Wii Fitted

I had a very enjoyable birthday evening.  Ali snagged me meatloaf at the grocery store as my birthday dinner. Meatloaf is something that just doesn’t show up very often when your wife is a vegetarian.  She rounded it off with one of my favorite vegetables, lima beans.  For my birthday I got to open the Wii Fit that I bought on Black Friday as well as getting a gift cert for a massage from Ali.  Ali also made the classic chocolate cake to go on top of the Christmas cookies she made over the weekend.

I unpacked and set up the Wii Fit to check it out.  It kept Ali and I busy until around 10 pm trying out the various exercises and games.  The Wii Fit is in a word , sweet.  The board comes with little “extenders” that attach to the feet to use the board on carpet.  At first I didn’t use the extenders and it miscalculated my weight by 10 pounds.  I was sort of mystified about how the extenders attached because they would not stay attached.  I’d press them on and they popped right off.  I wound up having to slide them onto the board once it was sitting on the floor.  It seemed that after using the board all night, our body weight wedged the extenders in place enough that they stayed on.

We went through the process of setting up our profiles in Wii Fit.  They basically ask you your height and age.  You then step on the board and it weighs you.  My weight seemed right in-line with what the bathroom scale says.  Based on these numbers it calculates your BMI and lets you know where it falls in the good to bad range.  Both Ali and I fell safely in the GOOD area.  The program then encourages you to set a goal which it will track as you go along.  I set a goal of losing 3 pounds in two weeks.

So then you get down to TRAINING.  It categorizes the activities into 4 sections, yoga, strength, cardio and balance games.  Ali went first and went into the yoga section. You pick a personal “trainer” to walk you through the exercises, either a man or a woman. The trainers kind of look like ghosts and their mouths move very little as they speak.  Ali picked the guy, I picked the woman.  The trainer shows you exactly how to do the movement and then walks you through the exercises, offering feedback and encouragement along the way based on how well or poorly you are doing. 

Doing Wii exercise is all about balance.  As you do the different movements and exercises your goal is to do so while maintaining your balance which is graphically represented on the screen.  It adds a whole new element to exercise.

Some of the exercises were quite tough, even for someone with an established fitness base.  I could hardly believe that the one of the basic strength moves that is first available for abs is the jack knife.  The jack knife is very tough.  After 10 reps I was working very hard.  Doing the push up / side plank combo on the board was very challenging as well.

I struggled with many of the balance games.  Many of them require you to constantly shift weight back and forth.  It found it very hard to precisely control my movements.  I enjoyed the ski jumping the most.  The aerobic activities are very fun.  Watching Ali do the hula hoop challenge was very entertaining.

  Like most Wii games, the interface and interaction is just about perfect.  The game rewards you for your hard work by adding points to a time bank for each thing that you do.  As the time bank grows, new exercises, activities and games are unlocked. The Wii Fit even recognized that yesterday was my birthday and offered me copious amounts of well wishes about it, funny.

  The combination of positive reinforcement along with goal setting and detailed, automatic tracking of your progress should help people stay motivated. That being said, it doesn’t surprise me what I read the other day.  Some survey said that 60% of people that buy Wii Fit use it once and never again.  I guess when some people realize Wii Fit can be REAL exercise that makes you sweat and struggle, it crossed the line of FUN to WORK.  It’s a shame though, because I think they did a real nice job with the product.  I am hoping to work it in daily as a replacement for the push up / ab quickie routine I do each night after work.   

Wii fit gets two thumbs up from me.