Jessica Smith 30 Minute Power Walk from YouTube

Why I chose this workout...

I'm still in my Leslie Sansone free week and wanted to do a walking workout. Someone on Facebook suggested that I check out Jessica Smith on Facebook. She has her own channel and posts new workouts once a week. Since she posts these herself, I have no moral dilemma about doing them or about saying that I did them. The cute dog on her introduction video didn't hurt either. I'm a sucker for a cute puppy. The dog's name is peanut. She's adorable! This workout was the 30-Minute Power Walk. She does sell stuff on Amazon as well. 

The Workout

The Warm Up

The warm up on this was pretty fast. There was no gradual increasing of the pace like I'm used to with Leslie Sansone. The walking in place was pretty fast. There was also a front leg lift thing. After that there was this weird leg rotation thing with your leg out to the side. i can't even describe it because I don't think I did it correctly. 

The Workout

After the five minute warm up, things got even faster. There was a lot of side stepping and some double side stepping. There were knee lifts as well. I don't remember any kicking, but there was a little bit of punching. She talked a lot during the workout, but she wasn't annoying, and she didn't go into long monologues while making me do something for extended periods of time. She did do some interesting moves though, and we didn't keep our feet moving the entire time. There were times where we put all of our weight on one leg while doing something like tapping the other leg back and stretching our arms out and up and then pulling the foot in while pulling the arms back down. One of the interesting moves was side stepping to the left twice and then back to the right, then turning at a 90 degree angle to side step twice to the left again and then twice to the right. You form an L, and I'm sure I did not describe that well. The workout as definitely fast paced, and she stacked the moves on top of each other without a lot of walking in the middle. I was out of breath for a good portion of the workout. 

I had some problems keeping up with her pace. Part of my problem was that she was not keeping time with the music. I'm so used to keeping my pace with the music that I found myself slowing down. I tried to keep up by watching her, but it was just really hard for me to pace myself that way so eventually, I just decided that I wasn't going to keep up with her and I was okay with it.

I felt a little weird while doing this workout because she's set up in this really small space in her house. She didn't have much space to move around in and it made me feel like I didn't have much space even though I had my whole living room. I did preview another one of her workouts, and it was filmed in a different room, so I will try more of her stuff because I liked her and the workout even though I wasn't thrilled with the setting.

The Cool Down / Stretch

The workout started fast, but as you can tell below, it slowly tapered after that. Although, it's possible that the gentle taper was more because I decided not to stress over keeping up with her. There wasn't much of a cool down. The stretch was pretty extensive though. There was a lot of inhaling and exhaling while stretching our arms up over our heads. There was also the standard runners stretch. I felt pretty well stretched out after I was done.

BodyMedia Screen Shots

Below are my BodyMedia screen shots for the workout. It felt like I had more than 12 minutes of vigorous activity! It also felt like this thing got more intense over time instead of decreasing in intensity. I'm tempted to do it again and see if I can keep up with her and what it will do to the readings. I'm going to explore her YouTube channel more and check out some more workouts. I think she has challenges and I might just try one of those. I previewed one of her kickboxing workouts and I want to try it!