Sweating Sexy

Jennifer leads this fun dancy 50 minute workout in a nice open studio style set with 2 background exercisers. You wont need any equipment for this workout and no shoes are required! This is a fun blend of body strengthening, active stretching, and flowing dance. The dvd is chaptered and you can select a segment from the menu or play all. There is also a 5 minute dance inspired warmup that will introduce you to the upcoming moves.

Using the Floor: This section is lower body focused and includes a fun little dance routine. Exercises include: floor brush, flowing squats, toe squats, knee raise w/ a toe point, hip shifts, pliets, & Jennifer adds in some fun arm movements. This is a nice combo of ballet & flowing dance.

Using the Upper Body: This fun flowing10 minute workout is core focused and performed standing. Exercises include: side to side rib & hip shifts, reaches, pulls, standing roll ups, reach over & around, spine rolls, and finishes with a routine that combines the moves you just performed.

Ready To Dance: From the play all option you get the entire 28 minute routine, when selecting the chapter you get the 18 minute breakdown- which still moves right along but includes some "teaching" with the dancing. Exercises include: kick, side toe reach, hip circles, jazz square, inverted lunges, jump & pump, body roll ups, leg sweeps, hip pushes, and 10 minutes of performing the routine (cuing is still included). Concludes with a 5 minute cooldown.

I rate this a beginner workout in terms of cardio intensity and low intermediate in terms of choreography. Fun to do and easy to catch onto. Kind of a fusion of barre & dance with strengthening and stretching interspersed. A great "feel good" workout! Jen is a superb instructor, clear & concise cuing & perfect form pointers just when you need them. This dvd works great as a solid 50 min workout or is easily broken down to add on to other w/o's. I received this dvd to review.

This workout is about 50 minutes and divided into 2 distinct parts that you can do at different times or together: the first part is standing toning (or isolations as Jen calls them) that lasts about 20 minutes. Such as bending the neck side to side, then bending at the waist side to side, then moving down to the legs for ballet or barre style leg lifts, also raising up on tip toes with hands in certain ballet positions, or plies with feet turned out in certain ballet positions. You're learning some basic moves here that you will incorporate into the second half of the DVD. Nothing very advanced if you've never done ballet before. It's all very do-able.

The second part is a dance class where you learn a routine and put it all together at the end, that lasts about 30 minutes. This second part reminds me of Carmen Electra Vegas Strip, but you go through these segments faster in Sweating Sexy so the cardio effect is a little more intense. Very fun and sexy but not "too" sexy. This dance is not ballet-style like the first part, even though you are using some of the moves you learned in isolation in part 1.

I really enjoy the whole workout. I love that there are 2 distinct styles on one DVD, which gives me the options of doing "barre" or dance, or both. And the length of the choreogrpahed dance is just right. If I had to do choreo for a whole hour I'd forget half the routine! 30 minutes works well.