The group has released a report on the super-popular home fitness program, drawing on research performed by the University of Wisconsin. And this report has found that even Wii Fit’s most physically taxing workouts can’t hold a candle to actual exercise.

Wii Fit’s boxing, for example, burns only one-third of the calories of actual boxing, while the other four most intensive modes — Free Island Run, Super Hula Hoop, Advanced Step and Free Step — only burned between 100 and 160 calories for every 30 minutes of exercise. Considering a cheeseburger has around 300 calories, you’ll be on Wii Fit all day if you want to really burn some fat.

Perhaps most damning/hilarious, however, is the report’s finding that while Wii Fit burns more calories than a regular game — where you’re doing nothing — it’s not as good for you as a session on Nintendo’s own Wii Sports.

Ah, the power of marketing.

American Council on Exercise Charts ‘Underwhelming’ Wii Fit Health Benefits [Gamasutra]

I recently, briefly, tried the revised boxing game programmed into November’s Wii sequel EA Sports Active More Workouts. And I was chided, kindly, by the EA trainer showing me the game.

He said I was throwing my punches like a programmer.

I wasn’t jabbing and hooking, Wii Remote and Nunchuk in hands, with gusto. I was, I didn’t realise, just making short moves.

Just this past spring, different EA representatives had trained me out of the bad habits of shortening my Wii-playing gestures. They did this while demoing the extra-sensitive modes of EA’s latest tennis and Tiger Woods games. These modes proved how a Wii Remote enhanced with the Motion-Plus add-on, could detect the difference between a player who swung their arm fully and those who just flicked their wrist. The Wii Remote’s acceleration sensors could be fooled by those two types of motion. But the position-detection in the MotionPlus could not. It could not be tricked. It would recognise a wrist-flick into a chip shot in Tiger and reserve big drives for full-arm swings.

What I learned in the spring I must have un-learned for the fall.

With no MotionPlus engaged for EA Sports Active More Workouts, I was back to my cheating ways. My punches were short. Can we say I was just trying not to hurt anyone at a public event? Apparently my EA-public-demo punching style is also the fighting style of EA programmers. Presumably this is not because they are lazy but because it is easier to test and replay a fitness game by taking a motion shortcut than by knocking oneself out throughout the day.

The new EA fitness game doesn’t support the Wii add-on, but it does have a host of other features to distinguish it from its recent predecessor, June’s EA Sports Active.

It includes a six-week workout program and a more interactive fitness calendar. It includes core/ab workouts, something the first game omitted. It has an overall count of 35 new exercises. Yoga-stretching has been added as well, by popular demand, EA claims — though it does cost them the talking point from the first game that EA Sports Active is the sweat-inducing Western complement to the gentler strain of Wii Fit’s Eastern balance-based routine.

The new game has plenty to exercise the player who wants it. As proof, a public relations specialist working on the game answered Kotaku’s challenge and demonstrated the game’s new obstacle course mode. She ran (in place) until her avatar reached a lunge station. She lunged until she was prompted to run more. Then she hit another upper-body exercise. She finished, mildly winded.

There may well have been ways to cheat all the exercises I saw. But that’s how it goes with games and fitness — users are pulled by the gravity to find shortcuts, be they cheat codes or less-than-complete sit-ups.

The lack of MotionPlus support may make it harder for users of the new game to resist temptations to cut their moves short and cheat, but as with the use of all fitness products, the user would just be cheating themselves. Oh, this is how it is for all kinds of fitness training, right? You need to want it.

Clear out those living rooms! That exercise bike game Cyberbike needs its space.

Out next January, there are 18 different courses, unlockables and multi-player — dunno if that’s local or online multi-player. Though, dragging an exercise bike to a friend’s house seems like a good work out. Heck, getting it home from the game shop seems like exercise.

Cyberbike is from BigBen Interactive, the folks behind My Body Coach, the dumbbell Wii peripheral game.

News: Wii accessories officially out of control [CVG via Hot Blooded Gaming]

The listing says the weights don’t interfere with the IR capability so, hell, why not hook it up to Dead Space: Extraction or Madworld for a real workout?

Wii Weights (2lb Dumbbells) [Everlast, thanks fusioncam]

Wii Fit Plus is the follow-up to the hugely successful Wii Fit, which has sold over 700,000 copies in Australia to date. (Plus 15,000 in New Zealand, the press release adds. Aww, bless you, New Zealand!)

New stuff includes include the option to customise and design your own work out, additional exercises, estimates of calories burned, 15 new balance games, and an option to weigh your baby and even your cat and dog. Not sure if there are separate work outs for your pets.

You can buy the full bundle, which comes with everything from the original Wii Fit, all the new stuff from Wii Fit Plus, and the required balance board, for $159.95. Alternatively, if you already own Wii Fit, you can pick up the Wii Fit Plus standalone disc for $29.95.

I’ve never given Wii Fit all that much though until I gave my brother and his wife a Wii for their wedding present last year. Then my sister-in-law was all “Wii Fit” this and “weight loss” that. I guess she didn’t see any of the initial press around the system calling seven-year-olds obese and Nintendo officially stating that the game doesn’t make you lose weight, it just makes you more aware of your body and so forth.

But, undaunted, she’s still on her pro-Wii Fit campaign and I decided to give its new iteration, Wii Fit Plus, a go. Socks off, of course.

What Is It?
Wii Fit Plus is essentially Wii Fit with new features added, plus an actual multiplayer function. The game gets you “aware of your body” by giving you a weight and body mass index measurement to track over time and then inviting you to play a bunch of games that make you move your body in weird and healthy ways. There are also actual exercise routines in the game that are divided up by Yoga (stretching) and Strength (which includes endurance exercises).

What We Saw
I borrowed a developer’s profile to play through the following modes: Perfect 10, Obstacle Course, Birds’ Eye Bullseye, Tilt City and Rhythm Kung-Fu.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is out October 4.

What Needs Improvement?
Hey! I’m Walking Here! The Obstacle Course game has players running in place, stopping, jumping and then running again to avoid giant swinging balls, rolling logs and giant gaps. The timing was a little tricky and the Balance Board wasn’t as responsive to coming to complete stops as it is to other kinds of motion. This gets frustrating, because while you can’t run off a cliff in the Obstacle Course, you can smack right into a swinging ball that you were trying to stop just shy of.

Blasted Math: Perfect 10 is a game where your Mii stands between several numbered mushrooms and tries to whack them with their hips to add (or subtract) the numbers to reach 10. You have a top-down view of them and are able to control their hips — bouncing left, right, forward or back. Now, I’m an amateur belly dancer, so I have excellent control of my hips. But I had a hell of a time convincing the Balance Board that I had in fact bounced right and not left. I had an even harder time convincing it that I was thrusting my hips forward — so it’s not that the board is too sensitive. It’s just that you have to come back to dead centre and pause before moving in the next direction — which goes against your instincts because the whole game is timed and it’s asking you to do maths.

What Should Stay The Same?
Calorie Tracker: The game keeps track of approximately how many calories you burn per exercise, game or routine. To put it all in perspective, it gives you the approximate calorie count in every day foods. So you can set yourself a goal of burning 70 calories — and then see that that’s equivalent to, like, one slice of American cheese and an ounce of avocado.

Routine Setting: You can now customise a workout just for yourself either by picking out different exercises to chain together in a seamless routine that doesn’t require any menu navigating once you get going (max workout time is 60 minutes). You can also tell the Wii how long you want to work out for and what kind of exercises you like (Yoga, Strength or both) and how long you want to work out for and it’ll generate a routine for you.

Actual Multiplayer: This game can get really competitive. For example, I lost my first run in the Obstacle Course, but then the Nintendo rep told me that nobody on their entire press tour had been able to beat it — so I just had to give it a second go and take the top spot. Also, I totally beat Russ Frushtick’s high score in Birds’ Eye Bullseye by about 20 points in only one try (take that MTV Multiplayer!). To better facilitate this competitive attitude, Wii Fit Plus introduces a multiplayer mode where you can add up to eight players to a game — you just select Multiplayer Mode from the main menu, choose an exercise or game and when you’re done, the game asks you if you want to add another Mii. Once you tell it “no”, after adding all your friends, the game remembers how many of you there are and cycles between you accordingly.

It’s Fun: Folks, it’s no accident that Wii Fit sold so well. It may not melt the kilos off in and of itself (as that jackass on the BART pointed out), but it’s fun to play to the point where the weight doesn’t really matter. At least not to me –—what I care about is being the only games journalist to beat the Obstacle Course on Nintendo’s press tour. That’s probably what separates me from my sister-in-law as far as the “gamer” label goes.

I Can Weigh My Cat Or Baby: But sadly I can’t make her do the exercises. They do get their own icon on the Fit Plaza screen though, and you can track their weight the same as your own. As long as they pet or baby doesn’t mind being held still while the Balance Board measures you both.

Final Thoughts
Seriously—Wii Belly Dance—get on it, Nintendo!

Reader, Martin, sent us the link and says the gym has been wallpapering local TV with ads. Good for them. Now, who’s to say if Nintendo feels like going after a fitness club. But yeah, the name does sound a smidge like the brand on the no. 5 selling game of all time—and one strongly associated with exercise at that.

But my name’s Paul, and this is between y’all.

We-Fit Tucson – Personal Training and Post-Rehab fitness [thanks Martin]

I clicked out at 0:20. It’s only 1:15, but how much can you take?

Daisy Fuentes Pilates Lifestyle Trailer [Gametrailers]

“When I was in Best Buy the other day and saw the huge EA Sports Active displays it felt like we’d hit saturation but until we have Richard Simmons Wii Workout I don’t think we’ve reached it,”says Ben Sawyer, who co-founded of the Serious Games Initiative and heads up the Games for Health initiative. “Famous last words, right?”

EA has been capitalising in the last couple of months on the fitness game craze with half-a-million-plus seller EA Sports Active, but Nintendo lead the re-newed interest in “exergames” with Wii Sports and Wii Fit. In 2007, Nintendo was coming off its smash-hit Wii Remote and Wii Sports one-two-punch. Those successes laid the groundwork for Wii Fit: players got up off the couch, moved around, swung their arms. There was an audience for this — but there had always been. Thing is, it was a largely untapped audience.

During the early 1980s, the VCR revolution brought exercise into the home with Oscar-winning-actress Jane Fonda telling folks to “go for the burn” with her 1982 exercise debut Jane Fonda’s Workout. The tapes sold millions and made millions. The same year computer maker Amiga released the Joyboard, a peripheral on which players would stand and use their body weight to play a slalom skiing game. It was a failure, and the two follow-up titles to support the peripheral were never released. Ditto for an Atari exercise-controlled bike that never found its way out of the concept stage. The exercise bike game would later be realised in 1996 by Namco with Prop Cycle.

There was a market that could be tapped, but it needed someone to do it. And do it right. Enter Nintendo.

The Kyoto-based game company brought the Power Pad to home consoles in 1988, letting kids jog in place on a mat marked with giant buttons. The next year, Namco followed up with Dance Aerobics for Nintendo Entertainment System, foreshadowing the deluge of rhythm dancing games released in the following decades.

While they were developing Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, Konami’s own staffers were reporting weight loss. Same for players when it was finally released in the late 1990s. Konami continued to release updated versions of DDR with increasingly complicated steps. The home versions were more forgiving, but the arcade ones were not. In Japan, Konami has even introduced DDR exercise routines into its health club chain called “Groove Motion DDR”. Group classes use digital projector screens showing DDR patterns, mats and motion sensor belts.

Nintendo has struck gaming gold with Wii Fit, selling over 18 million copies of the game. The follow-up, Wii Fit Plus, goes on sale later this year.

“When we first announced the Wii Balance Board, people were skeptical,” recalls Denise Kaigler, Nintendo of America’s vice president of Corporate Affairs. “But consumers responded quickly and told their friends about it. Now when a new fitness game like Wii Fit Plus is announced, no one bats an eye. Fitness games are now an accepted part of the video game landscape.” Not only that — but the larger cultural landscape. In 2008, Nintendo teamed up with Westin Hotels to offer Wii Sports and Wii Fit as part of the hotel’s fitness program.

Get up off your arse, sure, but why not get out of your house? Go take a walk. Jog. Trend or no trend, what’s the point of exercising with a game indoors? Explains Nintendo’s Kaigler, “Legendary Nintendo video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who led the Wii Fit team, is fond of saying, ‘If it’s sunny, go outside and play.’” Sometimes that’s not always possible, she continues. “Sometimes it’s because of the seasons or inclement weather. Other times it’s situational: Some people come home late from work, while others can’t leave the house because they can’t leave the kids alone.”

The medical profession has started latching onto these exergames. Geraldine O’Shea, D.O., an osteopathic physician and Chair of the American Osteopathic Association’s Bureau on Scientific Affairs and Public Health, first began looking at the impact of video games as physical activity in 2007. “What might appear as nothing more than another entertaining game was revealed as a tool for not just activity but directed physical therapy,” explains O’Shea.

Around the same time, researchers began using Wii Sports in physical therapy. O’Shea has spearheaded a measure by the American Osteopathic Association to support video games as part of a patient’s fitness and therapeutic program. “Because I believe any activity is better than no activity,” she adds, “I have become a convert.”

“Wii gaming actually turns over more energy than sedentary gaming, but not as much as authentic sports,” said Gareth Stratton, a co-author of British study on Wii Sports health benefits. “While it’s not going to replace the real thing,” Stratton told The New York Times, “it’s certainly moving in the right direction.” Several researchers conclude that Wii Fit does not replace regular exercise, but concede that the game has done something key: raised fitness awareness.

“I think it’s more important to realise now that with Wii Fit and EA Active Sports we may be beyond this being a trend,” says Sawyer. “We might really begin to see a genre emerge and stay.”

What’s more, the study’s authors were surprised to find the Wii Sports games, which rely almost solely on upper-body motion, still provided a good enough calorie burn. I guess they hadn’t played the home run derby, which still whips my arse every time.

Researchers at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences centre conducted the study, looking at 23 boys and girls ages 10 to 13. They examined the kids’ energy expenditure at rest and while watching TV, then playing Dance Dance Revolution at two skill levels, then Wii Sports bowling and boxing, and then walking at various speeds on a treadmill.

Unsurprisingly, kids burned three times more calories playing the games than watching TV. The researchers were impressed enough to recommend “active games such as DDR or Wii” as “a complement to activities such as walking or cycling.”

Of course, anyone who’s gone 3 rounds in Wii boxing and ended up heaving and sweating already knew this. But it’s a top-flight university study in a leading research journal, and the mainstream media’s picking up the ball. So for those keeping score on whether we gamers are getting slapped upside the head or patted on it, today I’d say the latter.

Let the Kids Play Video Games – They’re Burning Calories [Los Angeles Times]