Does Ring Fit Adventure actually give you a workout?

At the start of your Ring Fit Adventure, the game will ask you several questions to help calibrate the game's difficulty settings for you. These include questions about your weight, age, daily levels of physical activity, and personal desire for challenge.

You'll be assigned a difficulty level ranging from 1 to 30 based on these. However, be aware that the number you're assigned mostly only impacts the number of reps you have to do per set when using a fit skill in-game. At lower difficulties, you'll be given fewer reps, while greater difficulties will require more reps to do the same amount of damage.

It also seems to impact how long you need to "hold" your ab guard or other exercises to achieve success. Plus, it may slightly impact how fast you need to jog to "dash" up conveyer belts or in different scenarios where dashing is required.

Once you get started, you can change the difficulty setting manually at any time in the settings menu. Changing the setting up or down just one level won't impact too much and is a good way to gradually increase your exercise over time as you play. But if you change it a lot at once, you'll notice a big difference — this is useful if you feel you got your initial calibration wrong and want a much more or less intense workout.

The game will also check in with you every few days and ask you if you want to adjust the difficulty at the start of your workout. You can take advantage of this to increase or decrease the difficulty as you see fit.

There are several different workout options within Ring Fit Adventure to choose from, and you may want to experiment with each one before you decide which one is perfect for the kind of workout you want to do.

Quick Play, the second available option on the home screen, lets you play a series of mini-games based around the exercises found in Adventure Mode. This is great if you want to focus on the activities available there with some gamification, but without the story mode surrounding it. Similarly, Custom allows you to set up your custom workout routine without any of the gamification of the other modes.

A free DLC released in March 2020 added Rhythm Mode to the home screen as well, which lets you play rhythm games along to music from games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Splatoon 2.

Finally, if you want to play through the Adventure mode, you still have a lot of different ways to customize your workout. Though you'll start with just one exercise from each category (abs, legs, arms, and "balance" yoga poses), you'll gradually obtain more as you play through the game. Any time you're outside a level, you can customize the fit skills you'll have available to you in battle, allowing you to specifically target areas of the body, or exercises that burn more calories, or similar.

Ultimately, how much you get out of Ring Fit Adventure is going to be dependent on what you want out of it. If you want a light, indoor exercise, and stretch, you can play on a more casual difficulty setting and stop exercising when you feel you've gotten what you want out of the game. Similarly, if you want a harder workout, up the difficulty and play for a bit longer, opting for more intense exercises.

Since Ring Fit Adventure tracks total time exercising, total reps for exercises, overall calories burned, and includes a heart rate monitor to track workout intensity; you always have a clear picture of what you're getting out of the game. Keep adjusting the game's settings until you find the workout that's right for you.