For Women Only/Upper Body

This is an approximately half-hour long upper body workout. Tamilee begins with a slow, basic and brief warm-up of dynamic full-body stretches with Pepper. She provides several form pointers, but leaves most of the fairly elementary cueing to Pepper, who leads the rest of the tape. He's a personable enough leader, but he's really there for eye candy: he poses at several points quite deliberately, and his attempts to put "funk" in things (i.e. random hip-thrusty stuff) compromises his form on some of the exercises. This does not concern him nearly as much as it should.

Tamilee leaves after the warm-up, and Pepper then leads us through chest and beck work. He does not really mix things up here, which was a nice change of pace from most of my other weight tapes: you stay with each body part until it's finished, and do all sets of a given exercise at once before moving on to a new one. There are brief breaks in between each set, and they were just long enough hat an ambitious modifier could probably pyramid their weights, or at minimum, go have a drink. Pepper randomly varies between doing 2 and 3 sets of each move, and the number of reps fluctuates from around 8 to around 12, depending on the exercise.

Following this section, Pepper, for no logical reason, attempts to teach a brief funk dancing combo, for which Tamilee reluctantly reappears. Having this combo in here was very strange and did not really make sense, but it was blessedly short and skippable.

The rest of the upper body gets lumped into the final long section, called "arms." Pepper maintains the nice and slow lifting pace he established in the first weight section, but I found his seemingly random exercise selection a bit frustrating. Biceps get what amount to about 60 curls in a row (3 variations, in 2 sets). Triceps then get only ONE exercise! Back gets 2 or 3 different moves, then shoulders get about 5---some of which other videos classify as back moves anyway. I substituted more triceps work here, and feel I got a balanced workout as a result, but I found the division of work here baffling.

Overall, I feel this tape is a good little workout if you know how to modify. Because some of the shoulder work is really for the back, and the chest gets a solid run of pushups, the only muscle group really underrepresented is the triceps. If you are willing to cut out some of the shoulder sets, or if you plan ahead and do your triceps work during that funk cardio part, you'll be fine, and you might even enjoy yourself. Pepper is certainly a personable guy, even if he is not the most meticulous paragon of good form. And since the lifting pace is slow enough and he does at least two sets of each exercise, this tape can be modified to a strength-building pyramid approach. I wish that pepper had been a little more organized and consistent, but overall, I found the tape a solid low intermediate workout, and a nice change of pace from my usual routine.

I totally skip the fun aerobics on this tape, and just use the upper body workout which is done by Pepper Von, who I really liked from Fitness Pros. It is fast paced and I use 8 lb. dumbells. I do it between Cory or MIS. He covers all parts of the arms and shoulders and does two sets of 12. I really enjoy Pepper and the workout.

Short warmup and stretch with Tamilee and Pepper. He does this incredible hip roll during a lat stretch that Tamilee tries to do and laughs like she is a little girl with her kindergarden teacher.

The workout has 3 sets of pushups, chest flies, deltoid squeeze and a lat pull using your own resistance. All the time Pepper is trying to be sexy and then does some flexing at the end of the lat pull to show us how well developed he is. After this, is a 2 minute hip hop thing (it probably supposed to be a rest?) He brings Tamilee in to show her how to do it.

Then back to biceps and tricep work. Upright rows and lat pulls. He uses all the same weight but as a Firmer, I know that I use a much heavier weight for my lats then for my triceps. He also does some overhead press.

The music is rap/hiphop music.

If you like a sweaty muscly guy googooing over you and smily sexy at you and singing to you while you lift weights, you will love this workout. Just don't wear overalls like his or they will fall off by the second set of bicep curl!

Tamilee is alright in this tape. Her personality shines better in the Buns of Steel 2000 series and her Quicktone series. She doesn't do any of the toning. She only does the warm up with Pepper and then does a small hip hop section where Pepper is showing her how to hip hop. She acts like a little girl. During the warmup she says to Pepper stuff like pull that gorgeous or beautiful lat my way. Kinda corny.

Pepper is wearing suspenders half falling down with boots. The suspenders are really swinging during the pushup section. Really goofy! He doesn't give any info on what muscle you are using. He does give some tips on form and how to make the excercise easier. He really tries to motivate you by saying stuff like Its you and me girl and I know your chest is beautiful but we can make it better ( during pushups) It's ok to hear on the first time but doing this tape over and over would get tiring to hear. He also sings to songs which is irritating. He wears a hat on backwards which is strange. They always do close up shots of his muscles which some times are blurry they are too close. One nice thing is that they made the men shave their armpits. YEAH!