Caribbean Workout & Calorie Explosion

[Guest guest]

I had time for a workout today and made it a good one. I chose first to try Caribbean Workout Kickbox 1 from Caribbean Workout Kickboxing. I tried this once before and couldn't follow it so I gave up. Today I was in a reasonably good place, braced myself for not being able to follow it and kind of thought it might be a little easy and silly. I got through the entire 20 minute workout this time and it was far from easy and silly. 20 minutes includes warmup and cool-down but it is definitely an intermediate workout in terms of its intensity. You can do it with or without a step, a modifier does not use a step. Mc leads it and she and another backgrounder each use a step with one set of risers. She says you can up the intensity by using more risers. One set was good for me today, especially because I was learning the workout and haven't been exercising as regularly as I normally prefer. I did have a tough time following for the same reason as before... the camera operator and director (or whoever is in charge of camera shots) should find other jobs! WAY too much of the time the camera was focused on someone's head, usually the modifier too and rarely on 's, so even when she's calling out a change in the action, you cannot see anything that they're doing because all you see is someone's head and it takes a while to go to a full stage shot so you can see what they are doing. Horribly annoying. The choreography is easy enough to catch on to that I did most of the time. If I did this a few more times so that I'd know what she was talking about when she says to make a change I could just do it without seeing it but... I'll probably try the other workouts on the DVD at some point, now that I know they are really good workouts, just really bad camera angles (there's a lot of weird ones too).

After that, I wanted more so I decided to put in The FIRM Calorie Explosion. I seem to be on a kickboxing bent these days so I did the cardio kickboxing workout on that DVD. You get a 4 minute warmup, 12 minute workout and, I think, 3 minute cool-down/stretch with each workout. I've only done the first workout on this and it so kicked my butt that I've been intimidated to try the rest, I finally said, bring it on and did this one. It is the only all cardio workout on the disc and I reallllllllllly liked it a lot! Alison leads and does a great job with it. It is very tough but when you're only doing 12 minutes of an actual workout, sometimes you really want tough. shows low-impact modifications and although I didn't think I wanted high-impact, I ended up following Alison and Rebekah anyway and it actually felt really good. It wasn't constant high-impact at all either so that helped. The stretch was a little too rushed for me though and my heart rate was still too high for bending over so I didn't get much out of it. I tried to back it up to just that part and was having too much trouble doing it (the warmup and cool-down are not chaptered) so I just gave up. Next time I'll know to just pause it and walk around a bit until I'm ready for it. Definitely another good, quick workout though.