When you're doing the yoga and strength training exercises, Wii Fit gives you an instructor who demonstrates the moves and then performs them while you follow along. You can choose from a dude or a chick. Being a dude, I choose the chick. Duh.

She's in pretty good shape, but she's a bit creepy. She's almost translucent, like a ghost or a virtual person or Cortana. She talks – boy, does she talk! – but she never moves her mouth, so it creates the impression that she's beaming her thoughts directly into my head, telepathically making me get into shape.

Starting out, there aren't many yoga poses or strength training exercises available. You have to unlock most of the exercises by faithfully training, storing up Fit Credits ™ in the Wii Fit Credit Piggy Bank ™, which is a cutesy cyborg combo of an LCD display and a piggy bank. Every minute of exercise is a Fit Credit ™, and as you rack them up, stuff magically unlocks. It's a reward system. You can't just jump into Wii Fit and expect to do the hard stuff. Silly.

So today I do a few yoga poses and a few strength training exercises before my only remaining options are redoing things I've already done. The tree pose kicks my butt almost as much as the push ups, which are particularly hard because you're expected to put both hands flat on the board. Seeing as the board is only about a foot and a half wide, this makes the push-ups more challenging than the way you would normally do them, with your hands shoulder width apart. Wii Fit doesn't care. Suck it up.

As I'm doing my push-ups, the ghostly trainer chick asks, "Have you dropped your hips?"

"Shut up," I tell her, adjusting my hips, which had dropped.