Beware of Amorous Elk

Booty-themed workouts are hot right now, so I had no trouble finding another booty-related exercise DVD to continue vaguely inappropriate workout month. This week we’re trying out Bollywood Booty.

This workout fit right in with the theme of the month. Instructor Hemalayaa enjoyed this workout so much that at times I felt uncomfortably voyeuristic watching the DVD. At least someone was having a good time.

The DVD contains a warmup, four workouts (imaginatively named Workout 1, Workout 2, etc.), and a cooldown. There is also an option to play all six segments back-to-back, for a single 45-minute workout.

The 4-minute warm-up jumps right in to the Bollywood moves, without a lot of instruction. For the first two minutes, we learn how to do really odd walking (apparently people walk oddly in Bollywood movies). In the second half of the warmup, we learn a dozen different hand movements in rapid succession (about 10 seconds per hand movement). I was lost in no time.

The 6-minute Workout 1 was described as focusing on “butt monster moves”. I’m still not entirely sure what this means, but it seemed to involve never-ending plies with variations in foot placement and hand movements.

The 8-minute Workout 2 was all about twists and side lunges, and some hip wiggle moves that she called The Elk. Apparently mating elk wiggle their hips from side to side (really more information than I wanted about the mating habits of elk).

There was also a lot of jumping up and down in place in Workout 2. Hemalayaa explained that if you have knee problems, you should absolutely not hop, but didn’t offer any alternate move to do instead.

The 12-minute Workout 3 starts out with The Swan, which seems to be mainly moving your hips in a figure-eight motion. This move is intermingled with more hip wiggles (although these were called hip flicks, and did not seem to involve any elk). Towards the end of this segment, we spent about 30 seconds spinning around in a circle until I felt dizzy.

Workout 4 puts all the moves from the previous segments together in one 11-minute dance. There’s not a lot new here, except for some shoulder shimmies that I don’t recall seeing in any of the previous workout segments.

All of these segments suffered from the exact same malady. They filmed the workout without the instructor speaking, and then she taped voiceover instructions. The problem is that instead of cuing what was coming up, she spent most of the time describing what was going on after the exercisers had already started doing the move.

So, the clueless people at home (a.k.a. me) were always several beats behind. Since the instructor only stays on a move for a few seconds before moving on, by the time I figured out what to do, she’d invariably already be on to something else. Super frustrating. Every so often (just often enough to really confuse me), she’d give the instruction as the video was showing the new move, or even right before the video was showing the new move (where the instruction should be).

The 4-minute cool-down was actually not too bad. Everything moved very slowly, so it was not as big of a deal to be a few beats behind while you waited for Hemalayaa to describe what you were supposed to be doing. The cooldown was yoga-like, but a very fluid moving sort of yoga. This was definitely my favorite segment of the workout.

Special features on the DVD include a 6-minute classical Indian dance, and two short workout clips from other Acacia DVDs.

The classical Indian dance moved slowly, like the cooldown. Instructor Hemalayaa went into more specifics about how to do the moves, even though she still tended to describe them after she was already doing them. In addition, the cameraman kept zooming in for extreme closeups that made it harder to see what was going on. Overall, this Indian dance segment was on a par with the cooldown as far as follow-ability.

I’m really disappointed in the timing of the instruction throughout this DVD. The Bollywood dancing was actually pretty fun, and the workout didn’t feel like work – it flew by. If only the frustration level from the instruction wasn’t so high, this DVD could have easily gotten a much better rating from me.

I’ll probably try the workout a few more times, to see if more familiarity with the moves makes the mistimed instruction less distracting. It’s not an instant classic, but by the end of the week Bollywood Booty was starting to grow on me.

Of course, I’ll need to be sure to steer clear of any mating elk.