A few months ago, Lance and i purchased a new Wii game called My Fitness Coach. We had each individually heard good things about it. And the Wii Fit was just not cutting it, for me in particular, as an exercise tool. At least not by itself.
What follows is my assessment.
The Fit has some fun balance games, but those are its best feature. The other categories are “ok” and i’ll elaborate below. The graphs provided for tracking your progress in the Fit are also great. At one point i was researching if it was possible to download your weight loss graph because i wanted to put it on my blog. Negatives – no matter what you’re trying to do, you have to go through too many screens to do it. And switching profiles? Very difficult.
My Fitness Coach has filled many of the gaps in the Wii Fit. It far surpasses the Fit in a few crucial areas. However, it is not a complete replacement for the Fit, as it is missing some of the Fit’s nice features. But both together make a great overall physical fitness challenge. Here are a few points of the major differences.
- Initial profile.
- The Fit imports some of your basic data from your Mii, and doesn’t ask for much else. The first time you play, you must complete a body test. We found this pretty annoying when we were in a party setting, where each person just wanted their own Mii to represent them in the balance games. With so many screens, the profile definition and initial body test (along with the requisite commentary from the cartoon Balance Board) probably takes 10 minutes.
- My Fitness Coach took us each through an extensive profile definition that took 15-20 minutes. We used a tape measure to get circumferences of various parts of our bodies, as well as performed some basic fitness tests (how many push-ups can you do?). You have the option to skip most of it, though. Weight and measurements must be entered manually, as this game does not use the balance board.
- Number of pages.
- The Fit has too many “pages”. The cartoon balance board tries to be cute every single time, when all i want to do is turn on the game and go play balance games. I don’t want to hear your damn fitness tips.
- After experiencing the Fit, it surprised me how easy it was to get to the “meat” of the game in My Fitness Coach. You tell the trainer you want to workout, and she asks three questions – what type of workout (cardio, upper body, pilates, etc), how long do you want to workout, and what equipment you have available. That’s it. No superfluous cutesy tips or lectures.
- Switching profiles
- To switch profiles in Fit, the common scenario being your family or friends are gathered and are trying to beat each other in downhill skiing, you have to back-out through a dozen screens. Getting back to the downhill skiing with the new person similar goes through another dozen or more screens.
- In My Fitness Coach, you rarely need to switch profiles, because there is less of a “game” element. You wouldn’t be playing this game in a party setting. (It’s focus is truly working out.) But, the profile switching is extremely easy, 2-4 screens only.
- Multiple players
- The Fit is 1-player only. (With the one exception of the cardio-running where you can have a friend join you.) I found this to be somewhat annoying when Lance and i were trying to workout together. We would do the weight section together, for example, but only one person can get “credit” within the game.
- My Fitness coach has a Group Workout mode. You then select the names of those who will be joining in this workout, and everyone gets credit for the workout in the log. It’s a nice feature.
- The “meat” of the game
- Fit – There are four categories, each containing a bunch of “mini-games”. Much fanfare is made of being 1st place in each game. This is appropriate in some cases but not in others.
- Balance Games – Excellent. All of the games are unique, fun and engaging. Except the weird one with the candle. These are great in a group, or just by yourself, while you try to beat your previous best score.
- Aerobics – Not great. There aren’t that many exercises, but they do get you moving. You can increase the intensity to a good level with the running and the Rhythm Boxing, and the Hula-Hoop game is a very good ab workout. But even the longest workout is only a few minutes. I’d like to see a 30-minute string of these things, without the interruptions of having to go through a dozen screens in between each exercise.
- Yoga – Pretty good. Balance and core exercises are important and often neglected. I wish there were more exercises – i believe they limited themselves by always trying to include the balance board and/or wii-mote in the exercise somehow. This is fine for poses where balance is an issue, but there are many yoga poses that happen on the ground. I also wish there were options to go through all poses at once instead of having to click through a dozen screens in between each pose.
- Strength – Good. The exercises that are there are solid. Some are downright hard. I won’t say that you won’t get a good workout, but when i think of strength training, i think of weights. This is more like calisthenics. Push-ups, lunges, twists, stand-up-lie-down, etc. Definitely good for you, but it’s not a muscle-building exercise like pumping iron would be. You could easily get to a point where you wanted a more intense workout.
- Fit – There are four categories, each containing a bunch of “mini-games”. Much fanfare is made of being 1st place in each game. This is appropriate in some cases but not in others.
- The trainer
- The trainers in both games are roughly equivalent, robot-types that offer encouraging words. I find the Fit trainers to be more annoying because they talk too much at the beginning and end of each exercise (again, more screens to click through).
- Tracking progress
- Fit is superior in this category, providing several attractive graphs to track your weight loss, BMI, Wii Fit Age, and workouts. You can also add time for workouts you did outside of Fit.
- My Fitness Coach may provide a graph or something, but i actually haven’t found it yet. You can enter workouts that were not performed in the game to get credit, but i haven’t seen where this is logged.
We’ve made use of both games together when we get in stretches of times where we are wanting to workout more. For me, i see the Fit as more of a “fun” game while My Fitness Coach is more of a “workout” game. I’ve seen a few other workout games out there but haven’t tried any other ones yet.
October 16th, 2009 3:17 am
That’s a pretty spot on comparison of the two. I played My Fitness Coach back when it was called Yourself! Fitness on the Xbox. From what I understand it’s still essentially the same game with Maya acting as a virtual personal trainer.
Nintendo recently released Wii Fit Plus which addresses a lot of the shortcomings with Wii Fit. Multiplayer is much better, the balance games are much improved, and you can string together exercise routines so that you don’t have to go back to the menus between exercises. They also added a “simple test” so you don’t have to listen to all the balance board’s “adorable” ramblings.
Even with all the improvements, My Fitness Coach would offer a significantly better workout. But in terms of fun and usability, Wii Fit Plus is a major improvement over the original.