Wii Fit Balance Board & CTA Digital Step Raiser

I’ve been using the Wii balance board (aka step) for the last three months. It was one of my Christmas presents, along with the Wii Fit program, so I started using the step and the program about a month into my Losing Gamer campaign. It was pretty easy to set up, even for me.

In a future post, I’ll discuss my initial thoughts on the Wii Fit program, but this post concentrates on the Wii balance board and CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System.

The balance board itself looks like a short aerobic step. It syncs up with the Wii system and helps track your balance, weight, and accuracy in doing different exercises with various exergames. One would think it’s pretty straight forward, but I’ve had a few issues with the balance board.

First, its weight calibration is off. I thought something was odd the first few times I used it to weigh myself. Then I had the brilliant idea of testing it with some known-weight objects, such as five and twenty-five pound bags of flour. Each time, the scale found the object two pounds heavier than the object’s stated weight. The Wii Fit program allows for clothing weights of two and four pounds, so weighing oneself naked and saying one was wearing two pounds of clothing was a relatively easy fix. A better fix could be for Nintendo to program a nob or other calibration in the program to allow for incorrect weights without a consumer having to use the clothing allowance for that.

Secondly, the center of gravity is off. Wii Fit and other exergaming programs have many uses for one’s gravity – it helps ascertain how fit you are, whether you’re holding yourself up straight, whether you’re doing different exercises correctly, and the list goes on. It seemed odd to me that I was listing a few degrees to the left every single time I was on the balance board – even when I actively leaned waaaaay over to the left, but I really didn’t think much of it other than I must be THAT off balance. You see, as a left-handed person, my left side is my dominant side. I assumed that over time I’d simply shifted my center of balance that far over to the left….but it did seem odd.

Then, one morning I got a call while I was about to stand on the balance board to measure my balance. I had to take the call, so I stood behind the board talking on the phone. To my amazement, the empty board registered my center of gravity as five percent over to the left.  After my call, I tried wiggling the four balance board feet, removing and reattaching them, placing things to one side or the other to see if I could fix the gravity issue. Basically, I couldn’t. To this day, my balance board registers a list to the left and I take that into account and compensate when necessary in order to get the job and workout done.

Finally, the balance board height is annoyingly low. I had assumed it would be the same height as a regular aerobic step, because it’s shaped the same as a step and looks like it’s modeled on a step. But, alas, it’s much shorter. Generally aerobic steps are about four inches higher than the Wii balance board. But certain innovative companies have found a fix for us.

CTA Digital has been around since 1992 and they’re an excellent example of a company that does well making accessories for video games. While they’re not a video game publisher, they “live” in the video game space and they employ many people, helping lift the economy. I’ve discussed companies like CTA Digital quite often with legislators, when violent video game bills come down the pike. Often legislators see video games as “games” and not industries of people employing people to create art as well as accessories for that art. But getting back to their step…

I love it!

It’s really easy to put together. I didn’t even need the instructions to try out the 4” and 6” levels.
It’s stable. The feet of the balance board rest in depressions in the riser so that it stays in place. I did balance exercises for the Wii Fit, EA Sports Active 2, and some self programmed step aerobics classes and it didn’t slide, topple or make me nervous.

It bulked up my work out! I could feel the extra burn of the taller step, and the EA Sports Active 2 heart rate monitor showed a 10-30 beat per minute lift in my heart rate from when I did the same exercises without the riser.

If you’re looking for a fix on the Wii balance board height, CTA Digital’s Wii Fit Balance Board Multi Functional Aerobic Step System is the way to go.

Buy It.


Full Disclosure: CTA Digital gave me their step system to try out and use.

Related articles

• Wii Fit Plus Review (fitnesstroop.com)

EA Sports Active 2 Wii Part II (3.14.11)

This is the second in a two part discussion of EA Sports Active 2 (EASA2), answering some of the questions I’ve been getting on this particular product. I want to reiterate that I love the product. It’s pretty hard, and the circuit is always full of loads of squats and strength training.

Now, to get back to answering direct questions…

People ask about time commitments. The challenges require you to work out 4 days a week, taking 3 rest days. The 21-day challenge workouts start out at around 20 minutes and scale up over the 21 days to 40 minutes in length. The 9-week challenge workouts start at around 35 minutes and scale up beyond 45 minutes in length. Presently I’m five weeks in and my workouts are averaging around 45 minutes. I generally do the regular challenge workout and add a second workout to get my time over an hour. So that can mean, for example, a 20 minute challenge workout plus a hard forty minute mountain gravity workout, or a 40 minute challenge workout plus a 30 minute step aerobics class.

Other than the challenges, there are a lot of other options. I’ve tried out a bunch of their other single session workouts that are pre-programmed into the disc and particularly like the mountain gravity and core upper body workouts. They also have one, whose name I forget, but it’s basically the “ya wanna try to kill yourself” workout - that one really makes you sweat. Additionally, you can ask the trainer(s) to create a new workout targeting the body area or type of exercise you want. And then there’s the ability for you to create your own workouts using all of the exercises they offer. I’ve used this to create multiple step aerobics classes for myself that I use routinely.

EASA2 also allows you to go online, workout with groups, find additional exercise options and there’s an online help component too. While I haven’t used any of the online resources, I hear from many people that they’re as great as everything on the disc.

As I mentioned above, weight training is integrated into all of their workouts. They give you a stretch band to use, along with handles, but for someone looking for instructions on everything related to video games, I was flummoxed on how to set the thing up. Probably from a company standpoint, it seems intuitive that someone would know, but I’m admitting here that this someone looked at the handles, looked at the band, looked for instructions and continuously went through that loop. It took me two weeks to realize that I simply needed to tie the ends of the cord around one loop of the offered hand holds. Let me simply say that the strength workouts are much easier once one has attached the handholds.

The program often tells you to lengthen your hold on the band to make the workout easier and to shorten it to make it more rigorous. I’d like to add that if you have them, you can also substitute free weights for the fitness band. While I have free weights, I haven’t gone there yet, as I get a nice burn from using the fitness band.

While I love EASA2 for Wii, and would suggest that it’s great for most people, I would caution folks with bad joints to use something a little less strenuous to start. The constant squats, mountainclimbers, running and jumping could be very intense for someone with bad joints. For such a person, I’d advise starting with, for example, a Gamercize stepper, Wii FIT or Just Dance 2 in order to build up the muscles around one’s joints before trying EASA2.

Buy It.

Full Disclosure:  EA gave me a free copy of EA Sports Active 2 to try out and use.