The first exercise is handling the box it comes in, which is big and heavy. Opening it reveals why – the Balance Board is a quality piece of kit. Essentially a set of electronic scales, but with load cells for each of the four corners so that it can tell the Wii where your centre of balance is, the BB is solid, well put together and feels like it will deal with anything you throw at it. Including your entire bodyweight. The Japanese version we’ve been using has a maximum weight guideline of 136kg / 21.5 stones. Size 11UK bare-feet (size 12US) are accommodated comfortably, but if you have enormous clown feet you will probably need to wear shoes to avoid noticing any overhang. It needs four AA batteries and conveniently these are supplied in the box. We tested it mainly on a hard floor, but were worried it might not perform so well on the deep carpet or rugs that many people have in their living rooms, so we tried it on a pile of soft towels too. We are glad to report it worked perfectly. It’s all very impressive.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that, due to the popularity of Wii Fit, other games have already been released that use the Balance Board as an input device, the first being Family Ski, so there’s more value for money than just Wii Fit here.

After firing up Wii Fit and syncing the BB to the Wii, the first step is to assign your body stats to a Mii. The BB is only used during exercises – all other input is done using the remote as usual. Entering your height, sex, date of birth (look out on your birthday!) and exercise goals lets Wii Fit track your progress – each time you use it, there is the option to check your BMI: Body Mass Index. This takes your entered stats into account and checks these against your weight as measured by the BB and pumps out a number which will then give you an indication of how much over or underweight you are. This crude but effective measurement will work for the majority of the people but falls over in some circumstances, such as with body builders for example – muscle weighs more than fat, so a shorter, more muscular individual might be told that they are obese! The most important thing here is to not focus so much on the actual number and instead keep track of how the number changes over time e.g. once a week. Even something as simple as how much clothing you are wearing will affect the BMI (and Wii Fit asks you about this), or what time of day you weigh yourself (your weight fluctuates throughout the day, so aim to weigh yourself at the same time on any particular day), so becoming hung up on small changes isn’t mentally healthy!

After getting through the detailed setup (have a look at our translation/guide feature if you are struggling with the Japanese version), a quick balance test will generate an “age” based on your performance. If at a later stage you try these tests again (and they get a lot harder on the re-runs), you can see if your “age” has gone up or down. This is all a bit curious and it’s not clear why these particular exercises are separated from all the others, both in terms of where they are on the menu, and also in using this unique scoring method.

The rest of the exercises are grouped into Yoga, Muscle Building, Cardio Vascular/Aerobic and Balancing games. Some of the exercises are explained to you in detail by your choice of male or female personal trainer; others are obvious and don't require quite the same level of tuition. A few in each category are available from the start, with the rest being unlocked with extended play – completing an exercise earns a coin or few for the money box which equates to unlocks at various points. At first it seems an odd choice to have exercises unobtainable from the start, since Wii Fit is not a game in the traditional sense, but it starts to make sense once you realise the amount of time that has been spent standing up, exercising for those few extra coins, rather than sitting on a couch playing Call of Duty. It’s all about incentive.

We asked a real-life Personal Trainer and Pilates Instructor to help assess the Wii Fit exercises. Unlike the chirpy couple of trainers in Wii Fit, we were fully expecting ours to be pretty negative and dismiss most of Wii Fit as a gimmick. Remarkably, Wii Fit survived this ordeal intact, and even received a certain amount of praise, albeit with some caveats.

So, first the bad news: unless we are missing something in translation, Wii Fit doesn’t prompt you to do a warm-up beforehand or a stretch-down afterwards. This is fine for some of the less strenuous exercises, but if you jump straight into doing something like the jogging or the boxing, without 3-5 minutes of gentle warm-up first (think walking/marching on the spot), there’s a chance of injury. Again, some of the exercises can be quite strenuous, especially if you aren’t used to exercising (and we are guessing that a large proportion of Wii Fit users will fall into this category) and it would have been easy for the on-screen personal trainer to keep track of which exercises you did during a session and give the option of showing you some relevant stretches to do at the end of the session.

Now the good news: some of the exercises are VERY cool and there are only a few duds out of the 40. The whole Balance Board concept is spot on and impressed our trainer in how it can truly help promote correct exercise technique. For example, the “lunge” is a standard exercise that can easily be performed badly. Taking a large step forward, you then ensure the knee of your front foot is directly above the ankle. You then lower your body down and up again whilst keeping that vertical ankle/knee line at all times. Without a trainer watching you or already knowing what you are supposed to be doing, a beginner’s knee normally floats forward in front of the ankle. This is where the BB comes into its stride. Before starting to lower the body down, it notices where the centre of balance is on the board and displays this on-screen as a dot, as well as a representation of the BB itself. Move around slightly, and you can see the dot move accordingly. During the exercise, Wii Fit puts a small circle around that dot and rewards you more points and higher star rating if you keep the dot inside the circle, thus ensuring the knee doesn’t float around too much. This is absolute genius and the designers should be commended for putting this much thought into it.

Similarly, you might feel like you are standing perfectly still on one leg in a Yoga position, yet that red dot shows you not only how much you are really moving around but also that one of your legs is more stable than the other. It’s not all just about legs either – there are similar concepts for static exercises like “plank” (forearms leaning on the BB, elbows bent, body straight out behind) or abdominals where you rest your feet on the BB and it notices when you raise them off the deck. Speaking of which, this exercise is insanely hard and if you aren't familiar with exercise in general and this particular one, it is possible to perform the exercise poorly, with all the associated potential for back injury – there’s no grading of individual exercises and it would have been a nice touch to group them, or give options to make the hard exercises less tricky e.g. only lift the feet, not the torso. Later on, harder versions of some of the exercises are unlocked that finish when you give up rather than ending after a set amount of time. If that red dot strays outside the zone for too long, it knows you are flagging!

The 1- or 2-player jogging modes dispense with the BB and instead use the remote stuffed in a pocket or belt to act like a pedometer. Running on the spot in your lounge is all about the calves though, so stretching those is advisable if you’ve been spending a lot of time pegging it through the virtual park.

There are also some exercises that look more entertaining than traditional methods. Watching your Mii do the Hula exactly in time to your body movements is quite surreal, and realising how sensitive you have to be to get a good time on the ski slalom is eye-opening (or later, the snowboard version in which you turn the BB 90°). It’s all very well being strong or able to run a marathon, but Wii Fit will teach you how to control your body on a whole different level as long as you are prepared to analyse what’s going on and where improvements can be made.

Other exercises are much less about technique and more about fun and balance, like walking the tight-rope and a marble-tipping game. The amount of amusement you get from the more traditional style of exercises really depends on your state of mind and whether or not you find improving your standing-on-one-leg score to be fun. What's clear though is that compared to just doing these in isolation without the Balance Board and its body-feedback system, Wii Fit is more fun.

We can hear people shouting "Why not just do some proper exercise?" already, and Wii Fit certainly isn’t going to replace going for a real run, or getting into the gym for a serious weights session, or doing a real Yoga or Pilates class. However, many people don’t do any of these things in the first place and unlike many other exercise tools (think teleshopping…. Shudder….), there’s a high chance that it will end up being used regularly, because it is actually well thought through and is as fun and taxing as you want it to be. And “many people” is what Nintendo is surely aiming at here. Wii Fit is already flying out of the shop doors in Japan and the same will happen when it arrives in the West too, not because it’s a gimmick that’s easily bought into, but because it’s a great product.