Working Out with Yourself: fitness for the Xbox
As the name suggests, Yourself!Fitness is not your typical video game. There are no complex puzzles to solve, no car chases, no gunfights, no fleeing from the authorities, and no hunting down bad guys. Yourself!Fitness is all about, well, fitness. However, this title is much different from your mom’s Jane Fonda workout tape; it’s extremely stylized and, with over 500 different exercises, you surely won’t tire from the same old routine. With fitness videotapes, repetitive workouts can quickly become monotonous and ineffectual, especially as changing your workout routine every so often helps to keep things on track.
Leading you through your workout is Maya, your personal trainer and fitness guru. Before your first workout Maya will perform an initial evaluation of your current fitness status, much like a real personal trainer would. The assessment information is then used to incorporate exercises into your routine that are compliant with your current fitness level. This will take roughly 30 minutes – so be prepared to break a sweat. Maya will want to record your resting heart rate and then your active heart rate. To get that heart pumping she’ll ask you to perform two minutes worth of jumping jacks, which seemed more like five to this reviewer! After surviving the initial evaluation it’s time to move on to the actual workouts.
Maya will make a suggestion on which type of workout you should concentrate on – based on her analysis of your evaluation. In my case she recommended a weight loss routine. There are plenty of other options like Yoga, Pilates, Cardio Fitness, Strength Training, and Flexibility Exercises. Even though Maya freely offers her recommendation you are not obligated to pursue one specific workout routine each and every time you ‘play’. You can always choose your desired workout before you begin. When the exercises become less challenging you’ll have the opportunity to interact with Maya and inform her of your advancement. She’ll remember this for your next workout and ‘turn things up a notch’ so to speak.
Maya’s soothing voice and words of praise and encouragement will help keep you motivated throughout your routine. Your workout options include: workout type, length, music, and equipment. You can also do Yoga in the Meditation Garden should the mood take you.
Now, if you’re a novice fitness enthusiast, you’re likely to struggle to replicate some of the moves that Maya executes so flawlessly, but responDESIGN has taken this into consideration by offering a tutorial for each move. On screen during the workouts are the options to pause the game, or undertake a tutorial. The tutorials go into great detail on how to perform the extensive moves by using a 3D model example, which is accompanied by Maya’s voiceover instructions.
The game’s variety is very attractive and the non-repetitive workouts provide easy incentive for subsequent sessions. With standard fitness videotapes, the workouts are repetitive and become mundane fairly quickly. Thanks to its variety and many choices Yourself!Fitness doesn’t fall into a set routine, which makes working out fun because something new is always awaiting you. The best deal through this game is that you get a good workout with a personal trainer and all from the comfort of your own living room.
Another nice feature of Yourself!Fitness is the customizable meal planning. Choose your ‘diet’ and the game maps out weekly menu choices, complete with recipes and shopping lists. There are over 4,500 recipes, so variety shouldn’t be a problem. I was looking over one diet option and was pleasantly surprised that the recommended food choices were actually foods I would eat. This is a gripe I have about some eating plans where their outlined food offerings are not easily found in the local grocery store.
Yourself!Fitness seems to be a great option for those people who want to exercise but need a little extra motivation. A solo workout is all well and good, but it’s so much nicer to workout with someone. After completing your workout, Maya says “See you back here Thursday,” since you can set up in the game which days you want to workout. This kind of accountability helps to keep working out in the forefront of your mind. The intelligent, personal interaction sets Yourself!Fitness far apart from conventional workout tapes – and it’s a fitness solution likely to work best for a great number of people.
Yourself!Fitness is definitely treading new territory as a fitness game for a primary female audience. responDesign’s goal is to develop “Games that are good for you,” and they’ve succeeded. Those gamers yearning for something different and who are not afraid of breaking a sweat should grab Yourself!Fitness and get physical. At first it may seem strange to be moving so much while playing your Xbox but you’ll soon see, and feel, the rewards, and it’ll all quickly become second nature.
