Speed Strolling
I had originally scheduled myself to review Pilates Conditioning for Weight Loss this week, but I just couldn’t face another Pilates video, so I replaced it with Get Moving! Walking for Weight Loss. It’s still “for weight loss”, so it’s practically the same thing, right?
It had been a rough week, and frankly, I hate Pilates. I thought that I was doing myself a favor with this substitution; that a walking workout was going to be more my speed. That was an incorrect assumption.
Even the warmup for the Get Moving! Walking for Weight Loss workout starts off at full tilt, walking at a very brisk pace. When they named the DVD “Get Moving!”, they meant it as a direct order.
After a few minutes of racing along in the warmup, instructor Madeleine Lewis implies that we’ve merely been strolling up to that point, and we’re really going to kick it up a notch. Meanwhile, I’m already out of breath from that few minutes of “strolling”.
Shortly after we increase the speed, she talks about how we’re taking it back down to a stroll. However, the music keeps going at the same pace, and it seems as though her feet keep going at the same pace too. It was the speediest stroll I’ve ever done.
The workout is broken into three 10-minute workout segments (eight minutes of walking and two minutes of strength training each), and one 10-minute stretching segment for a cooldown.
In the introduction, Lewis explains that you can do all the segments or just one, but the DVD menu doesn’t really support this. You can play all four segments back to back, or you can customize the workout by choosing the order the segments will play in … but you still have to choose all four segments before the workout will begin. I guess you put the segments you don’t want to do at the end, and then just stop the DVD when you’ve had enough?
Each segment is intended to be standalone, but the first one is the only one that really incorporates a warmup. As mentioned previously, though, it is pretty zippy for a warmup. Almost like not having a warmup at all.
The segments get progressively more difficult, according to Lewis’ introductory remarks. Personally, I found the second segment the most difficult to follow. It was undoubtedly the introduction of the mambo in that segment that threw me off.
That’s right; this is one of those walking workouts where they figure plain old walking will be too boring. So, they try to mix it up with more complicated steps like the grapevine and the dreaded mambo. Arm movements are thrown in as well, to up the choreography difficulty level.
Walking workouts are usually among the most accessible for the uncoordinated, but I really struggled with this one. The pace was breakneck, the moves were more complicated than just walking, and Lewis often didn’t cue the next move until we were already doing it (or not doing it, in my case).
There were two exercisers with Lewis, one showing advanced versions and one showing beginner versions of the moves. Unfortunately, these modifications were more about making the move high or low impact than they were about the choreography, so they were not as much help as I’d hoped for.
I made it through the workout by slowing the pace way down, and leaving out the arm movements during some of the more complicated steps. This was good in that the speed was doable, but bad in that I was constantly out of sync with the instructor (making it harder to follow what she was doing).
One thing I did really enjoy about this workout was the super-long cooldown/stretch segment. Often the cooldown is an afterthought in workout DVDs, lasting a minute or two at best. It was nice to spend a whole ten minutes and really feel properly stretched after the workout.
Still, I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this DVD. It’s not a terrible walking workout, but there are much better alternatives out there … walking workouts where I can keep up with the instructor and don’t have to just march to the beat of my own drum.