Yourself Fitness offers Maya, a virtual personal trainer to create workouts based on your fitness level and goals. This is an excellent idea, especially for beginners, with ready-made workouts, regular progress checks and rewards although advanced exercisers may find this program tedious. This review is for the PC version and does not include a review of the meal plans (which are also available with this game).
Getting Started
Once you've installed the program, your first step is to set up a personal profile. This includes vital statistics (weight, height, age, available equipment, etc.) followed by entering results of a fitness evaluation that includes jumping jacks, squats, pushups, crunches and flexibility. Once Maya has this information, she recommends one of several goals: Cardio, Weight Loss, Core, Upper Body, Lower Body or Flexibility. Once you accept that goal (or choose another one), Maya then recommends a weekly workout schedule, which you can also change. The workouts are designed around your goals. If you choose cardio as a goal, all workouts will contain cardio. If you choose upper body, each workout will include upper body moves, and so on. If that doesn't float your boat, you can change your goal at any time. Some drawbacks include: the inability to combine workouts and the inability to fast forward or rewind, although you can change the music and the level of difficulty throughout the workout. Maya will ask how hard you're working during the workout and make future changes in difficulty according to your feedback.
Cardio Workouts
Yourself Fitness Cardio
The cardio workouts are based on level of difficulty and the equipment you have. If you indicate you have a heart rate monitor, a box at the bottom will provide a heart rate range for each cardio move along with the level of difficulty. The workouts themselves include both high and low impact aerobics as well as basic step aerobics (if you indicate you have a step). The warm up is simple and is the same for each workout, lasting about 3-5 minutes and including moves like step touches, side steps and front kicks. If you choose the highest level of difficulty (level 5), the entire workout will be high impact. If you choose a medium level, you'll find a mixture of high and low impact with moves like marching, side steps, karate kicks, cross country ski, fast step ups & shuffles. The step moves include: basics, I-steps & over the top. There is no choreography and the workouts are the same each time with slight changes in difficulty. The last 5-10 minutes includes lower body moves (i.e. lunges on the step), and the ending stretch is only 1 minute long. This setup is great for beginners, who may want time to perfect each exercise while veteran exercises may find the workouts a bit boring.
Upper and Lower
The upper body workouts begin with a warm up and then go into compound movements such as plie squats with overhead presses and lunges with bicep curls, each performed for 3 sets of 12-15 reps. She does not make recommendations for weight, so you're on your own there. Following that, you move on to strength-oriented moves such as pushups, chest press, dumbbell rows, etc., all for 3 sets of 12. If you have no hand weights, she shows the same moves with no weights...you're much better off getting a few sets of dumbbells if you want to see results. The lower body workouts also start with a warm up and then move on to lower body moves such as squats and lunges--lots and lots of them. For example, in one workout I counted static lunges, 'directional' lunges (front, diagonal, side and back), and lunges on the step, all for 3 sets of 12. Other moves I've seen include plie squats, one-legged bridges on the ball and leg lifts. If you don't like lunges or can't do them because of knee problems, you might not be a fan of the lower body workouts. As mentioned previously, you can't skip or fast forward through exercises, so if something doesn't work for you, you'll have to wait it out.
Flexibility, Core Workouts and the Meditation Garden
The flexibility workouts include core exercises followed by yoga moves, so this isn't the traditional stretching workout you might be expecting. The workouts begin with a warm up and move right into ab exercises like crunches and v-sits. After the ab work is a series of yoga poses that are simply repeated until the end of the workout. The core workouts are probably my favorite, since they have a little variety. You do traditional abs moves (like crunches), as well as yoga/pilates moves like planks, rolling like a ball and bridge. For more traditional yoga workouts, you can visit the Meditation Garden which offers short (10 to 25 minutes) routines that take you through 2 or 3 series of poses (such as sun salutations). I like the Meditation Garden because of the music (soft and soothing) and the fact that the routine is different each time. However, the workouts can be repetitive and they don't count as completed workouts, which is how you get your rewards (see the next page). Any of these workouts are nice add-ons to cardio and strength but, remember, you can't combine workouts so you'll have to go through the warm up for each workout you do.
