Thank you to Ubisoft for providing me with a copy of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012 and sponsoring this fitness diary series. Please click here to learn more about Ubisoft. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions are my own.
(Remember last week when I said the motion tracking is better with this version? Here's a photo of me taking a photo of the TV screen -- it's kinda hard to shoot a photo while exercising. If you're at all familiar with Xbox Kinect fitness games, this is pretty darn impressive.)
This is the week I officially fell in love with Your Shape. Also the week my 13-year-old explained how to pause the game while I checked on dinner (I was roasting a chicken while doing mountain climbers -- multitasking!)
Since I'm really digging running (at least this week), I have my cardio accounted for, so I focused on toning with Your Shape.
I love the encouragement from the disembodied voice on the game. She also calls out tips to improve your technique, and thus, your score. Case in point: mountain climbers. Every time that exercise comes up on a DVD, I ALWAYS say "Mountain climbers? I can't do mountain climbers!" But unlike a DVD, your Kinect is "watching" you, so you can't blow 'em off. So I did them and apparently I did a good job because The Voice kept saying "good job!"
After the toning workout, I had a little fun with some Bollywood dancing and cooled down with the yoga-tai chi combo, which I absolutely aced.
I'm not sure about the calorie counting on the game, though. It said I only burned 60 calories during my workout, but my BodyMedia FIT registered 181 calories.
Some tips from this week's workouts:
- The toning workouts use weights, so make sure they're nearby before you begin. I had to pause the game and run into the bedroom for the dumbbells.
- The game is the most accurate if it can really scan your body, so try not to wear anything too baggy. I switched from a long-sleeved shirt to a T-shirt halfway through Thursday's workout and the Kinect was better able to track my upper-body movements, but I had on some baggy Adidas cropped pants and my lower half looked a little blobby on the screen (aside from the usual blobbiness).
- You'll also score higher on proper technique if you don't crane your neck to look at the TV while you're down on the floor.
- But how do you follow the exercises that way? There are sound cues to get the right pacing. My score rose impressively when I kept my nose to the virtual grindstone.
Want to win your own copy?
At the end of my five-week series, I'll choose a random comment from the five weeks of posts and that person will win a copy of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved 2012, so comment away!
