Reebok: Long and Lean

This tape is a combination of stretch, toning and yoga-ish poses. It is an outstanding production as most Reebok tapes are. You start off with a sort of warm up group of poses, breathing and stretching. Then you move into lower body toning. The lower body toning is basically lunges and standing leg extensions. The leg part and following stretch are meant to help your balance as well. After lower body is the upper body which consists of pushups, tricep dips and an exercise that was like a shoulder push up. After upper body, you do abs that is a combination of yoga type ab exercises and traditional ab moves. This is followed with a final stretching/posing segment. I felt relaxed after doing this tape but not necessarily worked out. The toning is not challenging or long enough for me but it might be for someone who hasn't done weight lifting. One complaint that I have about the tape is that they do the same pose/stretch between every segment. I got tired of it. It did give me a chance to perfect my form but after doing this several times, I found my mind wandering off to other thoughts. I give this tape a B.

Reebok obviously puts money and creativity into their videos. They're good at it. This video uses soothing aquatic blues and greens and soft jazz music which was suitable but a little to loud for this type of video. Also, Reebok makes shoes so I suppose Petra and her cast had to wear them. I think body movement videos should be done in bare feet. A carpeted floor or yoga sticky mat is recommened.

The exercises are drawn from a varity of disciplines, ballet, yoga and calisthenics. Deep breathing is done throughout the video. Petra demonstrates intermediate. To the left is beginner and the one to the right is advanced ( forgot their names). Petra tells you "to go according to how you feel today."

The warmup has some jazz work such as isolations and rocking back and forth from heel to toe, feeling your body weight shift back and forth. The leg work is a

lunge/balance stretch combination. There are slow controlled pushups and oblique work for the upper body. For you exercise animals out there, this may not be a challenge. What gives the video it's title is the constant movement from downward facing dog to plank position into child's pose. The yoga names aren't used at all but that's what it is. And yoga based movements requires deep and controlled breathing.

Collage lists this video in the muscle toning section but I think it's more of a toning and stretch video. It is for beginner to intermediate and maybe advanced intermediate.

It's not really a bad video. The drawbacks ( shoes and music volume) aren't serious. I have the Method series and I also have Angles, Lines and Curves which I really enjoy. However, of all the Reebok University instructors, she's the best one for this type of video and she really does a good job in demonstrating good form and highlighting the modifications of the other two for choices.

This workout has a lot of yoga type stretches in it. It is not your typical toning video. Alot of deep breathing with yoga type stretches. They start off with a warm up that was too dull. Very slow. Petra was getting all the muscles warm by being aware of them.

Then she starts in a combo of deep breathing and then into a yogaish type combo. Three modifications are shown. One is down dog (the easy modification is reaching out with your arms and resting your buttocks on your heels). Petra keeps her knees bent in the down dog position. Then the other girl shows down dog. Then they do a push up position to up dog but they don't tilt there head back. They repeat this a lot. Then the toning is easy dips , inner and outer thigh sweeps. I would say that this workout is athletic/yoga type stretches. The arm work has tricep dips and pushups.

The ab work is similiar to the Method with isolation teaser (I think this is what it was called), alternating knees into the body, crunches (not too many) and standing torso oblique bends. The cool down was soothing. Petra does a mini "corpse" pose which is relaxing.

Although this workout has a lot of yoga based stretches like bringing the foot up to the knee to stretch out the inner thigh after the inner thigh sweeps, the word yoga is not mentioned. All in all, I felt this workout seemed to just drag on. It didn't hold my attention and the toning was too easy since I'm used to using heavy weights. I think Petra is a wonderful instructor but I just didn't like doing a video when I look at the clock every minute.