As requested by Loth and Lakeland Jo, here's what I think so far of the famed Wii Fit.
I love it!
The end.
Only kidding, I do love it, and I shall tell you why!
First of all, it thinks I am 32, when in truth I will be 42 in March. This is allegedly due to my superior athletic and balancing ability. It strokes my ego, what more can I say!
Life on the Wii Fit begins with a Body Test, which consists of measuring weight and BMI, and setting goals. It then goes on to check out your core balance and ask if you fall over a lot! How rude! There's nifty charts to track your progress, but it does prefer you to weigh in daily which I don't like! You can skip it though, so it's no biggy.
The training has 4 sections: Yoga, Muscle Workout, Aerobics and Balance. Let's look at them one at a time.
Yoga: I haven't done any yoga for ages, and I used to love it. It was just too hard to fit the class in with my work / sleep pattern. So I am enjoying the Yoga! I miss the overall class experience, with the incense and the chill out music, the dim lights and soothing voice of the class instructor. But that is compensated for by the feedback! Getting a score for how well I hold a pose
really appeals to something in me! The idea is the instructor of your choice (male or female) leads you in the poses and then as you hold the position you are scored on how well you keep the dot inside the predetermined area. Too much wobbling and he knows you fell over! For some reason I score well on pretty much all the Yoga poses, and this pleases me. At the end of the Yoga session my body knows it has worked, no doubt about it.
Muscle Workout: I'm just going to skim over this because it lacks appeal to me so I don't tend to do these exercises. I should discipline myself and do them! But the principle is the same as the yoga, complete with instructor. I'm sure they are excellent, but I'm the kind of person who skips this bit on exercise DVDs too!
Aerobic: This section is very cool! It starts out with some simple hula hooping, jogging and step, and then you get to unlock harder step, much much harder hula hooping, boxing and something I've not yet unlocked! The hula hooping is hard. Oh so hard. I'm doing the 6 minute Super Hula Hoop at the moment - 3 minutes right, 3 minutes left. If you don't do it right, you drop the hoops. It's hard enough exercise that I have to cheerlead myself through it to get to the end. "Come on - come ON! Keep going, you can do it, you can do it! Aaargh!!!" I'm glad I don't usually have witnesses to this. One day soon, when I can have an ambulance on standby, I'm going to try the 10 minute segment! The step is fun too, but not as much fun or as challenging as my old Cher step video. But again, feedback and bettering your score is what keeps you going back for more. The Wii Fit exercises very cleverly tap into my competitive core. For those days when you are full of pent up aggression, the rhythm boxing is cool. You get instructions in what sequence of punches to make, and then you give it your all - "Left! Right! Left! Block!" and at the end you get to beat the hell out of the punchbag in a manner of your own choosing. You'd need a shower even if this was the
only thing you did.
Balance: This section is just pure fun - all the games are about making slight changes in your balance to roll marbles safely into holes, or navigate a ski slope, or catch fish dressed as a penguin without sliding into the sea, or walk a tightrope while a metal monster tries to bite you....This is where I go first when I turn Wii Fit on. The balance games get me in the mood and provide a good warm up for the harder stuff. I literally danced round the room in glee when I made it across that tightrope! And I'm the only person in the household to do so at the time of writing!
I end my session in the Balance section too, on a game called Zazen, which involves sitting cross legged on the balance board and gazing at a flickering candle. If you move, the candle will blow out. They try to make you move, but I'm very good at sitting still so they can't catch me out! It's a nice way to cool down and empty your mind though.
Out of the box, there's only a handful of games unlocked, but the more time you spend on Wii Fit, the more games you unlock. It is pretty quick and easy to do the unlocking - there's no horrendously difficult tasks to achieve before you do.
If I was forced to criticise anything about the Wii Fit, it's that you can't swap between players without having to go back to the Wii Fit Plaza and swap totally. Some of the games lend themselves very nicely to drunken party fun, but having to have each player fully exit the game in order to allow the next to play is a bit of a drag really. But I'm nitpicking.
My Wii is in the front room. I have big big windows. It's the innocent passers-by I feel most sorry for!
