What I did and why
Today was my first day for Les Mills Combat from Beachbody. Someone had posted something on Facebook about Beachbody workouts and I made a comment about how insanely expensive I think they are. A Beachbody coach commented and shared a sale with me. I then got suckered into buying a Beachbody workout because A) I can't resist a good sale and B) I'm addicted to online shopping. This was the second to least expensive thing on the sale. The other one was Slim in 6 which just didn't sound like my style. Kicking and punching is totally my style!
I'll do a full review of the program once I'm done with it, but I'll do a brief overview right now. It's a 60 day program. It's a mix of Boxin, Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do, Karate/Kung Fu, Capoeira and Jiu Jitsu. It comes with 7 workouts plus an instruction video, a nutrition guide, a tape measure and a measurements card. If you submit your before and after pictures, you get a free T-shirt. There are different packages that you can get. I got the least expensive. The next package up comes with gloves. I have my own weight lifting gloves so I just use those to make me feel all bad ass. The package up from that has 4 extra workouts. I paid $35 plus shipping. If I decide later that I think this is the best thing ever and I totally regret not buying the upgraded package, I can add the extra DVDs and the gloves for $60 plus shipping. This would still be cheaper overall than if I had bought the super package to start. The other option would be to just get the extra DVDs and skip the gloves for $30. I think I made the right decision! The super package is $120!
I'm doing the Combat Warrior schedule. It's 60 days long. There is one workout per day and I have rest days on Day 4 and Day 7 each week. With the package that I have, I could also do the Supreme Warrior which also has a 60 day calendar, but it only has rest days on Day 7 each week. The third schedule is the Ultimate Warrior Hybrid Calendar, but you need the extra DVDs for that one. There are multiple workouts on some days. You still get the seventh day to rest each week.
The Basics
I watched the Basics DVD since the booklet said to do that. I'm not sure how much I got out of the Basics DVD and how much I will retain. There was little in the basics DVD that pertained to this workout. I'm glad I watched it just because it gave me a nice refresher on some stuff and I got to see some new stuff, but the new stuff wasn't in the Combat 30 workout, so by the time I do a workout with that stuff in it, I might have forgotten what was in the Basics DVD.
Combat 30
No matter which workout schedule you follow, your first workout of week one will be Combat 30. It started off with a warm up for a couple of minutes. There are two count down timers on the screen. One of them counts down the entire workout and the other count down that section. I'm not a fan of count down clocks, but I actually like this one since I knew when I would be able to take a water break. That's the worst part about DVD workouts. It's really hard for me to decide when to take a water break. When I do Leslie Sansone stuff, I try to take them when we're just marching in place, but sometimes she does short marching sections and gives little notice when the feet should start flying again. This was nice because they stopped working hard about 5 seconds before the segment ended and it took them 5 or 10 seconds to start up the next segment so I snuck in a couple sips at each section change.
The warmup start with some boxing bouncing. Then we shuffled left and right while doing some jabs at either end. We added some jab cross jabs into the shuffling. Upper cuts came next. There was little instruction and little cueing. At first this annoyed me, but if I'm going to do this workout for 2 months, I probably would get annoyed if there was a lot of instruction because after a couple of times, I wouldn't need the instruction. After the upper cuts we went into hooks.
After the upper body warm up, we moved into a lower body warm up which involved some knee lifts with some bouncing steps in the middle. Then we went into the roundhouse kick. After roundhouse kicks we moved into side kicks. It was nice that we didn't do any specific kick for a bazillion reps in a row. That always drove me insane with Tae Bo! He would say one more set, but we'd do like 20 more sets. My legs would be on fire! I was never on fire during this workout. After we went through all of those kicks, we switched sides and did the same stuff on the other leg. After those kicks, we went into alternating front kicks.
The next section was more punching. It lasted about 3 and a half minutes. There were was some kicking in this section, but not much. I wasn't able to keep up with them and I felt like a dork at times. I had some issues keeping up with the combinations. I'll get better though. When we string too many things together, I fall apart. There was this thing where you thrust your elbow out and then extend your hand and then you punch and kick. I I'm pretty sure I messed that up quite a bit.
The next section was about boxing. There was a lot of punching. No kicking though since boxing is all about punching and has no kicking. They did do some scissor legs in between the punches.. I'm not a fan of scissor legs. I didn't worry about doing them since I was trying to get the punching down. Oh there was also running in place in this one. At the end of this section there was a crazy upper cut section. That really works the abs!
The next section was all about the kicks! There were 236 consecutive kicks. I didn't count, but that's what he said. It started off with a slow kata section. This should be a relaxing thing, but he made it pretty non relaxing. We started with back kicks. Then we added knee strike knee strike front kick back kick. That started to tax my brain. I can't keep up with them so I'm never doing the same kick as them. From there we did some step front kicks and shuffled back. From there we went to the jump kick. I stayed on the ground though! I didn't think doing a jump kick was a good idea for me. Then we went back to the double knee strike, front kick back kick. Then we did the whole thing on the other side.
Back to boxing and all the punching again.
After that, we did a two minute stretch. We did a nice hamdstring stretch and a quad stretch. The quad stretch isn't so easy to do if you're not very flexible and don't have very good stability. How many people who are 288 pounds can reach their foot and pull it up behind them? I can grab my sweatpants! LOL. We did a shoulder stretch next. Then we stretched out our back and then our chest. Then we were done!
My first day of Les Mills Combat completed! Tomorrow is HIIT Power.
My Thoughts on the First Workout
I forgot how much I enjoy punching and kicking! I liked the workout, but the instructors did get a little annoying at times. I really liked that they broke things up into those time segments so I knew when I was going to get a break. I liked that they kept things even on both sides. The editing made it a little chaotic for me. The set made it look like they were in a warehouse which was weird, but that wasn't an issue for me. I prefer the camera to stay in a wide shot so I can see everyone and then periodically zoom in for a close up for important things. I don't like it to bounce around too often. This wasn't horrible as far as editing, but it did bounce around and get distracting at times. I'm pretty sure that my abs and glues are going to hurt like crazy tomorrow. My abs feel more worked out than after doing any of the ab workouts I've done lately. I'm also surprised with just how tingly my glutes are right now. Without any squatting or lunging, I'm shocked at how much of a workout they got. Just for that, I should keep doing this workout!
BodyMedia Screen Shots
Here are my BodyMedia screen shots for the day. I thought that I would have burned more calories, but maybe on my first try I just didn't give it everything I had since I wasn't sure how hard it was going to be. I also skipped the scissor kicks and the jumping. Maybe next week I will try the harder stuff. I think those two big dips are from doing the kata sections in the kick section. I could be wrong though.
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