Bait & Switch
No, bait & switch are not the names of moves in this week’s exercise DVD, Yoga Booty Ballet: Light & Easy. These are the criminal charges I felt like bringing against instructors Gillian Marloth and Teigh McDonough, after trying to complete this workout.
The Yoga Booty Ballet franchise seems pretty popular (complete with their own informercials!), and they have a number of different DVD workouts available, so I thought I’d give it a try. I chose the Light & Easy workout, because it has “Easy” right in the name.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only was it not “easy”, as described in the title, but it was also noticeably lacking in “yoga” and “ballet”.
The 50-minute workout … which is really only 39 minutes, thanks to an 11-minute infomercial for their other products at the end. So, let’s start that sentence again.
The 39-minute workout only contains 2 minutes of ballet moves, and about 6 minutes of yoga. I guess the other 31 minutes is booty?
The workout starts out with approximately 5 minutes of “intention setting”, which I thought was theoretically a nice way to focus your exercise on a specific goal. I’m not sure why so much arm flapping was required to set one’s intentions though.
The intention setting was followed by 20-minutes of fast-paced warm-up and cardio dance-y moves, then 2 minutes of ballet, 4 minutes of crunches, and 6 minutes of yoga. The workout wraps up with 2 minutes of meditation.
The pace is very fast in the cardio section; not only are you performing the moves quickly, but you only do a few reps of each one. This part of the workout is done TIFT-style (Take It From the Top), so you repeat the moves over and over. Unfortunately, the repetition doesn’t make it easier to follow, because they shorten the number of reps of some of the moves at seemingly random moments. You just never know what’s coming next.
Exercising at this pace, there’s not a lot of time for an explanation of the moves either. To make it more confusing, the video has two instructors, who switch off leading the class. It was a little jarring to change your focus between two teachers with slightly different instruction methods.
When cueing moves during the workout, Marloth and McDonough used Sanskrit names for yoga poses, and what I assume are official names for ballet moves too. There was very little description of how to do these moves though, just a shout of “And now, relevé!”.
I ended up feeling like I must have missed a beginner DVD in the series. There are no special features on the DVD explaining the moves in the workout either.
They do have two plumper exercisers in the group, who seem to be doing some modifications out of necessity, but nobody explains the modifications (or even acknowledges that those two exercisers are doing them), and the camera tends to pan to them only during easier moves where no modifications are needed.
So, you just get glimpses of techniques you might use to make the exercises easier. For example, there is a move where you step one foot to the side followed rapidly by the other foot, then repeat on the opposite side. Sort of a side-step-touch on speed.
I couldn’t manage to move that fast, but I did get a brief peek of one of the exercisers in the background who was compensating for this. She had her feet much closer together than the instructors did, and just waved the trailing foot in the direction of the leading foot, rather than having it come to rest next to the leading foot. Much more doable in the brief time allotted for the move.
Still, this whole workout was extremely difficult and frustrating for me to follow. There were many exasperated grunts, much gnashing of teeth, and I definitely shouted “Oh, come on!” at the TV more than once.
And this is the light & easy version. I’d hate to see their intense & difficult Yoga Booty Ballet videos.
Like YogaBoxing, last week’s workout DVD, Yoga Booty Ballet is sort of a mishmash of a bunch of different exercise styles, with some positive affirmations thrown in. The similarities end there though; YogaBoxing, while super cheesy, was fairly easy to follow and kept me coming back for more. Yoga Booty Ballet was so difficult that I seriously considered not finishing out the week’s trial.
I felt like Yoga Booty Ballet: Light & Easy didn’t deliver on the yoga, it didn’t deliver on the ballet, and it certainly didn’t deliver on the “light & easy”. I’m switching back to YogaBoxing.