A Wii Bit of Yoga: A physical therapist's view on how yoga applies to everyday life

Recently I was in suburban NJ visiting my in-laws. On Tuesday when my nieces and sister-in-law had to go back to school, I took advantage of the empty house to try out their Wii Fit, including Wii Yoga. It was a blast! Here’s a rundown of my experience with it:

When you first begin, Wii Fit weighs you, calculates your BMI, tests your balance, coordination and/or posture. You can input a goal for weight loss. It stores all this information for future reference.

The yoga exercises were not bad. Doing a yoga session with the the Wii is a far cry from the holistic, mind and mood-altering affect you may experience in an actual yoga class but it does offer some unique benefits. Most of the postures are performed while standing on a balance board and your center of gravity is calculated during the pose. You get continuous feedback on the screen and therefore are able to make very small and precise adjustments. This feature can be a little bit distracting. It requires a more external focus of the mind and it can distort the head and neck alignment of the some poses in order to look at the screen (forget about drishti!). However there are audible tones that correlate with the visual feedback so you don’t really have to look at the screen. While I found the external feedback to be a bit distracting, I think that it is probably an excellent pathway to postural awareness for some. Not everyone learns very well through verbal cueing which is often the only way many yoga classes are taught. Haven’t we all wondered at times what the heck a teacher means when they describe a certain subtle adjustment? For those of us who are teachers, haven’t you noticed how some people ‘get it’ right away but others need us to demonstrate, need hands-on cues or need to look in a mirror before they comprehend the pose? The Wii Fit offers one more tool for improving the mind-body connection.

After each pose, you get a summary of how you did and you are ranked among prior efforts of both yourself and other users. This competitive aspect strikes me as very un-yogic yet, the goal-driven Westerner in me found it kinda rather and rewarding. And the physical therapist in me appreciated the documentation of measurable progress.

I tried about a dozen postures, most of which were beneficial at some level. However there were two poses that I felt were not very good at all. Unfortunately they are the iconic foundations of the practice: breathing and down dog. For breathing, Wii Fit Yoga teaches relaxed diaphragmatic breathing while standing upright. I am all for teaching people diaphragmatic breathing but only in relaxed, supported postures! When standing and doing active yoga postures we need more support from our abdominal muscles (See Learning to Inhale.) For the Wii Fit down dog, you place your hands on the balance board and the graphics and audio cues signal when you have placed adequate weight through the arms. This was completely off for me. In order to be in the “proper” zone, I was in an awkward posture that was somewhere in between down dog and plank.

Overall, I would say that Wii Fit yoga is not for absolute beginners or for highly experienced yoginis. But it can be a useful and fun way for most people to practice asana at home. It is not adequate to really teach the postures but once you know the basics it can be a great tool for refining awareness of weight-bearing and alignment and encouraging people to stick to a home practice.

Later I’ll tell you about my thoughts on the Wii Fit Balance Games.