Ellen Barrett: Master of Disguise

Instructor Ellen Barrett is known for her inventive fusion workouts, pulling together elements from many different styles of exercise: yoga, pilates, dance, strength training, and more. She takes traditional exercise moves and transforms them into something new and fun … and barely recognizable as the original boring exercise moves.

Ellen Barrett Live: Power Fusion is no exception. If anyone had told me that I would do 45-minutes of non-stop squats and lunges, and enjoy it, I would have laughed in their faces … but under the surface, that’s exactly what the Power Fusion workout is.

Graceful arm movements and yoga-inspired variations disguise the standard lunges and squats, but you will definitely feel the effects the next day. This one is not for the faint of knee. If your joints are up for it though, it’s a fun fusion workout.

The hook is that it is a live workout, filmed in one shot. I’m not sure why this is a selling point – maybe it’s supposed to be more like being at an in-person class? The major downside of this approach is that you get only one 45-minute workout on the DVD, and it isn’t structured in a way that makes it easy to convert to a shorter workout.

The breakdown is roughly 7 minutes of warm-up, 27 minutes of standing exercises, 10 minutes of mat work, and 2 minutes of cool-down. However, the lines between warm-up, workout, and cool-down are so blurry that it’s hard to tell when one ends and the next begins.

If you want to shorten the workout, I would recommend doing the workout from the beginning through the end of the first goddess sequence, then fast-forwarding to the cool-down (around the 43-minute mark). The next time you do it, you can do the warm-up, then fast-forward to the second goddess sequence and go through to the end. This gives you two separate workouts that are more in the neighborhood of 30 minutes each.

Although the workout is billed as yoga/dance fusion, the pace was pretty slow for a dance workout, which made it easier to keep up with the moves.

There is one exerciser doing modifications for beginners. Many of the modifications are related more to balance or strength, rather than coordination. Even the modified versions of the exercises were fairly complex movements involving both arms and legs. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all too difficult for the uncoordinated; it just means that Barrett is a big proponent of moves that involve lots of muscle groups at once.

Some parts of the workout could be a little difficult to follow, either because you couldn’t see the TV or because the camera person had zoomed in to the point where you couldn’t fully see the moves on the TV (what use is a close-up of one foot?). Fortunately, there are enough repetitions of each exercise that you can usually get back on track within a couple of reps.

In addition to being a master of exercise disguise, Ellen Barrett is the Tiffani Amber Thiessen of workout DVDs (and in case it’s not clear, I mean that as a compliment). She’s got girl-next-door charm and she cheerfully motivates and encourages as she instructs.

All these factors put together must explain how I could end up happily doing so many squats in one sitting (pun totally intended). It’s either that or the stealth lunges were so well disguised that I didn’t realize I should be unhappy about doing them (and trust me, I hate lunges!). Either way, this is a DVD I will come back to again.