Wii Fit With Balance Board: Light Exercise By Alexsandralyn on Nov 29, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

When I saw the Wii Fit and Balance Board advertised on television last year, it made exercising look like so much fun, I just had to buy one of those. Last year, the Wii Fit and Balance Board was nearly impossible to find, and I waited in line at Best Buy for hours before the store opened on a rainy October Sunday just to be one of the first twenty people in the line to buy one.

The Wii Balance Board is a reasonably accurate scale that will measure my weight as well as subtle shifts in my balance and posture. The Wii Fit video software has more than fifty different exercises in the areas of Yoga, Strength, Aerobics and Balance. I'm in reasonably good health for a couch potato, but when my tummy started hanging out over my waistband, I decided to take the Wii Fit seriously to start my exercise program, and I've been at it steadily for a month now. I like the Wii Fit because it's a low-intensity workout where I can set my own pace and select my own exercises. I find the half hour's worth of Yoga exercises to be very relaxing and satisfying after a 15 minute high-intensity work-out on My Fitness Coach. The Strength exercises make me feel the muscle strain, the Aerobics will make me breathe heavily, and the Balance games aren't as easy as they look, but I am toning up nicely from doing these exercises regularly, and my posture has definitely improved.

I would recommend starting out with the Wii Fit and Balance Board if you're over 40 or out of shape, but it only took about 2 weeks worth of daily hour-long workouts on the Wii Fit before I was ready for a more challenging exercise program. And kids get bored with the Wii Fit very quickly because there's not enough entertainment value there for them.