Xbox One to get you off the couch with Xbox Fitness

Xbox has teamed up with celebrity fitness trainers to launch a new online service exclusively for the Xbox One that will get you off the couch to get you fit.

Called Xbox Fitness, it will take videos from the brands including Beachbody's P90X with Tony Horton and Insanity with Shaun T, as well as videos from trainers like Jillian Michaels and Tracy Anderson, and make them interactive for Kinect.

With fitness programs between 10 and 60 minutes, Xbox Fitness will organise personalised program recommendations that are based on your workout history with the service, but it will also show what the most popular workouts are for other Xbox Fitness users.

You can also use your performance stats to challenge friends or compare them with other users.

Kinected fitness

What's most interesting about the Xbox Fitness service is that it can use the Kinect to read your heart rate by seeing which muscles are most engaged, measuring the power, force and transfer of weight in your body, as well as track performance by measuring balance, tempo and form.

"What makes Xbox Fitness so innovative is the feedback it gives you," said Insanity trainer Shaun T.

"It's that little missing piece of validation that hasn't been possible for home fitness products before."

How well the monitoring will work is yet to be seen, but it has our interest piqued. However, even if it isn't medical grade monitoring, it does still sound a little bit creepy to us.

Available only on the next-gen console, Xbox Fitness should be available from "this holiday", with the yearly Xbox Fitness Pass included free with Xbox Live Gold memberships.

• Here's our round-up of everything Xbox One related.