Wii Fit

Wii Fit takes the whole concept of games as exercise to a new level with the inclusion of a balance board peripheral that can tell you on the fly exactly how well-or how poorly-you're doing with its various activities. Wii Fit is a good alternative if you are bored with the repetitiveness of going to a gym or too self-conscious to join a yoga or aerobics class. The drawbacks of, Wii Fit is your not able to create your own program from the available exercises and questionable health advice, limits its effectiveness both as a fitness tool and as a game.

You can control on-screen action with your movements on the balance board as you work your way through the challenges which are aimed at getting you off the couch and into the action. You can heck your Body Mass Index (BMI), see your Wii Fit Age and keep tabs on your daily progress.

There are over 40 activities and excercises to help you get fit, including strength training, aerobics, yoga and balance games. Whether you're doing a yoga pose or snowboarding down a slalom course, there's an activity for everyone.

You can have fun getting fit by challenging your family and friends to get in shape.

Create your own personal profile and set goals, test your balance, track your progress with daily workouts and unlock new exercises and activities.

Here is how to Create a Profile:

Before you jump into doing exercises and activities, start by creating your own profile. Choose a Mii, enter your height and age information, and do a few quick tests:

BMI Check:
BMI, or Body Mass Index, is a measure of body fat based on height and weight that is the standard used by agencies such as the World Health Organization and the National Institute of Health. To check your BMI, you'll enter your height then stand on the Wii Balance Board and let it read your weight.

Wii Fit Age:
After you've checked your BMI, you'll do a basic balance test and find out your current Wii Fit Age. This basic balance test measures how well you can control your left and right balance. Based on the results, you'll be assigned a Wii Fit Age.

There are four main categories to choose from: Strength Training, Aerobics, Yoga and Balance Games. The more time you spend excercising , you'll earn Fit Credits that unlock additional exercises and activities within these categories. Wii Fit also tracks the activities you do the most and puts them into the Favorites category.

Strength Training:
You can perform muscle-toning exercises like Single Leg Extension, Sideways Leg Lift, Arm and Leg Lift, Single-Arm Stand, Torso Twists, Rowing Squat, Single Leg Twist, Lunge, Push-Up and Side Plank, Jackknife, Plank and Tricep Extension. Challenges include Push-Up Challenge, Plank Challenge and Jackknife Challenge.

Aerobics:
Get your heart pumping with fun, interactive Aerobic exercises like Hula Hoop, Basic Step, Basic Run, Super Hula Hoop, Advanced Step, 2-P Run, Rhythm Boxing, Free Step and Free Ru

Yoga:
You can improve your balance and flexibility with Yoga poses and activities like Deep Breathing, Half-Moon, Dance, Cobra, Bridge, Spinal Twist, Shoulder Stand, Warrior, Tree, Sun Salutation, Standing Knee, Palm Tree, Chair, Triangle and Downward-Facing Dog.

Balance Games:
Get into the action with fun, balanced-based games like Soccer Heading, Ski Slalom, Ski Jump, Table Tilt, Tightrope Walk, Balance Bubble, Penguin Slide, Snowboard Slalom and Lotus Focus.

The easy-to-understand graphs and charts help you to keep tabs on your daily progress. You can set your goals, view a graph of your BMI results over time, see how many Fit Credits you've earned, check your Wii Fit Age and even enter exercise time you've done outside of Wii using your personal profile Fit. It's all about coming back and exercising a little every day, and the personal profile makes tracking your daily progress easy peasy.

Whats great is that you can even quickly check your Wii Fit Age and BMI without even putting the game in the console by going directly to the Wii Fit Channel.

How about this for cool stuff, you can set up to eight family members with their own profiles in Wii Fit. On the profile-selection screen, everyone in the family can see each other's recent BMI progress and Fit Credit total. This will allow families to have a friendly competition to exercise and get fit. How cool is that!

Wii Fit makes some fairly significant judgments about its users' fitness. This happens right from when your Mii is first registered with the game; after inputting a date of birth and height, you're asked to step on the balance board for a weigh-in (all guided onscreen by a cartoon version of the board). From the height and weight data, Your BMI is calculated, tagging you as underweight, ideal, or overweight depending on the BMI score. A simple balance test then occurs (usually involving having to shift your balance to certain areas within a time limit) before your Wii Fit Age is displayed in large numbers on the screen. Only one Wii Fit Age result can be recorded daily, although you can practice the variety of balance tests as many times as you want until your satisfied with the results.

Wii Fit is most similar to the various Brain Training games on the Nintendo DS, with the title broken down into a series of exercises that you can do regularly to improve your health. The exercises are split into four different categories: yoga, muscle, aerobic, and balance. The yoga and muscle categories feel the most like traditional exercise, with 15 yoga poses and 15 muscle-toning moves to work through. Yoga poses range from the ridiculously simple (standing still and breathing-yep, that's all) to the quite difficult and possibly lawsuit-in-the-making shoulder stand. The muscle-toning section is also simular, with basic lunges mixed in with more tougher activities such as the parallel stretch and push-ups. You can choose your own virtual trainer whatever your preference, from either male or female, to guide you through the yoga and muscle exercises, offering praise or criticism depending on how well you're doing.