The first thing you’ll need to do is sync the Balance Board with the Wii. Just tap the red button on the Wii and then the Balance Board as prompted on the screen and a noise will sound to tell you it's synched.
Since Wii Fit has a diary, the first thing you have to do is confirm the date is correct. If it’s not, select the option on the left (and then at the next select screen, the option on the right to return to the Wii menu and put the date in properly). Otherwise press the option on the right to continue.
Next you’ll need to choose your Mii. If you don’t have any, it will prompt you to create one or choose one off-the-shelf. Press the right option to confirm or the left to rechoose. You will then have a little chat about posture and centre of mass, so skip through.
Next, enter your height. Then enter your date of birth (year first then right to confirm or left to go back to height selection, then month/day and right to confirm or left to go back to year selection). The next screen shows a summary of your height and date of birth, so right to continue, or left to start this bit again. This info is important for working out your body mass index later.
The next screen visually prompts you to turn on the Balance Board using the button at the front. Presuming you synced successfully earlier, you will then see a screen about stepping on to the Balance Board. You have to wait for it tare the weight before stepping on. First you will see a red cross. When this changes to a red circle, step on to the Balance Board. If you wait too long, don’t worry, it will let you try again. If at any point, a red warning appears on screen in a largish black box, it’s probably because you haven’t been standing on the Balance Board for a while and it has turned itself off. Just press the Balance Board power button again to continue. Also, if at any point you find yourself repeatedly pressing A to continue but the text is always the same, it probably wants you to get off the Balance Board so that it can initialise.
The next screen asks you how you are dressed today so that it can adjust your real weight. Lightly dressed on the left removes 1kg, heavily dressed in the middle removes 2kg and the question mark on the right removes no weight, so presumably means exercising naked. If you change your mind, you can pull the B button at the next screen to reselect.
Next, stand where the picture suggests, with equal pressure on both feet, nice and tall and press A a few times until you see a red dot appear on a representation of the Balance Board. It will show you your weight bias. This will be mostly towards the heels and hopefully equal left and right, but depends on the person. Press A again and you'll need to lean forwards slightly to move your weight towards the centre of the Balance Board, so use your body movements to put the dot into the circle in the middle and hold it there. This introduces you to the Balance Board control and also allows the board to understand how much you personally need to move your body to achieve a certain delta for calibration purposes.
Pressing A again will show you your BMI – Body Mass Index. This compares your height to your weight and takes into account your age and sex to give you an idea of how “ideal” your weight is. For most people it’s a decent enough measure, but for some types of bodies e.g. body builders it can be misleading because muscles weighs more than fat and it could say you are overweight when you aren’t. However, since Wii Fit is aimed at the average person who’s not into fitness, the BMI will probably be good enough. It will also display how far away from your ideal top limit you are and then how much you weigh.
Next comes a series of balance control tests. Just move your body so that the moving markers stop inside the suggested boxes and hold them there while the 3-2-1 countdown happens. They get slightly trickier. After completing them, it will tell you how many seconds you had remaining on the countdown, or if you didn't complete. Then it will give you a massive full screen display of your Balance "Age". For example, if you don't complete it might suggest you are a bit older than you are. Or if your BMI is really high, it presumes you might be worse at this so your "age" tends to be lower. A bit of an odd measure, but really what you are looking for is reducing the number and not getting hung up on the exact figure.
You then have to manually “stamp” your activity diary with the remote. Wii Fit keeps a log of what you’ve done when so you can keep track and work towards your goals, which are chosen on the next screens.
First select how much weight you want to lose (or gain if you are looking to put on muscle) plus/minus 10kg. Watch the BMI display in the corner as you change the weight – it will change colour if you go into a different zone: blue for underweight, yellow for ideal and red for overweight. On the next screen, tell it when you want to achieve this goal by, in weeks and it will display, bottom left, how much weight you have to lose/gain per week. Note: try and get this target time correct first time, because there doesn't appear to be a way of modifying it later without deleting your Mii's Wii Fit profile and starting again. At the following summary screen, choose left to reselect or right to continue.
After this you are asked if you want to set a password/pin to protect your record and hide the weight and other personal data from other people. Select the left option to continue without, or the right option to set a 4-digit pin on the next screen. If you change your mind, press the left option to go back to the “do you want to set a password” screen. The “confirm” option on the password screen stays greyed out until you put in 4 digits.
The next screen asks if you make a new registration for other members of your family or friends etc. which will be carried out at Everybody's Plaza. You can also do this later at any time. Press the left option to do this now, or the right option to continue with your Mii.
Now that your Mii is linked to your attributes and goals, you arrive at the Wii Fit hub.
This is the main starting point for the rest of your time spent with Wii Fit. The two buttons at the top flick between graphs of your change in BMI over time and your exercise sessions. The button on the left with the face and the + symbol allows you to register another Mii and enter all the personal information and goals.
The button on the right with the face and the ? symbol allows you to use another Mii to just quickly have a trial go – after selecting the trial Mii, a screen appears with two options, one above the other. The top option goes straight to a selection of exercises/games and the bottom option allows you to enter your height and d.o.b. and check your BMI.
Finally, clicking the spanner tool (at the top right of the hub page) takes you to a couple of setup options. The top option adds a new channel to your Wii Channels so that you can quickly check your progress without loading up Wii Fit. If this channel is clicked through again, it will dive straight to the main Wii Fit hub which is very convenient. The bottom option checks all four load cells in the Balance Board are working correctly – wait until prompted visually before stepping on to the board. The small round button in the bottom right hand corner rolls the Wii Fit credits.
To get on and actually do fitness and game stuff, you just click on your Mii on the main hub page. On the next screen, it’s the right option to continue and the left option to go back to the hub. After this, if it’s your birthday, you might see a birthday message screen and the little animated Balance Board will be wearing a party hat! Sometimes a screen appears now that asks you if you want to read some fitness trivia, so choose the left hand one to say no and avoid being bombarded by Japanese text.
The next screen you arrive at is a diary, showing when you done any exercise sessions. Press the right option to progress on to the training/exercises or the left option to check body measurements/BMI.
Alternatively, pressing the button in the top right lets you change your personal settings. On this screen, there are 4 options. The first one lets you change your height and d.o.b. and set a PIN protection. The second one lets you customise your diary a bit, with different colour backgrounds and exercise stamp shapes. The third lets you change your personal trainer.
The fourth lets you delete your profile completely! (followed on the next screen by left for no and right for yes/delete – make sure you get the correct option if you access it by accident!).
There’s another button on the diary screen which looks like a graph. This lets you track your progress in more detail. The four buttons along the top are BMI, Weight, Balance Age and Exercise history. On the Exercise history page, a button in the middle gives you the option of recording a memo of today’s exercise. Clicking this will lead to a Quit / Record page. Clicking the right hand one (Record) leads to 3 options (from top to bottom): Light, Normal and Hard. Just click the one that represents how hard you thought the session was.
Back on the diary screen, once you’ve pressed the right option to get on with some training exercises, you’ll reach a screen with various coloured options down the right hand side, a “money box” on the left and a Balance Board at the top. The "money box" keeps track of the number coins collected either today or overall total (click to switch) - the more coins you collect, the more exercises you unlock. If you click the Balance Board you get to do the balance control tests and see your Wii Fit age. The options down the side are all the exercises and games. Once you’ve played a game, this list gets slightly bigger:
Blue is Yoga.
Green is Muscle Building exercises.
Red is Cardio Vascular/Aerobic exercises.
Yellow is for Balancing exercises.
Purple is favourite exercises, so this page updates itself.
Once you’ve chosen a Yoga or Muscle Building exercise, you will see two options. The left one gives you an explanation of the move and the right is to just get on and begin the exercise. You don’t get this choice with the other exercises/games though.
After you’ve done a few exercises, you may see the following screen with a tick against the relevant area. It shows that you've done enough to unlock new exercises. The otions at the bottom are just asking if you want to return to the exercise list pages (left option) or repeat the exercise you just did (right option). You will see these same too options after concluding each exercise, but not necessarily with the achievement unlock message.
When you press the home button on the remote, the left option goes back to the Wii Menu and the right option stays in Wii Fit but sends you back to the Wii Fit hub page.
That's about all there is to it. Once you've set up your Mii once, it's plain sailing from there.
If you've found this guide useful, spotted an error, or have more questions, please post in the discussion thread. |
