Yourself Fitness

Yourself! Fitness is a very impressive achievement, but it does have some, shall we say, quirks that you will need to learn to work with. I'll list out the problems that I've had, and hopefully some workarounds that might help you get the most out of this package.1. Maya doesn't keep in sync with the music.Maya does okay, but she does tend to have a difficult time staying with the music; my suggestion would be to keep track of which exercises you are doing, and use the animation as a reference for the proper form, but don't try to stay in sync with her movements or they may throw you off.2. Maya doesn't always give you enough time to catch up.When switching exercises, she will usually give a verbal explanation of the exercise she wants you to do. The problem is, by the time the explanation is complete, you're half-way through the allotted time, and you haven't really done any reps yet. Therefore, you tend to not have enough time to do the actual reps before you're on to the next exercise. The trick is to learn the exercises well enough so that you can ignore her explanations and go straight to the reps. You can pause the game and get a tutorial on any of the exercises; if you find yourself falling behind, I highly recommend doing this so that you get enough out of your workout. Otherwise, you should just accept that you'll be a little confused during your first few times through, but eventually you'll catch on.3. Maya doesn't really adjust the difficulty, even though she says she will.By the end of the warmup exercises, my heartrate tends to be around 170, which is way too high. After that segment, Maya pauses and asks me how I did. I always tell her I couldn't keep up. She says that she will adjust the difficulty of similar segments in the future, but she never does; if anything, those segments have been getting MORE challenging lately. Therefore, if you do have heart-rate problems like I do, then you might find that you have to rein in your enthusiasm during the warmups and kick a little lower, raise your arms a little less, etc. I always feel like I'm cheating when I have to do that, but that's what I have to do in order to keep up.4. Some exercises are not challenging enough.You may find that some of the exercises are not going to work for you if you have a decent amount of upper-body strength. My suggestion would be to learn which exercises they are (like "Lift Sequence" which is a set of biceps curls without weights), and make sure you have some dumbbells or heavier hand-weights nearby to enhance these exercises; for example, some of the curls and lateral raises really require more resistance to be effective. I've also found that the "Swim" stretches are not particularly useful for me, so I would suggest substituting "Supermans" for those if the "Swim" is too easy. It will take a little work to figure out which exercises are going to be beneficial to you, and which are a waste of time, so be prepared to make adjustments on the fly. Also, since you don't have anyone observing you to ensure that you are keeping proper form, you have to be very self-aware as to which muscles you are attempting to work out; if a particular stretch is too easy, it's quite possible that you're not doing it right, and you might want to go through the tutorial and make some adjustments.5. Some exercises might be physically impossible for you to do.When you first start out, Maya tests your physical fitness, including your flexibility. I can barely stretch my hands to my knees from a sitting position; regardless, during one of my workouts, Maya wanted me to do a yoga position called the Half Moon. I guarantee - if you can't touch your toes, you can't do this either. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about that because you can't skip an exercise; you have to wait it out, or do an alternate exercise on your own until she's ready to move on. There are other remedies - you can buy special foam blocks that help bridge the distance between your hands and the floor, but the program doesn't tell you that; it just assumes that you can do the move, and unfortunately the tutorial doesn't give you a suitable alternative.

Yourself! Fitness / B0007PNEGAWe have two copies of this product at our house - one for me and one for my husband - and after us both using it for several months, I've come to the conclusion that while this is a neat product and a good idea overall, I really wish it had a few more customization options.One of the things that I really do not like or understand is the inability of the user to go through the list of exercises and select/deselect ones that can come up in the course of a routine. When you start an exercise session, the game puts together a plan for you based on the "type" of workout you want (cardio, flexibility, etc.) and based on the difficulty level you select. However, the problem with this is that difficulty level is not a "one size fits all" in real life - for instance, the "Roll Like A Ball" flexibility exercise is rated as one of the easiest, but is absolutely impossible for me, because I have several fused spinal vertebrae, thanks to a childhood scoliosis surgery. Since I can't go into the list of exercises and disable "Roll Like A Ball", I just have to sit around or improvise when it comes up in a workout, which breaks flow. While this may seem like a special case, quite a lot of people have trick knees, bad backs, and other "problem areas", and I can't help but feel that the makers of this software missed the boat by preventing the user from customizing their workout plan.Another aspect I somewhat dislike is the unlockable rewards system. When you start a profile, you only have a couple of music and background options available, and you have to unlock more by not missing scheduled exercise sessions. If you're like me and you don't schedule them (because scheduling starts to feel like an obligation, which starts to feel like work, which starts to feel unpleasant) and just show up and do a session whenever you feel like it and have the time, then you never get the new music or backgrounds. I know some people like rewards, but I find them rather childish, as if the game seems to think that exercise is something awful to be endured in exchange for a little prize. I'd like the ability to turn off this reward concept and just use all the backgrounds and music from the get-go - the locked beach one is so much more relaxing than the corporate apartment one.The relaxing yoga sessions included here seem fundamentally broken - in a game that otherwise sells itself as accessible to newbies, the yoga sessions use impenetrable "yoga speak" without really explaining what the poses mean, or do, or what they are for. Since most of the poses make it impossible to see the screen, it would be terribly helpful to set up a running instruction dialogue with the user - something like "jam your face into the carpet while extending your left leg towards the sky and making a rude gesture with your right hand" - that sort of dialogue is present in the regular routines and is invaluable, but is completely missing from the yoga sessions. You'll only be able to use the yoga features if you're a yoga student and you know all the terms, at which point I'm not sure why you would need the game.Everything else here is...nice, I guess. I really like the Maya coach, as she is concentrated encouragement and enthusiasm. The example models for poses are a little confusing at times - I'm not sure why they didn't just use Maya - and, again, the lack of customization can be very frustrating - you can't speed past the 15 minute warm-up sessions, even if you really want to, even if you've already warmed up with some other method and just want to get to the jazzy music and some lifting. Overall, the concept is good, but the lack of control over what happens on the screen is terribly off-putting in an electronic medium like this, and those flaws will probably cause most people to give up and just do their own routines, which is a shame.~ Ana Mardoll

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