Xbox One Fitness Review

We lucked out and my fiance received an Xbox One a couple of months ago.  One of their apps is "Xbox Fitness" and I've been working out with it the last week or so.

The workouts themselves are not unique to the Xbox.  They are videos that are available other places such as the 10 Minute Solutions workouts, P90X, and Jillian Michaels. Most of the workouts are free with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.  The interesting thing is the way that the workouts are set up with Kinect. You make sure the camera is pointed where you are going to be working out and it tracks your movements as you workout along with the video.  It can tell how intensely you are performing the the workout and offers suggestions such as "work those legs" if you aren't going as deep into your lunges as you could.  You are awarded points and bonuses based on how well you follow along and compares your points to the average of your age group.

All in all, I'm enjoying using this quite a bit.  The workouts are very good at getting your heart rate up and I'm dripping sweat after 10 minutes.  It's nice getting the immediate feedback that you need to move your arms more or that your leg work is good.  I'm also a fairly competitive person and like the game aspect of it where you earn points and have challenges to complete during the workout.

There are a couple of negatives so far. I had some issues with the Xbox One where when I would try to play a workout, it would crash back to the home screen.  I ended up unplugging everything and plugging it back in again so it would work. Today it crashed back to the home screen when I was in the middle of a workout, which was frustrating.  I'm hoping that this is not a hardware issue and is fixed in the next update.  You also need a lot of room to perform the workouts, which I don't have in our tiny apartment.  I'm making it work, but it's a little cramped.  Once you hit play, the first few seconds of the video are cut off so the trainer is already in the middle of the warm up exercise when the video starts.  It's not a huge deal, but it's a little jarring.

Even with its quirks, I think that Xbox One Fitness is an excellent non-gym alternative for the traditional workout.  The time flies by pretty quick and the competitiveness of point earning is good motivation to do just one more workout.