Workout/Life Balance
I’m embarrassed to have missed my self-imposed Sunday night deadline for this week’s workout review. I got the chance to go to the final two days of the US Open this weekend; I got home late, hot, tired, and sunburned … and completely forgot to finish and post the review.
As with workouts, so it is with workout reviews: the trick is to get back on track as soon as possible, so here is my slightly belated review of Minna Optimizer: Balanced Blend.
This DVD features two former VHS workouts by instructor Minna Lessig, packaged together in one DVD. They haven’t really done that much in the way of repackaging, so there are just two menu choices – play the first VHS tape, or play the second VHS tape.
The first “tape” is Fat Eliminator. This includes a 30-minute “Fat Eliminator” workout, immediately followed by a 15-minute bonus “Blast the Fat” workout.
The Fat Eliminator workout has six circuits, each consisting of 1.5 minutes of strength followed by 2.5 minutes of cardio. The problem I had here was the total lack of distinction between strength and cardio. In some of the circuits, the cardio was just the strength moves sped up.
I felt like the strength segments moved too quickly to really get the strength training benefit, and the cardio was just an even faster version of the same strength moves. The cardio also added a lot of jumping, which considerably raises the difficulty factor for the uncoordinated exerciser.
Instructor Minna Lessig did a good job of cueing the exercises; it’s just that the moves were somewhat complicated and went very quickly.
The bonus Blast the Fat workout held the promise of at least using hand weights, and generally being more strength-oriented. This bonus workout was more what I had expected of a strength training workout.
The second “tape” is Strength & Grace, which includes one 46-minute strength-focused yoga routine. It’s an interesting mix of not-really-yoga moves thrown in with the traditional yoga poses (alternating tree pose with squats, for example), but this is essentially a yoga workout without the lying-down relaxation time at the end.
In this workout, things moved a lot slower, and one of the exercisers was showing modifications to the moves. Lessig’s great cuing was still in evidence. This workout was much easier for me to follow, even though the ab exercises were nowhere in the vicinity of ‘easy’ to do.
I’m okay with workouts that are challenging because I lack the strength to do all the moves yet. The ones I hate are the workouts that I’ll never get the hang of because I lack the coordination to do them.
The only part of the Strength & Grace workout where my lack of coordination really came into play was the warmup, where the choreography was a little tricky. As I’ve said in other reviews, it’s just the warmup, so as long as I’m moving around, it doesn’t matter how closely I’m following the actual warmup routine.
Most of the Amazon reviews I looked at preferred the Fat Eliminator workout on this DVD, and thought Strength & Grace was just so-so. For me, it was the other way around. I will probably not do the Fat Eliminator workout again, but the Strength & Grace one is more likely to appear in my workout rotation at some point. The mix of yoga and strength intrigued me, and the workout was challenging enough to be interesting without being completely overwhelming.
I’ll certainly look for other Minna Lessig workouts in the future. I liked her cuing and her not-overly-perky encouragement. I just need to find the right balanced blend of good instructor and simple choreography.