Lisa and I bought a copy of Yourself!Fitness for the Xbox at the beginning of January. We both need more exercise in our lives, and with our busy schedule, we never have time to go to the gym. I had read a review of the product somewhere (I can’t seem to find it now), and thought it might be a better solution for us than going to the gym. The gym is twenty minutes away, which is prohibitive given our tight schedules.

The first time you use the product, you enter your name, some statistics, and then proceed to do a “physical challenge”. This involves measuring your resting and active heart rates (after doing some jumping jacks), lower body strength via squats, upper body strength through push ups, and core strength through crunches. The first time I did it, I was able to do all the squats easily. This seems to be a flaw in the design — Lisa didn’t have any problems with this either. Once that evaluation is done, you commit to a workout schedule for each week, and set your goals. The workout intervals are in increments of 15 minutes, with one workout allowed in each day.

I chose 30 minute workouts 6 days a week. In order to make this possible, I began getting up a half an hour earlier in the morning, and working out first thing. This schedule has worked well for me. Lisa is not much of a morning person, so this really isn’t a possibility for her. Each day you go to work out, you choose a focus. This might be weight loss, cardio, upper body, core, lower body or flexibility. The software suggests one for you every day, but you can easily override the choice. You also get to choose the length of the workout, choose the music you want to hear, and specify any optional equipment you might have. This optional equipments includes heart monitor, stability ball, aerobic step, and hand weights.

There are a lot of things I like about Yourself!Fitness, and a few things that bug me. I like the fact that the workouts are customized to your level of fitness, and that they vary each day. I like the variety of exercises, and the cheery nature of the character (Maya) in the game. She has encouraging words before, during and after the workout. There are times I forget that I am working with an animation, and her encouragement seems genuine. She has a lot of different responses that she uses during the workouts, so it doesn’t become too repetitive. I like the fact that the software evaluates your progress at specific intervals, to help encourage you to continue.

There are few things that bug me about the software though. The first thing you see when you begin to interact with the software is the character on half the screen. She sways and twitches in an unnatural way. The lip syncing in this section of the software is not great, and it is bad enough that it is distracting. Even Lisa commented on it, and she hasn’t ever developed software before. There are some glitches in the workout sections too. During the workout, there is a window into the timeline for the workout. It generally shows the exercise you are doing, and the next exercise. Occasionally, during some of the aerobic workouts, a rest period will show up, but when the timeline reaches the rest period, it mysteriously disappears, and you are on to the next exercise immediately. In all instances, this has been another set of the previous exercise, so it isn’t terrible, but it is unexpected.

It bothers me that when a new exercise is being done, there is little to no introduction to it. If you want to know how to accomplish the exercise, you have to grab the controller, and interrupt the sequence. This brings up a new screen that has an animated set of body parts with a voiceover demonstrating how to accomplish the exercise. This is a bit of a hassle, and certainly interrupts the flow of the workout. This is especially true during a “flexibility” oriented work out. The Yoga positions are often difficult, and with little explanation, they are certainly more difficult.

The software asks you after each section of a workout to rate how difficult you found that particular section to be. If you rate it as “No sweat”, the software records this and makes it more difficult the next time you do this type of exercise. Similarly, you can rate it as too difficult, and the software will scale the difficulty down. In addition, you can interrupt an exercise and make it more difficult or easy. I haven’t used that feature too much, relying on the queries to vary the workout. I do this because I find that parts of a section are easy, while other parts are difficult. If I turned up the difficulty in the easy parts, the hard parts are too difficult.

I have also noticed some odd behavior with Maya during workouts. During some of the exercises with hand weights (I can’t remember the instance specifically), the weights actually went into her body, which looked really odd. Also, it seems that the upper section and lower sections of her arms are rigid parts with little blending between them. During some of the workouts, when she bends her elbow, you can see the corners that make up the joint of her upper arm protruding through. The workout equipment does this strange appearing and disappearing act between sets. If a given set uses hand weights, the weights magically materialize in the character’s hands just before the set begins. This includes the stability ball and the step. It would be much better if the character acted in a more realistic manner, getting the equipment and returning to the same location.

The visuals, aside from Maya’s pointy elbows and twitchy behavior in the main menu are well done. There are reflective surfaces, and simple animations in the background. Maya lip syncs during the workouts, which look good at that time. As you complete more workouts, different environments are unlocked, and music as well. In the environments, the sun is always at a fixed location, so the shadows are fixed as well. Maya casts a shadow on the ground. Unfortunately, in most of the environments, her shadow has different characterstics than the shadows rendered into the environment. Her shadow is always softer, and not nearly as dark. It just looks wrong once you see it.

All in all, I like the software. I feel physically better after working out, and it makes the whole day more tolerable. The results so far have been encouraging. I went from 162 lbs on January 8th to 147 lbs this morning. My goal is 135, so I’m heading in the right direction.