I have a new Wii Coach!

I have a new coach, but she's a whole lot like my old coach. Her name is Maya, sound familiar? I recently (two months ago is recently, right?) got My Fitness Coach for Wii.

Back when I used to train with Maya, under the guise of Yourself! Fitness, she kicked me into pretty good shape. This was before my first round of P90X, but I definitely had very noticeable results - which was awesome! Then I moved on to other 90 day plans, some better than others, then I settled into the most brutal year of professional and emotional stress, and I finally started to come around the mountain, seeking a new goal/routine/trainer to kick my softened bootay back into shape.

That's when Maya showed up again. My Fitness Coach looks almost identical to Yourself! Fitness, the initial test is almost identical: Weight, Resting heart rate, Heart rate after 2 minutes of jumping jacks, then push ups, squats, crunches and a flexibility test.

This time, however, Maya allows you to also track a different and better gauge of fitness than mere weight, measurements (waist, bust, hips, biceps, thighs). I did relatively well in my initial evaluation. While I haven't been doing much in terms of full-on workout plans, I have been running tons, training for a fall full of half marathons. I maxed out the squats and crunches and had good healthy heart rates and flexibility. However, my push up skillz were LAMENTABLE! I'm not even going to tell you how few I was able to do, Tony Horton might actually hunt me down and kick my ass.

Anyway, the options after that were fairly similar. Maya recommended a workout program focusing on improving my upper body strength. I agreed. Then I had the option of selecting my workout.

Here are the changes/improvements that My Fitness Coach offer over Yourself! Fitness:

• You can get credit for non-Maya workouts, retroactively up to one week back. This is a HUUUUUUGE improvement. It always frustrated me that none of my running counted towards my goals and that Maya would reprimand me for hardly ever showing up. (I know she's not real. It still bothered me.)

• The new cooldown moves include more options and seem better suited to the workout you did, not just hamstring and quad stretches EVERY SINGLE TIME (which is how it used to be.) The only odd part about this improvement is that they clearly just recorded new audio for these moves but didn't bother trying to make it match the old audio, so all of a sudden, Maya booms at you in a slightly muffled but really loud voice "BUTTERFLY STRETCH!"*

• Group workouts - Since Big E and I like to workout together, this feature is really cool, because it allows us both to get credit for doing the workout in our own profiles, yet workout at the same time. Although when Maya checks in about how the workout was, it's odd that only one of that gets to answer that question. Would it really be that hard to ask each of us individually to track and adjust the workouts for us? Not very sure how that part works...

• There seems to be slight changes here and there to sequencing of workouts and stuff, but it's only a vague impression, I can't give you specifics there.
  

Anyway, I've been doing it for about a month or so now, and have already had my 2nd evaluation, but can't say there's been much change yet... Just 3 more push ups. Tony would still be disappointed. But overall, I still like Maya and think it's a decent home workout plan for me.


*It's possible that this only really stands out to me because this is my line of work? Maybe not though... it was pretty egregious.