Leslie Sansone Walk Away Your Hips & Thighs 2 Mile Walk

What I picked and why

I picked Walk Away Your Hips and Thighs. I picked it because I got it as part of the Walk Strong DVD Set well over a month ago and I hadn't done it yet. I was excited to try the Fit Cuffs. I put it into the DVD player and waited long enough to see the main menu. I was given the option to watch the introduction, to play the whole workout, to play just the walking workout or to play just the firming workout. I left the room for a moment and the DVD automatically started the introduction. That was a first for me. At the end of the introduction, she demonstrates how to put the fit cuffs on. Then she talks about doing the workouts together or doing the walk every other day for three days and the firming every other day for three days which would give you 6 days of 30 minute workouts. At that point, I looked at the clock and realized that I did not have an hour so I had to pick if I wanted to do the walk or the firming section. I picked the walk since I would have to do some sort of warm up to do the firming and I didn't have time for warming up and firming. I guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow!

Equipment

For the walk portion of this, you don't need any equipment. The Firming section uses the Fit Cuffs, but that's for another day since I haven't used those yet.

The Workout

The Warm Up

The warm up goes over the four basic steps which are walking in place, side steps, kicks and knee lifts. It takes about three minutes to get through them all. Then she goes through them again, but makes them a little more intense by sitting down into the side steps a little more and making the kicks bigger. After about five minutes, she has determined that we're warm enough to get into the workout.

The Workout

This workout was a lot faster than the one that I did yesterday. I have had a pretty easy week as far es exercising goes. It's been my typical eat like garbage all weekend and then don't want to exercise on Monday. Fortunately, my desire to continue to blog about something has forced me off of the couch, but it hasn't motivated me to do anything intense until today! 

This walk didn't have any boosted walking (jogging to those who've never seen boosted walking), but it kept my heart rate up and I was breathing pretty heavy. It mainly consisted of the four basic moves, but it also added double side steps, double knee lifts, four knee lifts in a row, three steps followed by a tap, kick backs, walking forward two counts and back two counts and tap outs. The tap outs ended up turning into lunges a couple times. There were several arm combinations as well. There was the basic arms up over the head, opening up your arms all the way and then bringing them together for a clap during the side steps, going up over the head then down then out to the side and back, alternating arms out in front while doing kicks, pushing the arms out in front and touching the knee opposite knee during knee lifts. 

I normally really like her cueing, but in this one, it was sort of a train wreck for me. She would be counting down and I was thinking that we were almost done with a specific move and then she had us do more. Funny that it happened the day after I commented about how I love that she doesn't like to us. Not that it was a lie, but why did she just randomly count down? There were also times where we had little warning that she was going to start something new.There were a few times where she said something like four more, and I assumed that we were going to go back to walking after that, but instead she just had us drop our arms and continue with the leg activity. It was my fault for assuming, but she's so good at cueing normally that it was an easy assumption to make. 

She was alone in this workout, which usually makes her less giggly, but she was still pretty giggly in this one. She went on several long monologues as well. One was while we were doing kick backs with hallelujah arms. (That's what I call raising your arms up over your head and pulling them down while doing kick backs. Whenever she does this move, she has you start the kick backs, then you raise your arms up and she talks about raising them up to heaven, then she has you pull them down. One of the workouts she actually said something about hallelujah, so I have termed this move hallelujah arms.) 

The workout has mile markers for the one mile and the two mile, but it doesn't have anything in the middle. 

The Cool Down and Stretch

There wasn't much of a cool down. She kept my heart rate up until just about three minutes before the stretch. Then we did walk a little slower and do some small side steps. It didn't last very long at all, but my heart rate did come down. The stretch was the standard arms up over the head deep breathing stuff and the calf stretch. The calf stretch lasted a lot longer than I'm used to with her. Then we were done. Stay tuned to hear about the firming section of the DVD.

BodyMedia Screen Shots 

Here are my BodyMedia screen shots for the workout. I was pretty happy that I got 16 minutes of vigorous activity. The workout had a nice arc to it with some spikes while it was in the intense part. I burned a lot more calories in this 30 minute workout than I did in the workout yesterday.