Wii My Fitness Coach - assessment and first workouts

[Guest guest]

Today I started working with the Wii My Fitness Coach (I think I mistakenly called it My Personal Trainer in other posts). I did the fitness assessment first. It evaluates your cardio (up to 2 minutes of jumping jacks), upper body strength (up to 40 pushups on bent knees), core strength (up to 60 crunches), lower body strength (some number of squats) and flexibility fitness (reach test). You can also take measurements of biceps, chest, waist, hips and thighs and input those (I did). It doesn't actually tell you how you come out, which was a little disappointing but it does use the results to tell you which area it thinks you should focus on and will design workouts for with that ultimate goal in mind, though you can choose to do workouts with a different primary focus too. My ultimate goal, not surprisingly, was cardio. After 10 workouts it has you do the evaluation again, I hope it gives you indications of progress then. After the evaluation, I did a cardio workout with it. You can tell it if you have any equipment (heart monitor, step, ball or hand weights) and it will design the workout with those tools. I told it today I only had a monitor because I didn't want to take more time to go get equipment from the basement and bring it upstairs.

At the beginning, it, actually "Maya" (she's the computer animated person from the Mc's workouts and something Sara has too) asks how you're feeling. I was foolish enough to say "Great" or whatever the top level would be. Her response was "Okay, you'd better bring it!" I chose to work out for 45 minutes and away we went. She did very simple cardio, no combos. The fanciest it got were turn steps (I've only ever done those on a step!) and some odd moving lunge thing that I never quite got (I learned about the tutorial function towards the end of the workout but will use it next time I see that). I did my own version of it which kept my heart rate up just fine. In fact, for this supposedly training my cardio functioning, it had me above my zone quite often! I was actually in it for over 22 minutes, which is great but I could have been in it longer if I would have tried to keep the intensity down. I wasn't too tired or anything though for the most part, so I just kept going. It felt like a challenge and I didn't want to give up! There was a lot of high impact. There was also simple low impact too. I'm okay with high impact but I didn't see a way to tell Maya not to do high impact. You can tell her to reduce the intensity (or raise it) and that might change the impact but I didn't change it so I don't know. It was fun though. I chose to do my workout with 80s tunes for music but it was repetitive and awful, nothing I recognized either. I know she changes the workout each time and you can choose different music and backgrounds (and you get to unlock more music and more backgrounds as you do more workouts too) so maybe I'll try something else next time.

The bottom of the screen shows you what exercise you're doing and the next one scrolls onto the screen from the side, as your cue to what's coming next. It will also show how much time is left, the difficulty level of the exercise (1-5 with 5 being the hardest) and, at least in my case, where your heart rate monitor should be (a range) for that exercise. Very interesting. Mine was usually above where she said I should be. My only criticism of this particular workout, and I have no idea if it is consistent with other workouts you do, is that there was no stretch at the end. In fact, towards the end, she had me on the floor doing some glute work and a little bit of other lower body work and then there were a couple of spinal twists and that was about it. I really needed more stretching so I chose a 15 minute workout with an emphasis on flexibility. This was also frustrating because the first 8 minutes were more cardio, including high impact. So I decided to do my own stretching and watch the workout instead. Every so often, Maya asks how you're doing and when I said something was too hard (I wanted to see if she'd make it slower and more stretching) she said she'd make a note of it for my next workout. I tried bringing down the intensity with the menu but that didn't seem to change it much. Suddenly, it switched to yoga stretches so I jumped into that. There was no flow at all but the stretches were held decently well and were done on both sides. Oh yeah, Maya also does not mirror cue but everything was so simplistic that it didn't seem to matter with either workout. I used the "Latin" music for the flexibility workout and it was better. I noticed too Maya only has a few phrases she repeats over and over (kinda like Austin!) but you can choose to keep her quiet too so I might do that next time, especially for a longer workout. Overall, I liked it and will use it again, possibly even will try to fit in a 15 minute workout tomorrow with it (I want to unlock more music & backgrounds!). It is in my family room though, and with summer vacation starting this summer I'm not sure how often I'll use it since I prefer to do most workouts without people walking through my space so we'll see. I'm glad I got it though, it should be fun and interesting to keep using, especially if there is more feedback coming soon.