As part of the not-particularly New Year's resolutions, and more importantly, because it is expensive plastic tat manufactured by Nintendo, the Poorhouse felt inclined to invest in a Wii Fit system some months ago. And guess what...the regime continues, with fairly-near daily usage. Impressive, no?! It has to be said that there haven't been new crowds of fan marvelling at the new He-Man like physique, but presumably it can't do any harm to try and fitten up a bit.

What with the drudgery of work being seat-based, and often from home, on the longer sort of day it is quite conceivable that without some plasticky incentive the Poorhouse would simply sit in the same spinny-chair for 10 hours of mind-numbing employment tedium, followed up with an hour or two of eating & watching crappy telly. That cannot be a healthy lifestyle. Unlike making funny shapes out of yourself on a plastic square clearly is.

Visit the official site for the lowdown on what a Wii Fit is, should it somehow have passed you by. Essentially it's a plastic pad that plugs into your Nintendo Wii, and can measure your weight distribution. Not only does it record BMI and the like, but it encourages you to go through several exercises ("yoga, muscle, aerobic and balance") in an effort to improve your well-being (and lose weight, if that's your cup of tea).

Here's the advert:

The Poorhouse doesn't really need to lose weight, but has never had tendencies towards physical fitness. Running could only occur when one's life was literally endangered, and lifting up the water cooler bottle was an embarrassingly difficult, stumbling, chore. The cholesterol from an often poor and sometimes ridiculously-large-quantity based diet no doubt was clogging the inner system. He also had something of a semi-permanent back pain. Not quite enough to pull the classic long-term sickie, but enough that sitting at a desk for hours a day and then collapsing into a sprawled heap on the sofa was not a comfortable experience.

So the results? Well, firstly the Poorhouse's opinion is that Wii Fit certainly isn't generally "fun" in the traditional sense of the game. There is no Mario Kartesque belligerent adrenaline-fuelled euphoria to be had, although the fake skiing activity is pretty entertaining. There is also a distinct lack of a 2 player option, which is normally enough for a game to be banaished to the wheelie-bin within a few minutes. The best entertainment value though, comes from watching other people try and do the fake hula hoop activity amongst others. And probably for others to try and watch the Poorhouse do almost any of the activities...

So, the effects? Well, stats, as measured by the Wii Fit itself are below. On the anecdotal side, the Poorhouse does feel it has improved the condition of his back pain rather some. Guessing it's some of the stretchy Yoga exercises at work here, or perhaps even simple the extra time not curled into a rocking ball of Excel based trauma. Certainly exercises (crocodile twist) really feel even at the time they help. And when the Poorhouse misses a "session", on the whole - such as yesterday, in all honesty - it feels that the back hurts more the day after, though obviously that is a rather non-scientific and plausibly placeboish finding there.

In many of the supplied fitness activities, the Poorhouse generally gets better scores now then when he started, indicating an improvement in something, although it is hard to quantify the difference between simply becoming better at learning what the activity is, vs actual physical improvement. Nonetheless, a few more press-ups are possible these days. No need to get excited, that just means he can do at least two before requiring hospitalisation. But it does feel in the mind that it is worth doing, for those of us who otherwise eat battered cheese between lying-down sessions. Everything's got to help when it comes to those of us born physically idle!

Below are some charts, demonstrating accomplishments after use for 50 days (well, it's been owned for 50 days!), and doing 22 hours and 46 minutes of exercises (measured in "Wii Fit minutes" - supposed to correspond to the benefit gained and/or the effort put in). Where time permits - and really, no-one should be so busy they can't fake run a bit in their dinner-break hey? - an amount of exercises adding up to around 30 minutes a day is attempted. Annoyingly, Wii Fit doesn't recommend which exercises would be the better ones for you to do, leaving you to pick semi randomly.

If you were just going for minutes, you could massively cheat, not least because some of the exercises don't involve the balance board so it assumes you do on trust! However, thinking there is probably even less point to wasting 30 minutes doing nothing, rather than 30 minutes doing fake fitness stuff, the Poorhouse does try and pick some reasonably credible ones. Both jogging and step aerobics usually get a good outing, because you can do those ones whilst watching TV. Yoga for the back pain, balance for some fun, and then some muscle stuff, usually one of the ones involving press-up type stuff, firstly because it has always been something that appalled the Poorhouse, it actually feels like it is good (painful) exercise, plus of course it seems that it's a current web-trend fitness fad, what with the blogosphere popularity of the fitness site one hundred pushups and others of its ilk.

BMI: This is the main measure of healthy weight the Wii Fit judges. Both the long term trend doesn't look to show much of a up or down change. Bear in mind the Poorhouse doesn't need to lose weight. If anything, some weight gain - due to muscle of course, not cakes - would probably be desirable!

The "goal" line is a little random perhaps. Every couple of weeks the Wii sets a new goal for you. If you're already in a health BMI state, it seems it basically sets maintaining whatever your BMI was that day as the goal. Then after 2 weeks, your next goal will likely be whatever your BMI is then. You can manually adjust it if you want.

The short term results show a variation of about 0.5 kg/m squared over a couple of weeks. Some of this is no doubt due to, against the advice of the plastic square, taking tests at strange and differing times of the day.

Wii Fit Age: The Wii Fit also uses magic (or rather a combination of "balance tests") to judge what your Wii age is in comparison to your actual age, which you input. A lower Wii Age is apparently better, something one wonders if one day we'll see a Help The Aged protest about. It's hard to see this as a particularly scientific process - the only inputs it has available to it are height, weight, and results of 2 random tests, one of which is sometimes literally "stand still". Nonetheless, despite a decent amount of noise, one can see a definite downwards trend over time in this index.

Variation on this is much greater than BMI, probably down to the somewhat random-feeling nature of it and also inopportune events like falling off the pad making it think you can't even stand up properly for 10 seconds, let alone have the average physique of an 18 year old.

Max age gained since time began: 46
Min age gained: 23

Again, it could well be a selective recall bias effect, but it does seem notable that one seems to be "older" when feeling ill or tired...so perhaps it has some sort of basis in reality...

Bonus boast section:
Compliments received about improved posture: 1.