I’m a gamer and I’m of course gamer sized, but I also live in the middle of corn and cow country with no gyms for guys in the area (there is a curves and a female only dancercise school near by but nothing for men) but I need to do something. Last weekend I picked up a Kinect (for the kids of course ). This upcoming weekend I plan to try to convince the wife into allowing me to pick up an exercise game. I’ve been using Kinect Adventures, but I wanted something that I can actually use to track progress instead of just guessing how much rally ball burns a minute. To that extent does anyone here have experience with both “Your Shape” and “EA Active”? I do a bit of heavy lifting helping out with the farm on the weekends, but I was looking for some real calorie burners that I can do through out the week. Both get alright reviews for different reasons and each seems to have their own following but I was looking for input from a group of people that I think I can trust. IF this has been asked already point me to that thread and I’d be happy to read there. I tried to search for it on here and didn’t find anything.

Thanks,

I do ea active! Granted, mine is for the Wii, but I really like it. I think the structure and the exercises are about the same for both, so I can't speak for any glitches or technical stuff, but here's my thoughts on the actual program.

As for calorie burning, EA active has a nice thing where you can set either a time... and it will tell you how many calories you'll burn in a (usually) all-over body workout, or you can make a custom workout... and it will tell you how many calories you'll burn and what areas you've targeted. I don't know what they max out to, time-wise, I've been doing the 30 Day challenge workouts (about 21-25 minutes, depending on how many times my kids bug me) and then a custom 15 minute cardio-only routine.

You also get a journal where you can record what you've done, for how long, and about how hard you worked, and it will let you know how much calories you've burned. And you get extra 'points' for filling out a quick survey about how much water you drank, how many portions of veggies you ate, etc (which helps remind me to drink more water and eat more veggies) and for adding in non-EaA activities like walking or yoga or... um, other stuff I forget. And the sports/exercises are varied enough that they're still pretty fun after the tenth time playing in as many days. I am kicking ASS at my imaginary basketball game.

The negatives- the bands they start you out with are pretty light, if you're throwing around hay bales or something, you're probably going to want to start off with something stronger. And it's a little annoying that I'm playing the same game under the same profile, but I have to input that I did 15 minutes of cardio in the journal instead of having it update my journal automatically. Also, the dance cardio workouts are all pretty much the same routine, speeded up or slowed down, and even the fastest one is kinda slow.

Also- OWWWWWW the "Squat and hold" is a killer.

I played EA Active on Nintendo and it was a nice program. It had some very good workouts.

I currently use Your Shape and I find it to be very effective. It has the best Kinnect interface I have used so far. The cardio boxing section is worth the price alone.