If you consume any amount of news media, you’ll probably guess the number one thing every outlet can’t tell you enough about. Hint: It’s not a Kardashian. I’m referring of course, to dat nor’easter. Call me crazy, but it’s almost like the outside world wants to test your resolve to finally get off your butt and exercise. Mother Nature heard all about your New Year’s resolution to lose X /gain X, and she was all like, “Oh, reallys?”
Sensing an opportunity, no doubt, Microsoft released Xbox Fitness as a launch app for the Xbox One, back in November 2013. Of course, no one cared all that much. This was especially true in the States, where stuffing our faces through the last month of the year is not only an accepted custom, but an eerily unavoidable one in some circles.
The genius here of course, was in making sure that Xbox Fitness was already available and geared to go for anyone with a Gold Membership and an Xbox One by early 2104, when the madness of eating all of that pie is destined to catch up to your pie-loving butt.
“Not to worry,” your Xbox One says, “I’m here for you…and your butt.”
And indeed it is. [hr style=”striped”]
Xbox Fitness is an impressively intuitive successor to last generation’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, Nike+ Kinect Training, Kinect Sports, and yes, even the Dance Central series.
Where all of the last generations offerings were perfectly happy to offer feedback based on proper movement, Xbox Fitness takes advantage of the Kinect 2.0’s redesign to offer personalized feedback based on speed and form. I would have to take my Kinect apart to know for sure, but based on my usage so far, I’m fairly comfortable guessing that the Kinect uses heat tracking to determine which muscles you are currently working, and offers feedback based on that.
Not content with simply offering biometric feedback and ongoing encouragement, (“Great job! Keep at it!” mine says, and of course, “Dig Deeper!”) Xbox Fitness awards you fitness points for maintaining proper form. Keep at it for a set amount of time, and you unlock a multiplier, which doubles your fitness points boon. The points you earn are in turn used to compare your performance with your friends and other people in your age group, and to throw challenges at you throughout each workout. The hypercompetitive stats nerd in me was in heaven, even as my aching muscles paid the price.
The marketing materials for Xbox Fitness tout “famous trainers!” as a selling point, which you know, these days simply must include Jillian Michaels; whom I actually find really scary, even when she’s not yelling at some poor reality-show contestant. As an Insanity and P90x alumn, I was pretty excited about seeing Shaun T and Tony Horton. It was so much like seeing old friends in a brand new setting.
What’s more, there was no longer any wiggle room for poor form or extra water breaks. Being guilty of any of these workout sins would result in my multiplier quickly disappearing. My stats would drop, and then you tell me, what would I do? The shame would be unbearable, and worst of all, Shaun T would know. [hr style=”striped”]
A few years ago, I attended a panel which introduced and discussed the philosophy behind Fitocracy. It was the first time I heard someone speak about the gamification of fitness as if it were a real thing, and not just some abstract concept. It’s a good thing someone was listening too, because Xbox Fitness is without a doubt the evolution of that idea.
Like anything else offered through an Xbox console, Xbox Fitness offers achievements, levels, and stats tracking to your heart’s content. It’s an app that’s obviously in its infancy, as it currently only offers a small sampling of each series being represented. For instance, anyone who has done Insanity will tell you that it was designed to be a 60-day conditioning program. At the moment, Xbox Fitness only offers 3 videos in the series. For now, that’s more than enough, as I’m sure Microsoft is testing the waters and waiting to see how wholeheartedly we will embrace this.
If it proves successful, the next step should definitely be to offer a greater variety of workouts. The next step after that, should be to further engage these the already-familiar trainers in the roster, and commission them to create workouts specifically designed with the Xbox Fitness mechanism in mind. I mean, think about it: Can you say Insanity X-One? Or oh! oh! How about P90X-One? Why am I so good at this?
Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine that at some point down the road we might have the ability to automatically sync Xbox Fitness workouts with Fitocracy or some similar platform. Far more likely than that, we might see Xbox Fitness and Nike+ working together like some kind of fitness robot butler. This would be awesome, and I seriously don’t know what I would do with myself, except become even more stat-crazed.
So far, it would appear that the Xbox One as a console is committed to its course, no matter what the purists of the gaming world have to say. Xbox Fitness proves that its mission to take over your living room is not an empty one. You’d better believe that the choice to enlist trainers who have already been household names for years was no more an accident than your late November-early December Pumpkin pie binge.
I’m sure you know what this means. Every time you feel tempted to play a round of Battlefield 4 instead of working out, you will turn on your Xbox One, and be confronted with the image of Jillian Michaels and her abs as they stare into submission.
In short, your butt is fresh out of excuses. But cheer up: Swimsuit season will be all the better for it.
