My friends Hillary and Leza came over and we warmed up with Fitness Essential's Hip Hop Unleashed, which I reviewed last week so I won't go into detail here and only say that it's a very fun 30 minute Hip Hop dance routine and I got it for a nice price at Ross Dress for Less. It was a nice way to warm up for the much more intense Turbo Fire workout to come!
After 30 minutes of dancing we did Turbo Fire, the Fire 30 Class. I listed all the choreography a couple of days ago, now I got to experience it! It was a LOT of fun! It's more intense than Turbo Jam for sure, and every bit as intense as our Turbo Kick fan/instructor dvd's but with less complicated choreography, It seems faster to me somehow, but maybe that's just my mind playing tricks on me. The warmup is the same as Turbo Kick's, after the punching section there's a one minute "Fire Drill", which for this workout is the same as a Turbo. There are sumo burpees, jacks and air jacks, speedskates - lots to get that heart rate way up there! Ali shows modifications, so if you have bad knees or joints, follow her!
The next section has a roundhouse kick, a part b, and the same Fire Drill as before. You have a short recovery where you walk around the room, then there's the Finale which is tons of fun! After that you cool down with the same warmup punches, only slower.
I like that these workouts are filmed and have that artistic look to them as opposed to having the "live" look if that makes sense. Also, for those of you who are instructors and Turbo Jammers, you will recognize almost all of the Turbo Peeps in class! There's Shawn, Michael, Monica, Shilo, JD and others. Nice to see you, my SoCal friends! After that we did Core 20 WHICH IS HARD! You use resistance tubing for this but if you use the band that comes with the set, the green pilates type ribbon, that works fine too! It really adds a whole new dimension to standard crunches, let me tell ya! Here is what you do:
*warmup:* light shoulder rolls, some squats, squats w/knee raises, sumo squats, zig zags, and standing abdominal crunches *with the bands, still standing: *standing side flexion with the band looped through your foot so you have resistance, same with forward flexion *without bands, still standing: *more zig zags, with variations *floorwork with bands:* v-sits with "push and pulls", elbow taps, bicycles, bicycles and pikes, elbow to leg extend w/karate chop and down *in a plank: *knee in, leg lift repeat other leg, elbow plank with hip drops (hard!), opposite leg and arm in plank, ending with pushups
What a GREAT core workout! For those of you who teach ab classes that have resistance bands available to you, you will want to steal this choreography and use it in your classes! There is such a nice variety between standing ab work and matt work.
Lastly, I cooled down with Stretch 40, a 40 minute power yoga type routine that has the usual sun salutations, seated hip openers, pigeon (imo this needs to be held much longer than they do in the video) supine hamstring
stretches with the band/yoga strap (nice!) seated twists, ab work, guided relaxation.
stretches with the band/yoga strap (nice!) seated twists, ab work, guided relaxation.
My only critique about these workouts, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Turbo Fire is that BeachBody put these 12 routines in the basic set onto almost as many dvd's. The same identical stretch routines are on almost every dvd and then there yet another dvd with both stretches on it and nothing else. Beachbody only needed to put these on there twice, and they could have fit ALL the workouts on half the dvds. It's bad for the environment to waste like this, and it gives the consumer a false sense of getting more when they really aren't. Yeah, you have 11 or 12 pieces of plastic, but a lot of the workouts are identical.
Now the nice thing that Beachbody does is that you get a bonus ChaLEAN Extreme workout, Burn Circuit 1! I happen to have CLX and like it a lot, but if you were ever curious about it you can experience this other format for free! NICE!
Tomorrow I am going to do the HIIT 15 workout along with Keith Weber's new kettlbell dvd.
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