Exercise, Otaku Style
Today, I read how animators, and other employees in Japan, China, and Korea, are, mostly literally, working themselves to death at rates high enough for the phenomenon to merit its own word in these languages. In Japanese, it’s called “karoushi.” Part of it is caused by insane stress levels, not enough sleep, and too many drugs — usually caffeine and alcohol. This results in heart attacks, strokes, and pulmonary embolisms — and these three are, according to my doctor-husband, mostly just fancy terms for a blood clot that’s gotten stuck in different places. Sometimes, it alternatively results in suicide. Regardless, it’s “karoushi.”
As I said though, only part of it is the result of the aforementioned factors. The other part is a lack of exercise. Unfortunately, a sedentary lifestyle is, in fact, a risk factor for dying before you might have expected. And therein lies the reason behind this article.
Working Out Doesn’t Have to Be Boring (Though It Will Probably Still Suck)
Like animators, physical fitness isn’t exactly the first thing most people think of when they picture an anime otaku. That’s probably because, you know, you’d expect someone who likes anime so much to spend most of their time sitting down in front of their computer or TV, and any time spent doing that is time not spent running, lifting weights, or doing Zumba classes at the gym.
HOWEVER!
That’s what home workouts are for, and I’m not talking about things like the Insanity workout either. While that kind of workout can totally be done at home, and if you do them, all the more power to you, they’re not exactly my idea of fun. I don’t want to spend 20 to 40 minutes watching a trainer easily complete a workout that has me dropping over in exhaustion before the halfway point. It may be effective, so long as you can maintain motivation, but that’s just the thing: it’s really hard to maintain motivation for something like that. Chances are, as an anime otaku, and not an exercise otaku, you don’t find the “working out” part of working out all that enjoyable. It feels like a feat of superhuman willpower to perform just one of these workouts, let alone perform them 3 to 5 times a week for the rest of your life. Just thinking about it feels slightly traumatizing.
But there’s no reason you can’t combine anime (or video games or whatever) with working out.
I first considered this idea back when Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) came out. Suddenly, there was a video game that required me to actually be in shape and fairly coordinated. It wasn’t perfect of course — the soft, at-home version’s pads moved around under your feet, and the hard arcade versions often required you to slam your foot down for it to sense you, both of which were supremely frustrating. It was a start though, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to use the DDR pads to play Final Fantasy. Now, though, the idea of combining exercise with the nerdier side of things has really taken off.
First of all, there are apps like Burn Your Fat With Me! It’s a dating sim, but rather than make in-game choices like “do I take her to the movies or do I study with her,” you make the real-life choice to do sit-ups, squats, back extensions, or push-ups, depending on what you’ve downloaded — there’s also one for running, but that hasn’t been translated, sadly. To progress the story, you have to a) pass check points that involved doing x number of reps in y amount of time and b) do reps between episodes to unlock the next one. The story’s cute, and the girl, Mayu, counts for you and cheers you on as you go. She has different unlockable (and then selectable) modes, like “little sister” or “tsundere,” as well as downloadable outfits. The main difficulty with this app is that “easy” mode is, well, really really easy, but hard mode is absolutely insane. The progression in difficulty as you advance the story is also pretty erratic.
As a side note, there is a version of this aimed toward women, but, from what I’ve read, it’s probably best for both genders to use the male-oriented version. While Mayu uses “moevation,” apparently, the motivation in the other version is more of the “make you feel terrible about yourself” kind.
It’s not just apps though. Anime’s gotten into it too with Anime de Training EX!. It’s mostly just CGDCT, but those cute things are “exercising” with the viewer. It covers the usual tropes and doesn’t have much of a story to it, but if it motivates you then that’s the important part. I’m not positive how effective this one is, since the episodes are only four minutes long, but at least they tried.
Going along with the slightly dubious but well-intentioned Anime de Training EX! is the obvious, but often ignored, option of simply working out out while watching anime. Unless you understand Japanese, it’ll be easier to do this using dubbed anime, but subs aren’t a total disaster either, depending on the exercise. Running, jumping jacks, and other bouncy cardio exercises are a bit difficult, but if you have a stationary bike, you can use that, and it’s pretty easy to do bicep curls and squats while watching. Just be careful that you don’t get so distracted your exercise form suffers — hurting yourself exercising sucks. More on that later.
There are also websites with programs that make exercising feel more like a game and less like self-flagellation. Nerd Fitness does this to a certain degree. The Academy, their first program, lets you choose your “class” in classic MMORPG style. You have “main storyline” quests and “class” quests, though there isn’t actually any story involved. You do, however, get experience points as you complete quests and level up when you get enough EXP. There are a number of technically optional, but recommended, mental and dietary health quests and articles, but the workout quests and the main workout progression more closely related to this article.
For the main workout progression, you take a benchmark test to set your level, then choose whether you want to do your workouts at the gym or at home. From there, there are seven different levels, with a “boss fight” at the end of each one. If you beat the boss, you progress to the next level, which will include different, and usually harder, exercises.
The rest of the workout quests are a mashup of your usual fare (walk a mile each morning for a week, jump rope for a minute, etc) and more interesting stuff (hold a handstand for 30 seconds, jump straight onto a 2 foot-high box, etc). Some of these are general quests, but you’ll have additional quests based on your class. A monk might have to attend martial arts classes while a scout has a lot more cardio and a druid has meditation and yoga.
The Academy aside, Nerd Fitness also currently has three other programs. They have Nerd Fitness Yoga, which should be self-explanatory, a rings and handstands combined course (rings being like the rings Olympic gymnasts perform on), and their newest program, Rising Heroes. This last one, from what I’ve heard, unlike their other programs, does have a storyline and is, I think, more cooperative.
There are two main problems with Nerd Fitness. First, The Academy’s website is a mess. It’s a great idea, but the quests list isn’t organized, so “walk one mile” might appear several quests after “walk one mile every day for a week.” Several times, I’ve completed a quest only to discover that that was the third or fourth quest in a series. Additionally, some quests don’t have any explanation, even when they really need one because not everyone is up-to-date on their exercise names and methods. See that “Atlas stone to shoulder .3x your bodyweight” in the screenshot? I have no idea what that means.
Second, it’s expensive. The first three I mentioned are a flat cost at the beginning, somewhere between $80 and $200 depending on the course. The last, Rising Heroes, is a monthly fee that was similar to the cost of a higher-end gym membership if I recall correctly from the beta — it doesn’t open again until May.
So maybe that’s not your thing because you, anime-loving fan that you are, would rather spend your hard-earned — or possibly handed to you by your parents or significant other — cash on anime. Reasonable.
That’s where Darebee comes in. It is completely free, though donations are, of course, encouraged. The website is clean and easy to navigate, and they do a fairly good job of providing tutorial videos for exercises. There isn’t any fun tracking system like Nerd Fitness, but what there is is a long list of available programs, some of which have RPG elements. They also have a number of flat workouts, including a page devoted to anime workouts. These attempt to recreate the sort of workout the characters in question might use, albeit with varying amounts of success.
The programs, on the other hand, are made to cover 30 to 90 days. Each day has a page like the Sword Art Online (SAO)one shown here, but there are few, if any repeats. Some of the programs are just flat-out exercise programs, but three of them have RPG elements. I haven’t done Avatar, which has some sort of stat point mechanic, so I’m not sure how that one works, but I’ve completed Hero’s Journey and done several days worth of Age of Pandora, so I can explain them a bit.
Hero’s Journey has a bit of a story — nothing gripping, but enough that you know that today you’re doing high knees because you’re chasing a spy or something. There are, like most workouts on Darebee, three different levels, so you can do whichever level is the best fit for you and switch between levels if need be. On some days, you’ll have a choice of what to do. Perhaps rather than walk across a bridge, you choose to leap across the ravine instead. Whatever the choice, it’s again reflected in the sort of exercise you have to do. Sometimes the choice affects the difficulty of the exercise, sometimes not. Whatever you choose though will have an effect on you after, because you’ll be instructed to go to a page that tells you the consequences of that choice. These range from silly, like “wear a blindfold for 30 minutes,” to annoying, like “don’t eat any bread today,” to gratifying, like “do one less set on day whatever.”
Age of Pandora, on the other hand, is incredibly story-centric. You wake up in a weird facility, kind of like Fallout, except you’ve no idea how you got there, and are attacked by monsters. You escape (hopefully) and it goes from there. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, and you occasionally visit camps where you can perform tasks for credits, which you can spend later for various rewards. I’ll warn you though: for the sake of realism, there’s a lot of walking involved in this one. There’s a map with points on the trail between locations, and at level one, each point is worth 50 meters and 4 high knees, to be performed before you reach your next location. You can technically do this inside your house by converting meters to average step size and then doing a lot of pacing, but speaking from experience, I’d recommend grabbing a book and walking around the block instead.
Besides Darebee, you can find a few other sites with anime-related workouts of varying interest and effectiveness. There are also other “making exercise fun” apps, like Zombies, Run!, or even Pokemon GO. Pokemon GO’s actually pretty great for something to get you walking if you live in a big city, but it’s less so in rural areas.
Finally, if nothing else, there’s some pretty hype anime music out there that’s just made for motivating you to run farther or do one more rep. You can either make your own mix or, if you’re lazy like me, spend some time on a J-pop station on Pandora. Once it’s been fine-tuned, you can get a decent number of anime songs, like Haruka Kanata from Naruto, Crossing Field from SAO, and Melissa from FMA (2003).
Why Should You Bother?
Okay, I’ve spent a good amount of time pointing out ways to motivate yourself to work out, but why should you bother? No matter what you do to make it more entertaining, working out is hard. While you’re doing it, you’re bound to find yourself covered in sweat (a personal phobia), gasping for breath, and hoping you don’t just keel over. After you’re done, you have to either shower or risk smelling terrible, and you’ll find yourself trembling as you attempt to do totally normal things like type. A day or two later, your muscles will likely feel like your neurons have been permanently set on “max pain.”
But there are benefits. I can’t guarantee you’ll lose weight, because no matter what TV and magazines would have you think, exercise usually doesn’t burn more than a few hundred calories tops, and that’s like, less than a small Frappe Mocha from McDonald's. If losing weight’s your goal, you’re better off tracking food intake and planning a healthy diet then hoping a few more pushups will make a difference. Not that exercise won’t help at all — building muscles means that your metabolism (how many calories you spend just existing) will increase. I’m just saying the effect isn’t going to be the difference between salmon and rice for dinner or eating at… hm, let’s not pick on McDonald’s too much… say, Panera and getting a bread bowl.
However, you’ll get stronger. You’ll get tired less easily. Climbing a flight of stairs won’t leave you gasping for air, and your heart will both be stronger and not have to work as hard. You’ll feel like you have more energy, after those first few will-sapping weeks anyway, and you’ll decrease your risk of blood clots forming in your legs due to constantly sitting — remember the animators. If you lift weights or do other similar exercises, you’ll build muscles. Maybe you won’t see them, but they’ll be there, silently doing their thing and making your life easier and healthier. You’ll probably end up living longer, and having more time to watch more anime can hardly be a bad thing.
Also, girls (and guys), if you’re reading this, don’t think that lifting weights equals bulging muscles or that you have to do low-weight, high-reps to get “toned” instead of “bulky.” Muscles take time to build. You’re not going to lift a heavy weight a few times and wake up the next morning looking like Major Armstrong. Just work out like a normal working out type of person. If you reach a point where you don’t want any bigger muscles, then stop increasing the weight you’re using.
And while you don’t have to diet to reap the benefits of exercising, you can, preferably in a healthy, medically sound manner. If you do, you’ll absolutely lose weight unless you’re either one of those exceedingly rare people with a legitimate disorder or are already eating responsibly. In that case, those muscles you spent time and energy working on will be visible. I’m not saying you have to lose weight, because it’s everyone’s right to weigh whatever the heck they want to weigh, and maybe you don’t really like the way muscles look anyway. I mean, it does have its disadvantages — largely in that you’ll probably have to buy new clothes, which is just annoying.
It has its advantages too though, the most important of which — to me anyway — is cosplay. I’ll probably get into this in a later article, but a cosplay looks better — as in, it’s more accurate — if you are both a) approximately the same weight as the character and b) have approximately the same fitness level as the character. And, given the nature of the industry, there are a lot more mildly-to-very fit, very thin characters than there are less-than-idealized body type characters. Even if you’re already thin, exercise can still be important for cosplay purposes. If you weigh 100 pounds soaking wet and have a complete and utter lack of anything resembling a muscle, you’re not going to pull off Goku from Dragonball Z very well.
Warning: Massive Failures Are the Worst
If I’m going to go ahead and advise you all to exercise, I suppose I should also put at least some effort into making sure you don’t screw yourselves over. By which I mean injuring yourself. Exercise-induced injuries suck and while cuts will go ahead and heal with little to no supervision, the kinds of injuries you get exercising require constant care not only to just heal but to simply not get worse.
Somewhere approaching nine months ago, I went ahead and started running for 15 minutes each day. I didn’t stretch first, and I wore five-year-old sneakers, despite the fact that it’s recommended to replace sneakers yearly. The tendons in my left foot decided to get hurt, and for the rest of the summer until I obtained new sneakers with specifically superior support, I ended up limping everywhere. Not only could my left foot not bear weight, but because my right foot had to bear all the weight, it started to hurt as well. Nine (ish) months later, and I’m still not healed. I can run for about a minute before my left foot starts complaining. I can walk for maybe ten. It’s called plantar fasciitis, and I have a mild case at worst. I’ve read accounts where a person tried to “run through the pain” and felt the tendon literally snap. However, I haven’t gone to a doctor or done daily exercises or really anything except not running all the time to try to fix it because, darn it, that’s all normal injuries require, and this is the result.
So! Make sure you stretch the appropriate muscles beforehand and probably after as well. Wear appropriate (and up-to-date) clothing and footwear. For most girls, this includes wearing a bra or suffering the ignominy of holding your breasts in place manually. It’s pretty embarrassing even in the privacy of your own home, so I really can’t recommend it overall. As for the clothes themselves, clothes actually made for exercising are best, but you can make do with like, pajama pants and a T-shirt if you need to. If you have long hair, then you should probably tie it back, not because there’s any real exercise benefit to doing so, but because sweaty hair in your eyes is no fun.
If you aren’t used to an exercise, start slow. Even if you think, intellectually, that you can probably deadlift at least 90 pounds, start at bar plus lightest possible weights and carefully proceed from there. There’s no rush, and trying to do something you aren’t ready for is a good way to ensure you hurt yourself.
Make sure you have proper posture. If you’re running, don’t be all hunched over or, and I sincerely hope no one actually does this, bent over with your arms straight out behind you like an anime ninja. I have no idea what the actual efficacy of this technique is, but it can’t be good for your body in any long-term sense. If you’re doing squats, make sure your knees are in line with but aren’t protruding past your toes. If you’re doing deadlifts, please keep your back straight and don’t do some sort of pop at the end where you thrust your hips forward, because that’s only going to hurt your lower back.
Research whatever exercise you intend to do and find out what injuries can result, how to spot them in their early stages if possible, and how to avoid them. I want you in shape, not bedridden.
If you do get injured despite all efforts to the contrary, take proper care of it. I, obviously, am not the best person to tell you just how to do that, but a doctor might be a good start.
And don’t forget to keep up with your anime. Because what was the whole point if you don’t?
