Wii Fit Preview March 27,2008 - If you’ve looked down lately and noticed a small belly forming a noticeable arc past your chest, odds are you’re in the beginning stages of bubble belly. While it’s not an official term, but rather one made up in the last few seconds, you may have considered getting a gym membership. But, for you, that’s like paying an organization $50 per month so you can go once and carry a card saying that you work out. So instead, Nintendo has an alternative to mix your two favorite activities – playing games and standing a lot – in order to help you work your way back into a healthy weight range.

Unlike conventional stereotypes of those who play games, not all gamers are incredibly overweight but could nonetheless use a little toning up. Wii Fit attempts to make exercising fun with a variety of interesting workouts and mini games. There are four categories of activities: yoga, muscle-building, aerobic, and balance activities.

The very first thing you do in Wii Fit is essentially create a workout profile by entering in your height and date of birth. These metrics are used in conjunction with your weight (as measured by the balance board) to determine your BMI, or Body Mass Index.

Measuring someone’s BMI is a very simplistic way to make generalizations about someone’s health. There are generally agreed upon measures regarding how much someone who is a certain height should weigh, and if they fall below that range they are considered underweight, and if they’re past that range then they’re considered overweight. Unfortunately, the system is extremely flawed in that it doesn’t take into account lean body mass and the weight of muscle, which actually weighs more than fat. So someone who is in very good shape with very little body fat could actually be classified as overweight by the system, as happened famously to Lance Armstrong before the 1993 Tour de France.

Once the game tells you if you’re fat or not, you can then set goals such as losing weight, gaining weight, or reaching an optimum BMI. As you work out over the hours, days, or weeks you continue using the game, Wii Fit will keep track of your progress to your desired goal. You can even include the workouts you’ve done away from your Wii for a more up-to-date profile. In addition, you will be assigned your “fit” age gauged by your BMI in order to see if you’re as healthy as you should be at your actual age. So it’s possible your health could be that of a 35-year-old’s at the age of 22.

So once you’re ready to start burning your fat, you can take part in a variety of exercise. The most simple are the mini games, which includes games like hula hooping, soccer, snowboarding, tight-rope walking, and other balance based games. Almost all of them work as you would imagine, with hula hooping requiring you to move your hips, soccer having you tilt your body in the direction of oncoming soccer balls while avoiding cleats, and snowboarding tasking you with turning your balance board sideways as if it were an actual snowboard and working your way down a slope.

While not much has yet been shown of the strength training workouts aside from pushups in promotional videos, we do know how balance and yoga workouts will be played out. Yoga workouts will have you adopt traditional yoga techniques such as the tree pose, half moon pose, sideways twist, and single-leg stretches. You’re graded on how well you keep your body balanced and how long you stayed within the proper zones. Balance workouts are just that, a variety of different moves that must be performed on one or two legs while measuring your stability.

From what we’ve seen none of these activities look strenuous, but given the kinds of workouts simple Wii activities like tennis and boxing have offered up in titles such as Wii Sports, it could prove the skeptics wrong after extended periods of play. We can’t yet vouch for how good of a workout you’ll receive, how many pounds you’ll lose, or how flat and defined your stomach will become from Wii Fit, but we’ll know in mid-May when Wii Fit hits stores nationwide.

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