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Article Date: 02.06.2025
My Journey to 100% Wii Fit
It's difficult to describe how I got to this point in my life. When you're as neurotic of a videogame collector as I am, clearing your ever-growing backlog of games becomes a core part of the hobby. You want to make sure you're getting your money's worth from all of the random games you used to fill shelf space. But what if one of the games in your collection was gifted to you and doesn't really have an ending? Some games are just intended to be played forever, like Tetris or Fortnite, or will simply give you a Credits option in the Settings, which is what Wii Fit does. I think most normal people would see that and go "I guess Wii Fit has no ending, let's just play each minigame once and never touch it again". However, I'm really not as normal as I'd like to think.
My History with Wii Fit
I got Wii Fit as a Christmas present in 2009, back when my gaming hobby was mostly just playing Mario and Pokémon. I was pretty enamoured by Wii Sports and Wii Play at the time, and naturally figured that I'd love Wii Fit as well. We had our TV and Wii in the living room, which turned trying out Wii Fit into a family event, much like when I got Wii Sports for a previous Christmas. Everyone in my family, including my grandmother, all had turns jumping on the Balance Board, being called overweight, and then failing at the various minigames. Despite the weight-based insults, we all had a good laugh with it and then... nothing much after that. The novelty was done. My Mum claims that we kept playing it for a while, but as a kid, I wasn't really motivated to actually try and exercise with the game, and the few minigames it had didn't really grip me in the same way the other games in the Wii series had, so the game became largely forgotten within a few months. I think this experience rings true for most people too: the game sold insanely well and people have fond memories of the Balance Board, but you won't find many people who have really played the game for all that long, which made researching certain aspects surprisingly difficult.
Approaching this Challenge
I started this challenge properly in October of 2023 and my first thoughts when it came to really "beating" Wii Fit was to simply give each minigame a try, or unlock every minigame. So I tried a few of the initial exercises and realised I was getting graded 4 stars for a few of them. Wii Fit grades your performance in almost every exercise and minigame from 1-4 stars: 1 star means you failed to really finish the exercise/minigame, and 4 stars mean you executed it almost perfectly. So, how difficult would it be for me to achieve 4 stars for EVERY exercise and minigame in Wii Fit, and complete the game 100%?
(Disclaimer: this table uses European names, but the same activities appear in all versions of the game.)
This is a table showing every difficulty of every exercise and minigame in the game. The challenge would be to get 4 stars in every single activity in the game. The only exceptions to this rule are exercises that don't actually give you any kind of rating, such as the Cobra pose and the Tricep Extension. These exercises don't require using the Balance Board or Wii Remote in a way where the game can really rate your performance. There are also the workout challenges: the Press-up Challenge, the Jackknife Challenge and the Parallel Stretch Challenge. These activities can give you a maximum of seven stars and are obviously the most difficult activities in the game. I'll go more into depth on these later.
Early Days
I decided I'd play Wii Fit once or twice a week as an hour-long exercise: I'd do roughly 15 minutes of each category, to keep my exercise varied. The Yoga and Muscle Workout categories are very basic, no thrills exercise. The Aerobic Exercises were the most fun for me, they felt like Wii Sports-themed cardio exercises. And then the Balance Games were kind of like a dessert, where you'd finished all your real exercise and were now being treated to a bunch of actual games.
Progress early on was how you'd expect. Some activities were cleared basically immediately (of course I can do Deep Breathing), and some provided more challenge. I tried the Hula Hoop activity several times and absolutely could not reach 4 stars. "No worries", I thought, "I guess I'm just not fit enough to reach that pace yet".
I'd find myself having a lot of trouble adapting to the Balance Board. It's very odd controlling a game without simply using your hands and fingers. Not only do you need good balance, but you need to learn how to precisely move your centre of gravity around to succeed in this game. To Wii Fit's credit, I think it's actually very good at teaching you how to do this, particularly through the Balance Games. By the time you're scoring high in the Slalom games, you start to understand precisely how much force you're exerting on the Balance Board, and it's a very rewarding thing to grasp.
Aside from Balance Board troubles, it wouldn't take me too long to reach an activity that made me question whether I genuinely wanted to continue with this challenge. Let me introduce you to:
Jogging - The Villain of Aerobics
Something that concerned me very early on was the Jogging exercise. This uses just the Wii Remote and basically asks you to run in place, while the Wii Remote getting jiggled around in your trouser pocket tracks your movement. The way the game scored me made no sense. It'd reward me for jogging fast, but then would trip me and give me a lower score for jogging too fast. Then I'd sit down and simply waggle the Wii Remote at a decent speed, and it'd give me no score at all. What was going on here?
I hadn't really seen any discussion about this online before, but I'm happy to reveal that the secret to this activity is not only speed, but rhythm. You have to jog fast and at a consistent rate. Through quite a bit of experimenting, I found that 220bpm music is the best music to jog to for a 4-star rating, which is honestly shockingly fast. Shout outs to KopophobiA for their song
"Out of Time". I would listen to this song and jog to the percussion beat in my kitchen while rapidly turning into a sweaty mess. I'd also have to jog on a pillow to not piss off my downstairs neighbours, so imagine a sweaty mess of a person running at mach speed on a pillow in his kitchen. Insanity.
This 220bpm trick works for 2P Jogging too (I wasn't roping a friend into doing this with me, sorry reader), but, as if Nintendo specifically wanted to throw me through a loop, the trick suddenly stopped working for the Free Jogging activity. Suddenly 220bpm wasn't good enough and the game started demanding that I jog at 300bpm. Listen to
this and try to jog at the same pace. Do people really jog this fast?? Anyway, at 300bpm, I could clear this activity consistently, although jogging that fast for 30 minutes was a real challenge for me. First wall cleared.
Mid-Game to the Late-Game
As mentioned earlier, the Balance Games are incredibly good at teaching you how to precisely influence your balance and the way you move your body around. These games largely provided a good, fair challenge. They felt difficult, but achievable, given enough practice. Tightrope Tension probably felt like the easiest overall, Table Tilt and Balance Bubble took some time to get to grips with, and Zazen wasn't very difficult for me at all, which is odd; quite a few people online seemed to dislike it or have issues with it. Penguin Slide is a real bitch though, just because of how high the score barrier is for 4 stars. You cannot miss a single red fish, and even missing a handful of green fish will likely cost you that fourth star.
The real villains of this category are the Ski Slalom and Snowboard Slalom games, but even then, they feel mostly fair and are just very challenging due to how rapidly and precisely you need to shift your balance. There's not much difference between the two, just a difference in how the Balance Board is positioned. You may assume the Snowboard version is harder, but it took me the exact same amount of attempts to beat both activities.
Aside from the various jogging activities, the Aerobics Exercises were fairly straightforward as well. Rhythm Boxing has a real emphasis on rhythm, so it's key that you know how to swing your Wii Remote at the correct time to hit the beats and double your points. Step Plus gets quite complex and feels insanely rewarding to get right after multiple attempts. And eventually, I looped back to the Hula Hoop activities. They're very intense relative to the other activities, but after all the practice with the other activities, I was able to fly by these towards the end of my playthrough.
There hasn't been much to say about the Yoga or Muscle Workouts. Most Yoga poses are simple enough to where I could quite easily clear them within a few attempts. Some required me to really think about how I was balancing myself, but it was mostly smooth sailing. Mostly. As for the Muscle Workouts, I'm not super fit, but I'm at least strong enough to handle 20 push-ups, so there wasn't much here that slowed me down.
I eventually whittled this game down to what I'll lovingly call the Final Five. Some of these were obviously going to be some of the final activities I'd clear in this challenge, while a couple others were quite unexpected. I'll list them in the order I cleared them:
King of the Dance - The Dragon of Yoga
On paper, this seemed to be the most difficult yoga pose. You're standing on a single leg with all of your other limbs extended. And while it did take me some time to perfect it, I think it mostly appeared challenging relative to the other Yoga poses, which all took me maybe 5 attempts at absolute most. The King of the Dance took me a good 31 attempts to perfect, but it felt like a fair challenge once you learn how to properly use your arm and leg to balance yourself, kind of like a see-saw. Since your limbs are outstretched, it becomes easier to steady yourself and distribute your weight more precisely. Difficult, but rewarding.
Parallel Stretch (90s) - Glaringly Flawed
This was actually a fairly easy exercise, screwed over by frankly poor design. The game expects you to do a parallel stretch (a plank) for 90 seconds. Simple. Except, your arms are on the Balance Board and the game will score you based on how evenly you balance your weight on your arms. This poses a slight issue in that it's impossible to really keep track of your balance while doing this exercise because the parallel stretch requires you to be mostly on the floor, facing downwards, whereas your TV is likely on a cabinet or mounted on a wall.
Ultimately, I had to pull out my dinky little CRT TV and place it directly in front of me when doing this exercise, so I could keep track of myself. My proof-reader points out that you could also replicate this solution by playing on a Wii U, displaying the game on the GamePad controller and placing it in front of yourself.
Another issue is the Balance Board's grippy surface. Of course, it's there to stop people from slipping off of the Balance Board when they're standing on it, but when it comes to long exercises using your hands and arms, this type of surface is a nightmare and digs into your skin. I had to resort to buying a plastic third-party Balance Board protector. Pink was the only available colour, I swear.
Last issue I ran into is that you can start the activity with improper balance, so if you're not perfectly balanced from start to finish, that can cost you enough points to lose the 4-star ranking. A simple exercise made rather annoying.
The Tree Pose - The Villain of Yoga
and the True Final Boss of Wii Fit
Words cannot describe how frustrating I found this pose. I think there's a reason why it's featured on the box art and was referenced for comedic effect in the Wii Fit Trainer trailer for Super Smash Bros. 4. The Nintendo developers must have experienced themselves how truly difficult this pose is for the uninitiated. Stand on one leg, push your foot into your thigh and point upwards.
First of all, if you have any trouble balancing on one foot, you will need to train. A lot. Even if you're remotely shaky, the game will not score you 4 stars. Unlike the King of the Dance pose, where you can use your limbs to shift weight around, all of your weight is being focused on just your one foot, so it really needs to be firm and steady for you to succeed.
Secondly, you need to be quite flexible to place your foot on your thigh as high as the game instructs you to. I wasn't able to do this initially, but was finally able to manage it after enough training. And something really helpful that I learned is that you really want to force your thigh and foot together, as the opposing forces help to steady your body from shaking left and right. The same goes for your hands, make sure they're pushing against each other to help steady yourself. My Mum, who has actually practiced yoga, advised that it was more important that your hands push against each other than it is to stretch them out as high as possible, counter to what the game suggests. Trying too hard to stretch upwards only causes you to grow more unsteady as more of your balance is being shifted upwards rather than on your foot.
Even knowing all this, I could not score higher than 45 points on either foot, and that's the minimum you need for each foot to score 90 points overall and attain 4 stars. I experimented with holding myself against a wall and other forms of blatant cheating, and even some of those awarded me 3 stars! It got to a point where I dug through every YouTube video of people playing Wii Fit to try and find someone who got 4 stars. I found very few people who did it, and I wasn't totally sure they had achieved it legitimately, so this seemed like a genuinely impossible challenge for a time.
At this point, I had legitimately tried the Tree pose roughly 100 times. While researching the pose further, a friend tried it themselves and... got 4 stars on their first go. While it was great to know that it was actually possible, it's quite depressing to see someone ace something you've been trying to do over a hundred times already. The friend is definitely a lot more active than I am though, so I took the confirmation as motivation to keep trying.
I started doing the Yoga pose daily, practicing it in the morning before I got dressed, and each real attempt felt like my balance was getting steadier and my score was slowly but surely getting consistently higher. At one point, I got to the end of my exercise session and thought "if I give it one more try today, I'm sure I could get it". And sure enough, I finally got it. 133 attempts it took, but it was finally done. There was a real concern that this pose could have killed my challenge for good, but now that it was done, there was nothing stopping me from running to the finish line.
Press-Up Challenge/Stretch Challenge -
The Finale
It was obvious that these would be the final activities of the game. They work differently than other activities in that you can only really achieve one additional star at a time. For example, in the Jackknife Challenge, you have to reach 10 reps/2 stars before the challenge will let you reach 20 reps/3 stars. The requirements for these stars increase consistently until the 7 star requirement, which requires double of what you did for 6 stars. See below for the Jackknife Challenge requirements:
0 reps for 0 stars
1 rep for 1 star
10 reps for 2 stars
20 reps for 3 stars
30 reps for 4 stars
40 reps for 5 stars
50 reps for 6 stars
100 reps for 7 stars
It seems clear from this scoring structure that the 7 star achievement is really just there for bragging rights. Oh, and for anyone wondering as to why the Jackknife Challenge is being used as an example and not as one of "the final five", I finished the Jackknife Challenge in six attempts, the minimum number of attempts. While being exhausted at the end, I didn't think a challenge where I'm lying on my back the entire time would be too difficult. But the other two challenges were certainly difficult.
When it came to the Parallel Stretch Challenge, I knew from reading online that the 7-star requirement was 3 minutes. And fortunately, compared to the standard Parallel Stretch activity, you don't need to be perfectly balanced. You simply have to stay within a generous circle of balance. Now, when it came to actually attempting this, I was very unsure. I had done a practice plank a day or two before and only got to around 2 minutes. And as I started my attempt, I immediately got an itch on my arm which I had to try my hardest to ignore. Fine. I felt mostly fine until hitting around 150 seconds where I began shaking a bit. 165 seconds, I'm really shaking and can feel my back start to dip, but I can't give up now, I'm a mere 15 seconds away. I lock in and I get it done, first try. Amazing! I have to give Wii Fit credit: it really is good at motivating you to keep going. I really thought this challenge would take more practice but I won basically because I didn't want the Wii Fit Trainer to win!
And last of all, there was the Press-Up Challenge. Absolutely the most difficult challenge of the game, no matter how fit you already are. Funnily enough, when I started this whole playthrough, I was struggling to reach 20 press-ups. But when I got to this specific challenge and started practicing daily for it, I could easily get to 40 reps. Through some experimentation, I learned that you can actually miss a few reps per each set of 10 press-ups, allowing you to get some extra breaks in. Using this to my advantage, I was able to actually crack 81 reps in an early attempt, but struggled to get past 50 on many follow-up attempts. I knew with more practice and another good day, I could crack 100 reps. And I certainly did.
Words cannot describe how elated I was when I reached this point. I already had it in my mind that this game was basically finished when I perfected the Tree pose, but here I was. Finally on the top of Mount Olympus. Play time: 24 hours and 9 minutes. My Wii Fit 100% challenge was over...
...well, mostly.
Some Extra Details
So there's a few other bits of this game that can be "beaten" or "unlocked". There's a secret balance test that can be played if you interact with the Balance Board running on the treadmill in the Training menu. The difficulty in this is that it requires you to stay almost perfectly balanced for a few seconds, almost exactly equal weight on both feet. But after all the balance training I had done, this only took me a handful of attempts. My record for this is 35.89 seconds, let me know if you beat it.
The other thing is the FitPiggy, the piggy bank thing that keeps track of your Wii Fit play time. It'll turn bronze after 10 hours, silver after 20 hours and gold after 40 hours. As mentioned, my 100% playthrough only took just over 24 hours, so I'll have to do some grinding in Free Step/Free Jogging to get my numbers up. So I'm not quite done yet, but I certainly will be.
Lastly, there's the whole Body Test stuff. You can unlock special stamps for use with your calendar, to mark the days that you've done a body test. It takes doing 30 body tests to unlock all the stamps, which was easy enough. In these body tests, you get weighed and the game calculates your "Wii Fit Age". I'm not actually sure what the minimum age here is. I assume, based off of "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training" that it's 20, or roughly 20. I think these goals depend on your actual age and weight and am not really including this for this playthrough. I've managed to get 22 before, so I'll take that. And speaking of my weight…
Conclusion - Wii Fit actually helped me
I don't think I had ever felt so motivated to finish a playthrough in my life. Perfecting the Tree pose was a genuine peak moment in my videogame collecting career. Every wall I came across, I knocked it down, even if it took me over 100 attempts. And the best part about this, is that it's definitely had actual health benefits for me.
When I started this challenge back in late 2023, the body test weighed me in at roughly 105kg. For my height, that's pretty bad. Obese, in fact. I'm not gonna give Wii Fit all the credit here. It can be a frustrating game sometimes, It's rough. But it served as great motivation for me. My schedule of playing it once or twice a week helped me keep to a schedule. My desire to perfect the Tree pose and hit 100 press-ups made me want to visit the gym more, to actually improve my physique. It can be really hard to find that motivation otherwise. Now, at the end of my journey, I'm sitting at almost 85kg. What Wii Fit helped me achieve cannot be understated. I've gotten Stockholm'd into loving this game, it now has a special place in my heart. Regarding my weight, I'm not quite where I want to be yet, but I'm sure Wii Fit Plus and Wii Fit U are gonna help me get there. Maybe you'll see a follow-up to this article in the future. Until then, thanks for reading this.
Written by Scott of Luckless Heaven, and "proofread by the same dork who got 4 stars for Tree Pose first".