This Christmas, the Naan family got a Wii Fit – something I’d initially been quite sceptical about but after reading great reviews was quite excited about finally getting it. Two weeks ago, for various reasons, I also bought My Fitness Coach (Wii) – another personal virtual trainer style product.

I’ve been asked by several people how they compared with each other, so it seemed sensible to compile my thoughts into a single blog post. Rather than describe each one separately, I’ve decided to split the post into various categories to give each a fair comparison: price, navigation and tracking, quality of the workout, longevity.

WARNING: this is an excessively long post and a thorough review. I will not be in the least offended if you just skip it. The rest of the post continues after the jump…

Price

Assuming you can find a copy of Wii Fit, as supplies still seem to be limited, it’ll set you back somewhere in the region of £80-£90. For that, you’ll get a copy of the Wii Fit game and an extra wii peripheral: the balance board. This, hopefully, will be used in other games but at present the range is still quite small.

My Fitness Coach currently retails in the region of £15-£18, significantly cheaper. It comes with no other equipment than the game, but if you have other exercise equipment (hand weights, heart-rate monitor, exercise ball or step) then it will incorporate them into your routine. I’d also recommend some sort of floor/yoga mat. While not essential, the extra equipment is nice to have so for a fair comparison you might want to factor in additional purchases into the cost, making the potential saving slightly smaller.

As a side issue, with both products you have to consider how you will store the new equipment when you’re not using them. Living in a small modern house, these extra bits can easily start to take over the living room!

Navigation and Tracking

The Wii Fit is very much a Nintendo branded product. It uses the cute Mii avatars for everything, many of the screens feel overly cartoonish, the text is large and clear, and the buttons are a decent size making it easy to point the controller at to click.

The Body Test tracks your weight and BMI (and rather alarmingly, adjusts the size of your Mii’s tummy accordingly) and also tests your balance, giving a seemingly rather arbitrary “Wii Fit Age”. I was a little dubious about the potential obsessiveness of weighing yourself every day, but it did seem to help motivate me to snack slightly less in the evening if my tracking showed that I had put on weight!

Over all, the interface is cute and fun, giving the feeling of playing a game rather than going to do the dreaded exercise, and anything that helps to get over that initial hurdle is fine by me.

In direct contrast, My Fitness Coach is obviously a game ported from another console system. The dialogue choices are minutely small and it’s often a challenge to click on the right one. The interface feels far less playful and game-like.

However, where it really shines is in the very thorough tracking. The initial assessment takes in a whole host of details (including weight and various body measurements) and then puts you through your paces to test your current fitness level. It will then (apparently, I haven’t got that far into it yet as I’ve only had the product for a couple of weeks) reassess you at intervals to see how you’ve progressed – your weight is not the main focus of achievement, which seems a far healthier attitude to me.

I just wish it would tie in with the balance board in order to get the weight rather than having to enter it manually, but I am probably being over picky on that score.

Quality of the Workout

With Wii Fit, you pick each exercise you want to do individually, do the exercise and then pick another one. There are four categories to choose from: yoga, muscle training, aerobics, and balance games. Initially there are not many to choose from, but you quickly unlock new games and new difficulty levels as you progress.

There is no way to set up an exercise routine and then go ahead and do it, although it does suggest additional exercises that would go well with the one you just did. This means that you can waste an awful lot of time navigating through the exercises – a 30 minute exercise routine can easily take up around 45 minutes of actual time, which can be incredibly frustrating.

The exercises themselves are surprisingly good, though. Given that its focus is mostly on improving balance and posture, there were many exercises that were challenging and tough. With the short bursts and scoring, it does feel like a game and so mental resistance is much lower as a result.

The balance board itself is a great tool for feedback, and it’s used well throughout most of the exercises to let you know how you’re doing and if you’re performing the exercise correctly (although it didn’t always get the latter right, in my experience). I did however, loathe pretty much every game in the balance category despite lots of practice and improvement.

My Fitness Coach is a completely different beast. When you start a workout, Maya (your virtual trainer) gives a recommendation for a focus (yoga, cardio, upper body, core, lower body, or flexibility) but you can override her suggestion if you so choose. You let her know what equipment you have available, what location to exercise in and what music you fancy and then you are off. She’ll stop the routine a couple of times to check that the level of exercise is about right, but other than that you are working hard for the entire duration of the routine.

I have to say that the first couple of times I was in shock, as I consider myself fairly fit after regular Wii Fit use and cycling three times a week. How wrong I was. I had the overwhelming impression that she was trying to kill me. Every set I was selecting the “I couldn’t keep up” option in the dialogue and she promised to adjust the routines next time – it did get easier, but took a few sessions until she adjusted it until I could keep up.

The tutorials are also a lot harder to access, and the pace is very fast. However, it does make good use of any equipment you have (make sure you have them out ready at the start though, you only get a few seconds to switch!). I miss having the ready feedback of the balance board, but not nearly as much as I thought I would – once you start thinking of it less as a game and more as an interactive fitness DVD with a huge variation of routines, then it makes a lot more sense.

Once the program has learned your level, this is really an effective workout system, and by god the endorphin rush at the end is good! Didn’t get that with the Wii Fit.

Longevity

The key question is, will I still be using this in several months time? Is it a fun gimmick or a worthwhile tool I’ll want to be using daily? This, to a certain extent, will depend on your own personality and needs but I’ll try and answer this from my perspective.

The Wii Fit looks great and is fun and easy to use. However, for me there were a few key areas which ultimately irritated me enough to look elsewhere and I would want to see changed for longer term use:

• The trainer’s speech and other seemingly ‘random’ dialogues within the game are repeated way too frequently. Clicking through loads of the same dialogue at the end of each exercise just wastes time and adds no useful function. Can’t it tell that I’ve showed up every day for the last 2 months and so don’t need reminding that the most benefits will come from daily practice?
• Unlocking of new exercises and difficulty levels was far too quick. I’d unlocked pretty much everything there was to unlock very early on and had nothing new to look forward to. Also, often higher difficulty levels were unlocked before you’d really mastered the lower levels which just made no sense.
• Ultimately not knowing what combination of exercises would make the best well-rounded routine meant I wasn’t being stretched enough, especially with so much downtime between individual exercises.

That said, I’m still using the Wii Fit Channel daily for weigh in and the motivation of putting a virtual stamp on a virtual calendar to “prove” I exercised. I do realise how pathetically sad that last sentence sounds.

I will probably also revisit it from time to time when motivation to exercise is low and I just want to do something light and fun to show willing.

In contrast, despite having spent at least 3-4 hours in total using My Fitness Coach, I haven’t unlocked any new locations or music yet. This is actually a good thing – I have to work at unlocking new content and I feel I have something to look forward to.

The virtual trainer and the dialogue is not getting in the way of enjoying the exercise program either, although there is some repetition, it’s minor and doesn’t grate nearly as much. There is little getting in the way of just getting on and exercising, no pages of “tips” to click through before you can get started.

The routines are varied enough that they seem fresh each time and now that the program has worked out the right level for me then I’m being challenged enough to work really hard each time without being difficult enough to make me want to give up. The music is upbeat and has done a lot to lift my mood – I’m looking forward to each day’s exercise (and even sneakily hoping it will rain on cycling days so I can substitute it with some fitness trainer time instead).

Ultimately, whether I’ll still be using it long term will depend on whether it continues to be challenging as I become fitter. So far, from what I’ve seen, it will.

Conclusions

Wii Fit has justifiably been a sell-out hit. In my opinion, it’s a perfect proof of concept product, rather than a complete exercise package, and I’m really excited to see what other games in the future will make full use of the balance board. It probably suits best someone who is starting out at regular exercise to whom the gaming aspect will appeal, and those who think they’ll use the new balance board peripheral for future games.

On the other hand, My Fitness Coach will probably suit the more advanced exerciser better, people who need a more structured workout and want something more challenging, or those on a limited budget.

However, both products are high quality, and if there was a game released tomorrow with all the best qualities of each, then I’d be very interested indeed.