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Yourself Fitness Review
Cost
Features of Yourself Fitness:
Editor's Verdict:
The Windows version we're reviewing here evolved out of an XBox game that subsequently migrated to the PS2 and eventually ended up here, on the PC. It's not surprising, therefore, that it's a lot more graphically based than most other forms of dieting software. Rather than having you click through various screens of graphs and stats, Yourself Fitness takes the idea of a virtual personal trainer very literally. And by "literally", I mean she's a virtual person you can see on the screen. And her name is Maya. Don't be fooled, though. Yourself Fitness is not just for children and gamers and it's actually less a "game" than it is a powerful exercise and dieting tool (otherwise it wouldn't be in our top ten). Very little in terms of depth and flexibility is sacrificed for the sake of playability - you still get a database of over 4500 recipes and 500 distinct exercises to choose from and you can still set your own fitness goals, see them achieved in graphical form and plan your meals and grocery lists day by day. A key difference is that Yourself Fitness is much more oriented towards exercise than most dieting software packages, which tend to include exercise logging as an aspect of calorie budgeting but don't go anywhere near as far as Yourself Fitness does. In this program Maya guides you through whole exercise routines customized to suit your stated fitness goals and set to appropriate music, which you can follow at your own pace (warning: the music is mostly electronic and gets a bit samey after a while, so you do need a tolerance for techno). You can even ask Maya to incorporate any special equipment you own into her routines - by which I mean exercise balls, hand weights, exercise steps and suchlike. A minor gripe some people have is that your ability to customize these workouts largely depends around you telling Maya what you would like to do and her sorting out the specifics for you - they would like to have a greater degree of control over exactly how the workouts are constructed. For example, if a particular exercise aggravates an injury of yours it is quite difficult to get her to exclude it from future routines. Because Maya's exercise classes are computer generated rather than filmed, they're also very flexible and can incorporate almost any type of exercise you desire. So you can have her teach you Pilates or yoga, train for strength or flexibility, focus on toning a particular part of your body or just work on general weight loss. There are more than 500 distinct exercises she can teach you and they can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways to suit your changing needs. This means that every exercise class you take will be different - no more boring, samey workouts. The workout sessions even evolve as they go along. At intervals Maya asks you how you feel and you can reply based on a number of options (none of them too obscene) and she will adjust the remainder of the session accordingly. This means you can ask her to ease off if you're about to expire or scream if you want to go faster. This element of interactivity may sound silly at first, but somehow it helps to be able to answer back every now and again. Another aspect of this flexibility is that you can choose when you like to exercise to suit your lifestyle and schedule a session with Maya accordingly. Even if you subsequently forget about it, she won't, and she'll remind you. Plus, she always knows when you miss a session. Whilst this can be annoying at times it does keep you from skipping too many sessions and letting your regime slip - as in all things, it's important to stay regular. The eerie thing is that being held accountable for your progress by someone other than yourself really helps keep you on the straight and narrow, even if the someone in question isn't actually a real person (but don't tell her I said that). In fact, Maya is very cleverly designed not to be too bossy so that users won't find her pushy or annoying - she is constantly checking on how you are getting on and adjusting her sessions accordingly rather than whipping you ever onwards like a slave driver. Physically, too, she is designed to be inoffensively slim rather than intimidatingly perfect. No doubt a lot of users would like to be able to change her eye color or weight, maybe try out different outfits on her or even make her dance like a monkey for their amusement (the possibilities are endless and potentially quite dubious), but Yourself Fitness doesn't include this option. That's a good thing because making her the user's plaything would damage the necessary concept that Maya is someone you should pay attention to and hold yourself accountable to. It's in everyone's best interests that Maya remains her own woman. Having said that, it's also nice that, unlike a real woman, you can pause her. An interesting option would have been to be able to choose a male or female trainer (especially if you're doing weight training, for example - the image of Maya with bulging biceps somehow doesn't quite work), but clearly the designers decided a female avatar of nondescript race would appeal to the widest spectrum of users - or at least intimidate or annoy the fewest. All in all, the exercise side of Yourself Fitness is clearly a clever new way of providing you with the motivation, skills and flexibility needed to optimally exercise at home, but what about its dietary applications? it's fair to say that Yourself Fitness is stronger on exercise classes than it is on dietary health, but it doesn't exactly stint on the weight loss advice either. Yourself Fitness includes details of over 4500 recipes and a grocery list for each of them, along with detailed instructions to guide you through the cooking process. The day by day meal planning facility is probably Yourself Fitness's strongest diet-specific feature. It's fairly flexible and allows you to set your calorie quota for each day, so for example you can allocate yourself more calories for an active weekend spent hang gliding and then make up for it by making sure you consume less during the week. A nice way the dietary and exercise features interact is by telling you how many calories you will have burnt off at the end of each session, which can be hugely motivating. If you do well and Maya is pleased with you, you'll feel pleased with yourself too, bizarre though that is when you think about it. At the end of the day, the range and flexibility of dieting features aren't as extensive as you will find with most of the diet-focused software you can buy, but when were they as much fun as this! If you want to get into serious calorie budgeting or keep track of your BMR, or if you simply want to lose weight whilst doing as little physical exercise as possible, you'd be better off trying out one of the other packages in our top ten, otherwise Yourself Fitness has a lot to offer. The flip side of the lack of dietary stats, charts and pages of nutritional information is that this package might well appeal to dieters who hate numbers and fiddly details and would be better suited to a more visual approach to losing weight. Bear in mind that, though this software is available international. In the UK it's known as "PC Fitness" rather than "Yourself! Fitness". This is presumably because "Yourself! Fitness" is a silly title. "PC Fitness" at least makes some sort of sense and sounds like a name - "Yourself! Fitness" sounds more like two words and an exclamation mark that just happen to live next door to each other. Though this package is rather different from any of the others in our top ten, it falls into roughly the same price range. It's not quite the cheapest, but if you find that the Yourself Fitness system works for you then you'll probably consider it a bargain. Admittedly, a virtual fitness trainer may seem like a silly idea at first, but give it a try - as the saying goes, if it's crazy but it works then it's not crazy. Admittedly, it's designed more for the exercise -focused user who wants to eat a healthier diet too than the serious dieter who sees exercise as a peripheral activity, but Yourself Fitness is still a very clever idea and deserves to be hugely popular. Click the button below to check it out for yourself...
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