Wednesday, 14 Sep 2005
An unplanned trip to Toys R’ Us’s clearance game department led me to my latest fitness-related acquisition: Yourself Fitness for the Xbox. I’ve had my eye on this item for a while now, but refused to purchase it while it was over $20. Luckily, Toys R’ Us decided to include it in its 50% off green tag merchandise promotion, so I nabbed my copy for $17.50.
Yourself Fitness is a customizable workout program that runs on the Xbox game console. You create a profile and take a physical assessment test that involves inputting your height, weight and age, recording your resting heart rate and active heart rate (after 2 minutes of increasingly faster jumping jacks following the pace of a little stick figure on the screen), entering how many body weight squats, crunches, and kneelie (girly modified) push-ups you can do, and determining how bendy you are by recording how far you can stretch when reaching for your toes.
There is a pleasant virtual personal trainer named Maya who walks you through the assessment and leads your workouts. When I finished my assessment, Miss Maya recommended a long-term focus of cardio for me. Other options were weight loss, upper body strength, lower body strength, core strength, and flexibility.
I guess she wasn’t too impressed with my 179 heart rate after the jumping jacks. 
I maxed out all the strength moves, though, so perhaps the cardio recommendation was just the default for someone who can do lamo modified push-ups all day long. You know a product is aimed at a female audience when it doesn’t even ask you to do real push-ups!
There’s also a built-in diet plan with meal plans and recipes for many levels of caloric intake from 1200 on up. I checked out a few of the menus and was impressed with the variety of meals available although I didn’t agree with all of them. Most breakfast meals were completely lacking in protein, and several menus only included a protein in the dinner entree. Each meal plan lists an option for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, but doesn’t indicate whether the snack foods should be eaten three times a day or if the items should just be spread out throughout the day when the tummy rumbles strike. The program definitely did not mention 5-6 small meals a day as part of the plan. Maybe the PC version lets you print out your meal plans and recipes, but the limitations of the Xbox force you to write down your meal plan info yourself.
I chose the days I wanted to use the program (M/W/F in lieu of machine cardio), and started up a cardio workout with Maya, selecting my workout venue (Empress’s Dojo), music style (hip hop), and equipment. There were some grayed out venues and music styles that I will have to unlock somehow in the future. What a clever feature! For a completist gamer like me, the existence of unlockables will keep me coming back until I unlock everything.
I was pretty impressed until the workout began.
Horrors!
It was bouncy, flouncy, coordination-required aerobics! 
I hung in there for 10 minutes, but decided that the routine required more grace and coordination than I could muster up at 1:00 am in the morning, especially after nearly 2 hours of resistance training between the Full Body Blitz and the OARS exercises I did for the eDiets’s Life’s Odyssey challenge this week.
I’ll write more when I’ve finished a few of the workouts. So far, I give Yourself Fitness a thumbs up, despite the girly girl aerobics.