Fitness Formula

I purchased the tape for $4.99 at Best Buy. The date on the box is 1987. The box gives this breakdown of the exercise segment times: 8 minutes of warm-up, 25 minutes of aerobics. A cool down and muscle toning with another cool down follow the aerobics but no breakdown of time is given for these segments and I haven't timed it! The set is a decorated exercise room and Judi is the instructor. Five other Jazzercise instructors are exercising with her including a guy. The production quality is excellent. I've noticed that Judi makes very few mistakes in her videos. They are closely choreographed and well-rehearsed. The music is your garden variety instrumental jazz music with an attempt to theme it up and enliven it by giving it a slight country or calypso sound, just to name two examples.

I would rate this as intermediate. The warm-up is an active one i.e. you do isolation exercises like moving your rib cage from side to side while side stepping your feet at the same time. One segment intersperses the Twist with other moves. A little bit of the Twist seems to be standard on Jazzercise videos. Since they are interspersing it with flick kicks, etc., I find it easy to ignore the Twist which I feel is bad for my knees and just carry on with the other moves in time to the music. One segment is really extra good for raising your heart rate. It includes a lot of knee repeaters. I was wearing gloveweights and so I had to make my arm movements smaller because the repeaters were already doing enough for my heart rate! As always, one of the exercisers is clearly doing Judi's light or low impact version. During one segment the exercisers give their names while leading the exercise briefly. It's a solid, dependable, fairly standard Jazzercise workout. Judy is an excellent cuer and friendly but not shouting and vamping like in her earlier videos. I miss that!

The toning section includes some standard crunches and leg lifts. Not too exciting. The fun part of the toning is a balance segment. Judi has you standing on one leg e.g. you raise one of your legs 3 times and on the 4th time hold it up and balance. I enjoyed that segment which occurs right after aerobics. The stretches are good. For $4.99 this tape was an excellent buy. Some may disagree with my intermediate rating but if you wear gloveweights and make your motions big and do the arm movements, it's definitely itermediate.