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.

Week two and I haven’t missed a day yet!

• This week, I’m definitely noticing that the workouts are getting easier and that I have more stamina.
• I’m used to muscle aches being due to a one-time event, like helping someone move.  After a couple days, they would go away and I’m back to “normal”.  Now the aches I’m feeling mean I’m stretching myself and I’ll be better than “normal” when they go away.
• I’m pro-rut. That is, I like to do get in a habit (some good, some bad).  I so surprised that I’m now in the habit of exercising every morning.  I’m actually wondering what it will feel like the first day that I don’t get up and work out.
• I’m feeling it in my ankles.  It’s a little weird, but I guess my ankles need strengthening also.
• There are targeted exercise routines for different parts of the body, so you can focus on your arms or your abs, etc.  Since I’m on the “shape up” program, I’ve been trying out a little of all of them (except the one listed as “sports preparation”, that one seems a little too intense for me.)
• The loading times between exercises is easier to handle now that I’m not just doing the two-minute starter ones.  I don’t mind a little break.

When I first started it had me select an objective, and I said I wanted to “shape up and slim down”.  It then set a goal for 360 minutes of exercise (30 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for 4 weeks).  But at the end of last week, I was only at 6% done.  I figured out my problem.  As part of its plan for me, it wants me to choose from a set of specific activities.  Unfortunately for me, that set doesn’t include a lot of the very basic easy ones.  Now that I’m ready to move from light to medium exercise, I’m doing more from the “shape up” set and am now up to 22% done meeting my objective.  I’m planning on hitting 100% before the end of the year.  It’s also showing me as burning almost 600 calories so far, but most of those were this week as well.

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.

I’m not into fitness.  I lead a fairly sedentary life and I like it that way.  I like the weather to be 72 degrees and fluorescent.  So it’s not shocking that I’m out of shape. I’m also software developer and my hobbies are programming, playing computer and board games, and watching TV.   That’s why I jumped at the chance to review Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012, or YSFE for short.  My wife just picked up an Xbox 360 on a Black Friday sale and this way I get to work out and play video games at the same time!

I just saw a post on Lifehacker on giving your New Year’s resolution a 30-day trial, and I’m already doing that!  YSFE recommends 3 workouts a week, but I’ve been doing it every morning this week.  I left the house this morning at 5:30, but I still got up a little earlier that I would have so that I could work out. My biggest surprise was that I had more energy than I did before.  I had been planning on going to bed earlier to offset the early mornings, but I didn’t and I still had more energy all day.

Some notes from Week 1:

• There’s a several minute intro video that you have to watch once per person.  I first watched it when my wife was signed in, then had to watch it again before my first workout.
• The Kinect interface works very well. We have a Wii Fit Plus, which works well for specific activities, but the Kinect really tracks all of your movements pretty accurately for working out and for navigating through the menus.
• Some of the warm-ups are really fun.  My favorite is the Wall Breaker which is basically a punching and kicking game.
• Waiting for each workout to load seems to take a long time, and it either shows you how to do the workout (for the simple warm-up ones) or it shows a health fact or tip.  But there’s only a few tips and they repeat over and over.
• The workouts are targeted at specific areas, like cardio or glutes, and do a good job demonstrating the exercises as well as monitoring you and telling you when you’re not doing them right.  This is very helpful since I tend to cheat (that is score the points with the least amount of effort).
• Also, I’m so out of shape that I often run out of steam during the longer routines. (I’m expecting this to change over the next few weeks.)  Some of the workouts expect dumbells, but I wasn’t prepared.
• There’s a wide variety of activities from running through Manhattan to performing a Bollywood dance number.  It may take me a month to try them all.

My goal when I started YSFE was to slim down so that I could fit more comfortably in some of my older clothes (I think they shrink over time).  I can’t tell if that’s happening but I can certainly say that my energy level is way up and I think I’m going to try to stick to my every day schedule.  If I can make it to New Year’s Eve, I might actually have enough energy to stay up until midnight this year!

I’ll be posting diary updates every week for the next four weeks.  After that, we’ll be giving away a free copy of YFSE to a random commenter chosen from the comments on one of the five diary posts, including this one.