glad that I didn’t do that at the start of my exercising because I would have put the focus on my weight instead of my overall fitness, which is definitely improving.  I got out a couple of my old shirts, which seem to fit better than they did when I put them away.  But at this point, I don’t have a lot of outward improvement.  What I do have is increased flexibility, more energy (which I’ve mostly been wasting by staying up too late) and more stamina for the workouts.  I’ll track my weight again in a few weeks, but I plan on building more muscle before I lose much fat.

Last Saturday, the team I’ve been coaching went to our first Lego robotics competition. It was a long day of standing and walking around, but I seemed to do better than I normally do in this type of situation.  What I was dreading was how I would feel Sunday and Monday, which is when I usually pay for an unusual day of activity.  But when I woke up, I was feeling mostly fine, which is my new normal. (I’m a little achy every day.  Not much, but I can feel my muscles all the time now.  I think this will wear off in time, but even now it’s not that bad.)

I’ve been trying out more of the activities this week.  My wife got me to try a Bollywood workout when we first got the program.  I’ve been doing it most mornings.  It’s low impact and not too fast, and I find it easier than even the Zen activities.  (At my size, slowly posing and stretching requires a lot of energy.)  Under an activity category, like Bollywood, there are multiple selections, each listing a level of difficulty (Easy, Medium, or Hard) and the number of minutes you’ll be working out.  After going through the two short and easy “training” sessions over a few days, I started doing a Medium, 15-minute routine that I’ve been doing most mornings this week.  Each routine is broken up into several different moves or exercises, and you do several sets of each exercise throughout the routine.  Each exercise has multiple parts and the program tells you for each part if you’ve done it correctly by marking it with a green dot (and a small chime).  At the end of each set, it tells you what percent you did correctly and then there is an overall percentage at the end of the routine.  This morning I got 90% correct, which I guess means I’m a grade A exerciser.

Several of the others seem to follow the same pattern.  I’ve done Hip Hop a couple times, but don’t have the hang of it yet, and Cardio Boxing, which is fun but definitely leaves me winded.

The Bootcamp activity is a little crazy.  It includes these attack moves like the Sumo Squat Attack and the Double Knee Kick Attack.  It also has running and push-ups.  Now I haven’t done a push-up in my adult life (and not many as a kid) so I’m looking forward to be able to complete this one, but I’m not there yet.

I’m still working out every day and don’t have any plans to stop.  I’ve really been suprised how entrenched this has become as part of my daily routine.

I’ll be posting diary updates every week for two more weeks.  Here’s week 1 and week 2. After that, we’ll be giving away a free copy of YFSE to a random commenter chosen from the comments on one of the five diary posts, including this one.