How long to play?

[hillarygayle]

First thing, I'm SO happy to have found this site. It's exciting to find people doing the same thing I am to lose weight.

How long do you guys usually play? I go on Konamix for 30 minutes on workout mode every night (I find workout mode to be less frustrating than normal mode, especially on songs like Paranoia & Paranoia Rebirth). By the end of that time, I am sweating like CRAZY, breathing like I've run a marathon, and my feet literally hurt.

You guys seem to be REALLY knowledgeable about all this, and I had a bit of a question: when will I know that I'm ready to go longer? Does this exhaustion go away after I've reached a certain level of fitness?

I'm really excited about this "DDRing your way to health" stuff. ^_^ I've tried a thousand different types of exercise to keep myself going, but I always lose motivation & sorta stop doing it over time. That isn't the case with DDR; we've got an extra PSX all set up with Konamix so I can do it any time. I'm psyched. Here's to staying motivated!

[abrannan]

You might try backing off on the difficulty a bit. If you work yourself too hard, you go anaerobic, and your body stops burning fat, since the conversion takes too much energy. About every 5 songs or so, take your pulse, you want to have about 23 beats in a 10 second count. If you go higher then that, drop back on difficulty a foot rating or two. If you're not at 23, kick it up a notch. After 10 songs or so, you should have a good sweat going, but not be panting too much that you can't catch your breath. Then you'll find that you settle into a rhythm where you can play for a long time without stopping.