It is all good news. I have been feeling down for the past week and haven’t been doing as much excercise as I should. However, I made sure to keep eating small healthy meals for lunch, and go on walks throughout the day. I had thought I would have gained a few pounds since I last checked since I hadn’t been getting any cardiovascular workouts.

The burden of losing weight is that every little excuse comes up and the world is set against your goal. Ok, I am exaggerating a lot there. The biggest problem is simply the lifestyle that I live and those who share it with me. Many issues are petty, some are valid, but they all add up. After just one week too. Amazing and depressing all at once. I’m still finding ways to work around the issues and compromise. Although some issues are just not looking too good in the long-term outlook of things to come.

• Suggest a continuous Work Out. Currently the end-user needs to pick and choose from a wide variety of options what they would like to do next. This adds a lot of time in between activities and often confused the user (me) as to what activities work well with each other. Currently, an activity is suggested after performing one, but it doesn’t seem to be a full long lasting workout.
• Friends – Currently we can only have friends show up who use the wii itself. It would be preferable if I could see family members who also have the product and choose to disclose our information back and forth. In addition, some of the activities such as walking could be synchronized between two of us to walk together in real-time.
• Show an active scale in the Wii Fit Plaza. This goes for both Wii Fit and the Wii Fit channel. The main thing I want to see rite away is how much I weigh – before all the extra steps to go through the body test. Simply listing the current weight on the board would allow anyone to get on rite away and find an answer to that daunting question – how much do I weigh? Currently the wii fit character tells us to take the body test again if we want to see how much things weight. Lots of steps to do that!
• Make it quicker. Each day I get on the scale, I continue to go through the steps. One repetitive question asks how much my clothes weigh. It would be preferable if this were saved in my profile so I could jump rite on in there and get things moving.
• Option Skip weight test. The second day I had the Wii Fit, I tried the body test in the morning. I saw an option to skip the rest if I was in a hurry, so I took it. I later went back to the body test to get the balance test done and determine my wii fit age. Instead of jumping to that part, the test started from the beginning again.
• Jump to the next activity. Once an activity completes, it will sometimes suggest a activity for a workout, or mention that you had just unlocked. Rather then waste time hunting them down, it would be preferable to have a button saying “Take me there” to get started.
• Download Activities. With the wii store, I am sure it wouldn’t take much for Nintendo to make add-on activities that you can add to the available ones.
• Workout Music. I don’t know about you, but I love dance music. And what could be better then working out to it? It would be great if we could read mp3 files from our SD cards while working out. Even having an option to download music tracks for Wii Fit from the store would be a better option then what we have now.
• Suggested Workout Time. Rite now we can set goals for how much we want to lose in weight over the next 2, 4 or even more weeks. Along side of that, it would be nice to see suggested workout time too. We could watch our fit piggy count down to the number of minutes left for the day (or the goal).
• Body Measurements. Let us input our body measurements with a complementary tape measure. We can get more ideas of how much we lost. Rather then relying on BMI alone, other fitness tests can be used with a tape measure. These would be Waste to Hip ratio, Body Fat, and Body Frame. In addition, maybe the next version can ask us to measure our BPM as well if we have a device for it.
• Wii Mote interaction. Many of the balance activities seem that they could be … tricked into thinking you did the exercise correctly. Using the wiimote could actually help confirm that we are doing the excercises correctly. One example would be holding the wii mote during the Sun Salutation or Torso Twists. The program would be able to determine how fast/slow we are moving our hands and correct way.
• New Trainers – I’d like to see a wider variety of trainers. Even choosing different outfits may be cool. Remember, all the rage is about customization these days.
• Suggestive AI – I would like to log into the training area and see my trainer mention that I may need to improve on certain things from the day (or past week), and suggest a few activities to help.

I arrived home to see the Wii fit parcel waiting for me inside. I first tried to synchronize the balance board with my wii. I tried all sorts of things pressing the synch button in the battery compartment (four double A’s)and the Wii in different orders, or even holding the buttons down for a while. (I almost wiped out my other controllers synch settings doing that). I ended up reading the instructions and found out that I had to put the Wii fit disc in the machine first and start up the program before the Wii would recognize the balance board.

Setup

The first thing the program asked me was if the date/time was correct. It was off by forty minutes, so I had to exit the program and fix the time. I then returned and went through a lot of helpful information about balance, weight, etc.

Although the helpful phrases were simple and short, it did start to get in the way of just getting down to business. I Put in my height, birth date/year, and even told it how much I think my clothes weigh. You can either say light, heavy, or enter your own custom weight of you want to be precise. I now have a chubby little Mii with a BMI of 40.78. The Nintendo folks kindly left out morbid obesity on the BMI scale, but just show that you go off the chart. I also got a Wii Fit Age marked on me – 35 years (when I’m actually 33). This is the part where anyone else in the room giggles.

Setting a Goal

Once you go through the tests to weigh and balance yourself, you get to make a stamp on a calendar to mark it off. From there, you are done. You just log in each day, weigh/balance yourself and stamp the calendar. Almost everyone in a family would be able to do that.

You can also set a personal goal of how many pounds you want to gain or lose. The tricky part for first time users is that you don’t realize this is a short term goal. Entering your ideal weight would bring you to the next screen for a default period of 2 weeks. You can adjust the time period, or just go back and adjust the goal. I set mine up to lose 1.5 pounds for every two weeks.

Charts and Graphs (it’s not just for PC’s to represent family vacations)

You can take a look at a graph, but starting with day one, you are not going to get anywhere. You can see how you have changed over time with your Wii Fit Age, Weight, BMI, or Fit Credits. (For each minute that you work out, you get a fit credit).

When I visited my brother this past weekend, I noticed that he had a comment on his graph where he gained weight. It has a short message that he ate too much. Apparently, he says when you go in the wrong direction, you can choose from a couple select phrases of why you think that you went off track.

Getting Fit

Enough with this already, let’s get to the exercises. Once you choose your personal trainer (a generic manikins of a man or woman in bright white and pale shadows), you get to choose an exercise from a few categories. Wii Fit  comes with 40 activities, but you  only start out with four to five in each category  (Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, Balance Games).  As you get more fit points, you  unlock  new activities.

Some activities allow you to choose an activity level (increase the number of reps). However, you need to do well in that activity before you can increase the number. Most activities also allow you to see a demonstration at first to get an idea of what you will need to do. Otherwise, you can jump rite in and start doing the activity. In your first couple days, you’ll probably be working out a little more then the wii fit bank will show because you’ll be following through with the demo’s first.

Yoga

I decided to try out each yoga activity first. Deep breathing is perhaps the easiest.  Given the prerequisite of deep breathing is … breathing, I’ve had 33 years of experience behind me. However, Yoga is not just about breathing, and so the added challenge here is to stand balanced while breathing. The activities for yoga give audible breathing sounds that seem to represent your own breathing. They also have visual cues of a blue circle expanding and contracting with your lungs.

While I was breathing, I got to balance myself with a visual indicator of a yellow area that you need to keep a small dot within. It is amazing how much breathing actually affects the movement. I was able to quickly get it centered and steady as I got to understand how the balance board works.

The Warrior activity was great as you start to use a lot of room around the balance board. At the end of the session, it suggested to also try out the Lunge to kill two birds with one stone. Some activities are related to others.

I proceeded to do okay with the next few activities until I got to the Tree. This step requires you to place the bottom of your foot on your thigh. I had to take my socks off just to get enough traction. My foot was still sliding (although not as much). I ended up having to rest my foot on my knee.

Strength Training

After the Yoga activities, I started to go for the next category – strength. The single leg extension really gets you with coordination. I was often finding myself raising or lowering the wrong limb at the wrong time.  Push-up and side plank got me tired really fast. I could hardly work with it using my knees rather than my toes. I really got a sense of how heavy I was. I went ahead and tried out the torso twists, but these activities just exhausted me pretty quick. After the first three, I had to take a rest and write this post.