Start your New Year fitness goals off right with FitStar.  It’s a free-to-play fitness app for iPad that provides workout videos and charts your progress.  I reviewed the original game about a year and a half ago, and now they have a version of it with Yoga exercises and poses.  Find out if it’s worth paying money to subscribe to in this review.

FitStar Yoga is free to download, and right now for a limited time they are offering one of their freestyle programs, Easy Flow, for free as well.  But in order to experience the full game, you’ll need to pay money to subscribe to Premium.  This review is based on the Premium edition.

One thing to note is that in order to play, you will need to provide an email address.  Luckily you have the option to turn off notifications in the game.  Once you provide that and take a short test, you’ll be able to start.  The game will give you one Yoga workout at a time to select that is usually about 20 to 30 minutes.  In the videos, you’ll be able to see real life people doing the Yoga poses and there is a timer to show you how long to hold the pose.  The instructor will give you tips and instructions, too.  Once you finish a workout, you can see how many calories you’ve burned and you can even earn in-game badges.  The Premium program also lets you select Freestyle workouts with specific themes like morning stretches, before bedtime Yoga, and strength training poses.  Although I honestly didn’t notice much difference between them.

You don’t really need any extra equipment to play, just your iPad or iPhone.  The people in the videos use Yoga mats and Yoga blocks sometimes, though.  There are a few little problems here and there, however.  The transitions from pose to pose sometimes go by a little too quickly and they oftentimes don’t explain the poses very well.  It helps to have a small prior knowledge of Yoga.  Also I think this game is best suited for iPad, as I don’t see how you could see things on the small iPhone screen.  But I guess it is good to have workout videos wherever you go.  And finally, for certain exercises you can tap to select if it is too easy, just right, or too hard.  They’re supposed to change the program based on what you select, but I really didn’t notice any difference.  Plus they’ll go ahead and put in really hard poses, like standing on one foot while the rest of your body is parallel to the ground, or making you stand on your hands with your knees leaning into your elbows.  But other than that, I think Yoga fans could get a lot of use out of this program.

Kid Factor:

Parental supervision is recommended when starting up, as you have to put in an email and other info.  Reading skill isn’t needed, but I think it would be a great idea for parents and kids to use the program to exercise together.

Tags: Game Reviews