Cardio Ballroom

I'll begin by admitting I am NOT a dancer. While I did take some ballroom lessons about a hundred years ago, I have two left feet, less-than-stellar rhythm and little patience for learning complex steps.

Still, I've been lunging, squatting, stepping and lifting weights for over twenty years and have lately been craving a change, so I've been checking out dance workouts.

I found this workout in the bargain bin and decided to pick it up. I had pretty low expectations, but I think I liked this workout.

The set is fairly simple. It's just Julianne with two backgrounders. All three are clad in dance class wear that makes them look like they're in Debbie Allen's troupe from an old episode of 'Fame.' It all kind of made me wish I had held on to my legwarmers from sixth grade.

Julianne begins with a nice, stretchy warm-up. She then moves into three dance segments. The first is the Cha-Cha, followed by the Jive and the Paso Doble. In each segment, she starts off with fairly simple moves and builds on them. There is a separate tutorial section that I didn't bother with, but probably should have. Still, the only dance that I had to really fudge my way through was the jive. It moves quickly and I could have used a primer.

I was really impressed with her teaching skills. She definitely knows how to explain the dances well. Even though I had never done the DVD before, I was still able to follow it fairly well... at least, enough to get my heart rate up.

I would rate the workout an intermediate level. It's reasonably low-impact, too, which is nice on the joints.

The music is appropriate to each dance, but isn't specatacular.

She finishes off with a nice cool down. The whole thing clocks in around 45 mintues.