Yourself!Fitness

"Turn your game room into a workout room"

This title is not rightly called a game. Yourself Fitness turns your PS2 into your own personal fitness studio, complete with a digital personal fitness trainer, Maya.

In using and reviewing this title, I also used several nutritional and fitness websites that offer Body Mass Index (BMI) and daily caloric requirement calculators. As I am here to review Yourself Fitness, I will neither list nor endorse any of them here. A web search on "BMI" will provide a wealth of them of varying quality, so be sure and try several.

The custom workouts Maya creates for you can integrate a heart monitor, stepping platform, stability ball, and hand weights. This equipment is optional and in no way required to use the program, but will add variety to the workouts by opening more options for exercise. This can keep things fresh and interesting and help with motivation. The heart monitor can be considered "safety gear" to ensure you are not doing too much, which is worse than doing too little.

Profile Creation
Creating a new user profile, I was prompted to enter my vital statistics including name, height, weight, gender, and age. I was also asked if I owned any of the four pieces of fitness equipment listed above. I was then instructed on how to find and enter my resting heart rate, led through a two minute session of jumping jacks, and prompted to enter my (now) elevated heart rate. Maya then led me through a series of targeted stress tests, by seeing how many reps I could comfortably handle of upper and lower body exercises. This information is used to see where I needed the most improvement, and tailor the workouts to fit this. Depending on how winded you are after each stress test, this process will take longer for different people. Maya advises you set aside about thirty minutes, which seems a good round estimate.

Where many web calculators asked my daily activity level, Maya did not. I would expect this to be an important factor in determining the starting difficulty of the workouts presented. Also, where the web calculators showed my BMI and often suggested a daily caloric allowance, Maya failed to supply this information.

Meal planner
One third of fitness is diet. The meal planner, while containing a wide variety of recipes, also contains some serious flaws. the first step is to allocate a calorie budget for each day of the week. The program should be able to suggest a number, or at least a range, based upon your profile and goal, but this is not the case. Again, you must turn to outside sources of information to determine your daily caloric needs, as planning a diet and menu without knowing that is useless. For each day of the week, you may choose a menu that covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack. And that is where the flexibility ends. You cannot, for instance, substitute any recipes or ingredients for preference of taste (I hate cranberries) or worse, food allergies. I would have preferred to see a list of recipes to build menus from scratch. There is also no way to view any of the "over 4500 recipes" outside of the sample menus. How hard would it have been to add a list function? Overall, the meal planner should have been so much more than what it is.

Workout planner
Finally, Maya actually speaks up and makes a suggestion, setting up a schedule of a few sessions a week based on your profile and goal information. This is completely customizable, and you can choose to spend more or less time per day on your workouts, fitting them around whatever schedule you happen to have.

Workout mode
The real meat of the game, and the second third of fitness: exercise. This consists of Maya leading you through a custom workout routine built from her library of exercises to suit your personal profile, goal, and equipment available. This includes various styles ranging from old school jumping jacks and pushups to step aerobics and Pilates. Overall Maya does a good job balancing the workouts to include strength training, flexibility and weight loss. The workout can be paused at any time, and tutorials are available from the pause menu on how to properly perform the exercises. This is helpful when Maya springs a new exercise on you, and you want to know how to do it right. The catch is, you can only call up a tutorial on the current exercise you see Maya performing. Here again a list would have been helpful in learning the different exercises before they are sprung on you during a workout. Before each workout, you may select from a list of background environments for Maya to perform in and music to listen to. Periodically there are checkpoints in the workout where Maya will ask how you have been holding up. Based on your answer she will adjust the difficulty of this and future workouts. The difficulty can also be adjusted by the user at any time.

Meditation garden
Almost identical to workout mode, Save for that it takes place in a tranquil garden of eastern design. The workouts here are based primarily around yoga and always last 15 to 20 minutes. Rather than the fast paced trimming and toning found in workout mode, here you will find more relaxed routines focused on flexibility and control. Stretches and slow, deliberate transitions from one posture to another will make up the majority of these routines. For those unfamiliar with yoga and who have no idea what Maya means when she tells you to stretch from "mountain position" into "down dog position", the pause and tutorial features are the same as in workout mode.

The final third of fitness is mindset, which includes both motivation and knowledge. To be fair, motivation is difficult to address from a TV screen, but Mayas attempts at encouragement during the exercise, such as "Dont stop now!" or "I want to see some real energy on this part!" come across as cheesy and not at all encouraging, especially given that the program has no way of knowing if you are keeping pace or struggling along until you hit a checkpoint. Yourself Fitness makes up for this slightly by allowing the user to unlock new music tracks and exercise environments as they meet their exercise schedule. Though this doesnt make for much of a "carrot" for those that need it, it is a nice way to acknowledge someones progress.

Knowledge, on the other hand, has been neglected. One cannot browse the exercise tutorials and recipes freely. Maya makes no mention of basic nutritional information or exercise theory. The standard disclaimer of consulting your doctor goes doubly so here. One of the "now loading..." tips comes to mind about taking a daily aspirin to reduce ones chance of heart attack. Aspirin, being a blood thinner, should NOT be taken by people with conditions that put them at risk for bleeding.

The bottom line
It has been said that the best advice is plain old facts, skip the opinion thank you. Overall, Yourself Fitness is an adequate workout tool, but neglects to provide the user with information widely recognized by health professionals as being necessary for planning a fitness routine. Hiding the critical numbers of BMI and daily caloric requirement from the user was a major mistake. As a healthy recipe book it fails by not allowing the user to browse and customize. Combined with other resources, common sense and the all important consultation with your doctor, however, this title can create a custom workout routine that works.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/13/06