What I picked and why
I picked The Biggest Loser Calorie Knockout Extreme Cardio for Maximum Burn. I've done the 1st and 2nd circuits before, and I thought it was time to do the third. I liked the 1st, but apparently, I wasn't a fan of the second. The DVD gives you the option to select a workout or to customize your own. If you select a workout, all you get is the circuit that you pick. I thought that was odd. I assumed it would give me the warm up and cool down with it, but nope. If you want to get the warm up and cool down with it, you'll need to customize the workout. There are enough slots in the customizing screen that you could do the warm up plus all three circuits and still get the cool down. I don't think I'll be doing that option anytime soon. I feel like I should do it for the sake of the blog (and my good health), but after doing circuit 3, there's no way I can do all three together. I barely got through the one circuit, and tomorrow, I might not be able to move.
Equipment
We used two dumbbells for the first move and one dumbbell for the second and third moves. I used five pounds which seemed to be a good weight for me.
The Workout
The Warm Up
The warm up lasted five minutes. It had some stretching, some punching, some squatting and some leg rotation things that I had never done before this DVD. You start off doing a knee lift and then rotate your leg so it's out to the side and then bring it down to the starting position. The first time I did these, it was very awkward, but this time wasn't so bad.
The Workout
This was a Tabata style workout. Tabata is a interval type workout where you have 20 seconds of high intensity followed by 10 seconds of rest. You do that set 8 times which gives you a four minute workout. I've read a little bit about it, but don't know all of the ins and outs. This particular workout used that Tabata concept, but strung three Tabata workouts into one with 1 minute of rest between each exercise, so the whole routine lasted about 15 minutes.
He demonstrated three different variations of the move and then let us pick which to do. We were supposed to mix it up and do some of the easy, some of the medium and some of the really hard, but I mainly stuck with the medium unless I was dying then I went to the easy. I did one of the hard ones and it wasn't pretty!
So the first move easy option was to squat while doing hammer curls with dumbbells. The medium version was to do squats where you alternate stepping out to either side with them and still do the hammer curls. The hard option involved jumping out of the squat. It seemed like way more than four minutes of this. I rotated between easy and medium on this one. I didn't even attempt hard.
The second move was lunges! Woot Woot (I hate lunges!) There were three variations of this one as well. The first one was holding a dumbbell in front of us while alternating lunges stepping back. The second variations had us doing the lunges, but twisting to the right or the left. The third variation was jumping out of the lunge. Thank you very much, but NO I'm not going to jump out of a lunge at this point in time.Four minutes was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to be lunging!
The third move was jumping jacks! So you hold a dumbbell in front of you with both hands just like in the lunges. The easy move involved alternating stepping out to either side. The medium move was holding the weight just like the easy move, but then you jump out to the side and jump in like with a jumping jack. The hard move involved jumping in and out with your legs while lifting the weight over your head. I did 1-1/2 sets of the jumping ones. The full set involved just holding the weight, but the 1/2 set I did the arms over my head. That was torture. I mainly did the easy leg move with the hard arm move. It was an intense set.
The Cool Down
The cool down isn't much of a cool down. The last move of the workout really got my heart racing and my breathing out of control, and then the cool down hits and you plant your feel to do some deep breathing. My body didn't like that. I like a nice gentle slow down to get my breathing under control before I plant my feet for a stretch. Oh well, I survived. The cool down involved some deep breathing with the arms going up over the head and also a martial arts type thing in a half squat with the arms going forward and then being pulled back. There were some arm circles like we were swimming and some stretches for the legs. It lasted about five minutes.
BodyMedia Screen Shots
Here are my BodyMedia Link screen shots for the workout. I thought for sure that this one would get me a nice big high calories per minute at some point, but not so much. I'm fairly disappointed with the overall "arc" of the workout. I expected the spikes, but I didn't expect that huge valley in the middle. I also thought I'd have bigger spikes, but I guess it makes sense since it was 20 minutes high intensity and 10 seconds of rest. I'm going to be sore tomorrow and I burned extra calories today, so win win.
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