As I said in the last post, I'm not really one for jumping around. This means that doing cardio is really a challenge, one I (occasionally) try to meet by doing some kind of dance-based workout.
A few days ago I tried Crunch's Cardio Go-Go Dance for the first time. I have one negative thing to say about this video, and a number of positive remarks, so I'll begin with the negative: the Gypsy Clark's high-pitched, grainy voice kind of drives me nuts. Now, after forty minutes of hearing it and having endorphins coursing through my body, I no longer had a nails-on-chalkboard reaction to it, but oh were the first ten minutes ever hard.
Now for the positive: first of all, this is the first Crunch dance-based DVD I've done that actually felt like dancing. I don't know what it is about cardio-style dancing, but that cha-cha and that hip-hop never seem anywhere close to the real thing. There's something so weirdly controlled, so robotic, about cardio instructors' dance movements. It's like someone took my croissant and made it whole-grain. I'm sure it's better for me, but it tastes funny.
That said, I've grown to like them, even Marie Forleo in all her strangeness. I'd rather do a fake cha cha than twenty jumping jacks. But Cardio Go-Go Dance actually feels like dancing. It's only one kind of dance for the full DVD (no medley of "Latin heat" or whatever), and a lot of the moves felt like what I might do naturally in a club.
What I expected even less was this: so many of the movements were bellydance movements! Chest lifts and shimmies, hip bumps and lifts, omis, and so on. The mood and the music are completely different, but I think the video would be a great way for bellydancers to do some cardio that would warm up exactly the muscles they use, but with a wholly different vibe.
Finally, I really liked the fact that the backup dancers/exercisers varied in the way they performed, or danced, the movements. In fact, some of them did the movements in a more dancey, if not as intense, way than Gypsy Clark. Watching them I got a sense of how the video could be done more as a dance warmup than as a typical cardio workout.
Labels: cardio, club dancing, workout
