Image courtesy of Amazon.com
Two years ago, my husband and I sold things on E-Bay to purchase a Wii Sports bundle and the Wii Fit. My husband is a longtime Nintendo fan who had loved the Wii from when it first came out. But the cost was more than we could even consider. So we waited And waited. Until finally, the price dropped, by half. At the time we had to search around for something who still had the Fit Sports package instead of the Mario Cart package that was currently being featured, but we found one. Then a month or two later, we also purchased the Wii Fit with Wii Fit +.
Even without the Wii Fit, Wii sports and Wii sports resort have the potential to be great exercise tools. It can be hard to have high level exercise if you stop too often, so if you are playing for exercise, I recommend choosing your game order in advance instead of spending a long time between rounds searching through menus. This works well for some people because it’s fun and it doesn’t seem much like exercise. When my husband’s doctor told him to exercise he said whatever he chose was fine, as long as he would actually do it. Well, while the Wii was supposed to be for my husband, he has never been very consistent about using it. But it ended up being a great tool for me, especially the Wii Fit.
Yoga tree pose in the early second trimester.
While I loved my Pilates DVD’s and still miss using them regularly, the Wii Fit really worked with my J side. I could keep a record of exercise schedule, it recorded my approximate calorie burn and let me set weight goals. One of my favorite features is setting a calorie burn goal. You pick a food item (mine is a soft serve ice cream cone), and it tells you how many calories it is. Then your goal is to burn that many calories when you exercise. This helped motivated me to pick the more aerobic activities on days when I felt like playing easy games.
My daughter using the Wii Fit to do yoga. She loves the doing the warrior pose.
Things I didn’t like about the Wii Fit. You can only log Fit credits on the current day. When you exercise other than on the Wii Fit there is a feature that allows you to log the duration of your exercise and estimate difficulty and it gives you approximate Fit credits that show up on your bar graph. Sometimes I would go for a walk and then forget to log the credits until the next day, so it put it on my current day. This is annoying but not the end of the world. I liked being able to look at the chart and see how often I was exercising at a glance. So it was annoying when it looked like I had gaps, when really I just forgot to log the credits.
My daughter and I doing Wii Fit boxing in my third trimester. (Notice she is pretending parts of her doctor kit are the Wii remote and Nunchucks)
Now, I realize that the Wii has been replaced by the Wii U, however, that means that there will be more Wii’s on the market and they will be cheaper than ever. If you don’t have space for something like a treadmill and you find workout videos boring, the Wii Fit can be a great option. I had never even done yoga before we got the Wii Fit it was hugely helpful in keeping me active during my last pregnancy. In fact, using my Wii Fit played a huge role in helping me to maintain my blood sugar when I had gestational diabetes. I used to hop on the Wii Fit for 15-30 minutes after every meal (at least until towards the end of my pregnancy) and it really kept my blood sugar balanced.
So if you love technology, and like having a system that will tack your exercise patterns, weight loss goals and calorie burn, the Wii and Wii Fit may be a great option.
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