UFC Personal Trainer – Review

UFC Personal Trainer, developed by Heavy Iron Studios for Kinect, ranks among the better fitness titles on the platform. THQ and Heavy Iron partnered with the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), which certifies personal trainers nationwide, to design routines aimed at building strength, cutting weight, and improving coordination using real mixed martial arts techniques. A trainer or UFC fighter is on screen for nearly every exercise, demonstrating form and offering encouragement, and calling out missed goals before motivating the player to improve on the next attempt.

Players begin with a fitness test that tailors exercises to their physical baseline, then choose between workouts, activities, programs, quick workouts, multiplayer games and a player tracker. Workouts are led by trainers Mark Dellagrotte, Greg Jackson or Javier Mendez, using either pre-made routines or a fully custom program built from dozens of exercises. Activities include Hit the Mitts (boxing work with a trainer holding pads), Tire Flip (a squat-style motion), Speed Bag and Free Striking, alongside instructional video segments featuring UFC fighters, trainers and Rachelle Leah on topics like goal setting, weight loss and the R.I.C.E. method.

Structured 30- and 60-day programs target goals like cutting weight or building endurance, laid out on a calendar that adjusts automatically if a day is missed and alternates muscle groups day to day, consistent with NASM guidance. Warm-up and cool-down segments bookend each session, and the game supports peripherals such as dumbbells, prompting players for weight when relevant.

Multiplayer includes standard leaderboards, “Side By Side” head-to-head high-score competitions in Tire Flip or Speed Bag, “Hot Seat” turn-based competitions in Hit the Mitts or Speed Bag, and Xbox Live Challenges allowing up to 18 asynchronous Hit the Mitts challenges among friends. The Player Tracker offers a BMR calculator, personal stats, playtime, calories burned, and a muscle-group breakdown, alongside achievements designed to reinforce consistent play, including streaks for three, thirty, and one hundred consecutive days of workouts.

Kinect tracking was described as reliable and resistant to shortcuts, correctly rejecting, for example, a left-hand punch when the exercise called for the right. The main caveat is needing enough floor space for ground exercises like push-ups and sit-ups; a Nyko accessory addressing that limitation was noted as coming later that August. The Kinect version includes exclusive trainers/fighters such as Frank Mir, Kenny Florian, Diego Sanchez, Cain Velasquez and Dan Hardy. UFC Personal Trainer was scored 9 out of 10 for Xbox 360/Kinect.

UFC Personal Trainer arrived at a point when Kinect’s motion tracking was still being tested across a wide range of genres beyond the dance and party games that dominated its early library, and fitness quickly became one of the areas where the camera-based sensor made the most sense. Rather than following a workout video where mistakes go uncorrected, having the sensor confirm whether a punch, squat or strike actually lands the way it’s supposed to is the kind of feedback loop a DVD or a basic exercise app simply can’t offer. The UFC license adds a layer most competing fitness titles didn’t have: an established roster of real fighters and trainers lending credibility to a genre that can otherwise feel gimmicky, and it sits alongside THQ’s separate UFC Undisputed fighting series as a second, very different way the publisher put the UFC brand in front of players that year.

Heavy Iron Studios came to this project with a background mostly built on licensed action games rather than fitness software, having previously worked on titles tied to properties like SpongeBob SquarePants and Kung Fu Panda. That experience translating outside intellectual property into a cohesive game seems to have carried over here: the structure around trainers, programs and a calendar that adapts to missed days shows a level of polish that separates UFC Personal Trainer from a simple collection of Kinect-tracked exercises, giving it more in common with an actual personal training regimen than with a typical exergame.