Thread Drift

[OakLeaf]

Because guiding a marble down a hole, guiding a bubble down a river, or dropping marbles into the correct buckets using both your hands and your feet - sometimes in opposition - are a whole lot more fun than any proprioceptive exercises someone's trainer will give them. Sure you can spend an hour working only on balance and proprioception, but how motivated is anyone to do that day after day?

Because if you already have a Wii box, the balance board only costs about $30 more than a good wobble board.

Because it gives you on-screen feedback on your balance and center, whereas on a wobble board, you're either stable with all the edges off the ground, or you're not. If you're leaning slightly to the left, you'd never know.

Because most people, DEFINITELY including me, can't stand up on a Swiss ball (or even a small ball). Suggesting exercises standing on a Swiss ball as a substitute for Wii balance exercises is like telling someone to do full pull-ups as a substitute for 20# cable pull-downs. Great if you can do it, but too challenging even for most active people.

Because there is no "real game" to correspond to most of the balance games, and if someone went to the trouble and expense of re-creating many of those games in the physical world, any one of them would be WAY more expensive than a Wii, and many would have a really high risk of falling.


I guarantee you neither my mother (who's actually very motivated) nor my mother-in-law (who isn't particularly) would be doing ANY proprioceptive work if it weren't for their Wiis. If it'll keep them from falling and breaking a hip, then hear, hear.

Yes, the BMI thing is worse than stupid, but take that up with the medical/weight loss establishment that pushes it so hard. I might add, IMO the Wii's obsessive focus on small weight fluctuations is even more damaging than its reliance on BMI. You can always skip the weigh-in on the Wii. I do, even though I weigh myself almost daily on a non-talking scale. Four pounds is a typical weight fluctuation for me, and I can do without a machine criticizing me because I'm better hydrated one day than I was the day before, or ate more fiber at lunch, or whatever. But another thing to take into account is that apparently this machine acts EXACTLY like the weight-loss establishment. My mom has been going to TOPS/KOPS for years - I don't encourage it, but she likes the social aspect - and she confirms that the Wii feedback is just like the structure of that group. If she's a pound heavier than she was at the meeting the week before, she gets some kind of a demerit. So I think a lot of it is that the Wii is exposing a lot of us here - who've never been sucked into the weight-loss machine - to philosophies that have been getting shoved down overweight people's throats for decades.