Fitness and Video Game Combined in Home Workout

Maya is one of the busiest personal fitness trainers in the United States.

Each day, she designs detailed workouts tailored for her hundreds of clients. No mere mortal can pull it off.

But then again, Maya is no mere mortal.

Maya is a virtual trainer who exists only in the world of Yourself!Fitness, a new hybrid of video game and fitness video that focuses on exercise at home.

The fitness game can be played on an XBox, PC or PlayStation.

Maya is sort of what happens when a modern mad scientist combines genes from Al Pacino’s computer-generated movie star, “Simone,” exercise instructor Karen Voight and Lara Croft.

Phineas Barnes, co-founder of responDesign, is one of the men behind Yourself!Fitness. Barnes said the idea for a personal training video game came to him two years ago when he noticed that his female relatives and female future in-laws were all talking about getting in shape for Barnes’ wedding. He also took a mental note of how most electronic gifts, especially video games, were purchased by women for the boys and men in their lives.

What if there was a product that had qualities of a video game combined with the benefits of a fitness video that women could play?

Yourself!Fitness aims to fill that role, for women and men.

First, Maya takes a baseline fitness assessment. You do tests such as jumping jacks, squats, push-ups and reaching for the toes so she can determine the level of fitness she’s working with.

You give Maya the results. She crunches those numbers with vital stats such as age, height and weight and your exercise goals. She selects a regimen from a set of 500 exercises that were evaluated and approved by living, breathing personal fitness trainers certified by the American Council on Exercise.

No equipment or gadgets are needed, but if you have an exercise ball, a step bench and weights, you can “tell” Maya about those so she can include them as tools in the workouts. And if a workout is too easy or too hard, you can give Maya that feedback. You also can tell Maya how you’re feeling that day.

Although Yourself!Fitness is not a video game in the traditional sense, it incorporates gaming features such as interactivity, eye- candy graphics and the challenge of gaining access to more of the game’s music and exercise environments as your fitness improves.

There’s one shortcoming that’s going to be fixed in future versions, said Barnes: You have no way to tell Maya that you’ve decided to substitute a hike, bike ride or a soccer game for a scheduled workout. So Maya automatically assumes you’ve missed the workout.

If you like fitness videos or want to exercise solo but wouldn’t mind some virtual coaching, Your-self!Fitness might be appealing. As for Maya, she’s not about to replace a real personal trainer, Barnes said. But to some of her clients at yourselffitness.com, she comes darn close. So close that she’s described as almost, well, human.

One new client wrote that she wasn’t feeling great during the workout, and that Maya motivated her:

“She gave me an attitude that made me feel like I had to prove myself to her.”