Billy Blanks Jr.: Dance With Me Groove & Burn

THE WORKOUT: Billy Blanks Jr: Dance With Me Groove & Burn

REVIEW BY: Sophia


WHO CAN DO THIS: Easy enough for beginners, fun enough for intermediates. I found a couple of steps a little bit tricky to master, but not terribly.

THE BREAKDOWN: Three 10-minute dances—disco, African, and Latin—with warm-up and cool down. Each dance ends with a short toning “blast.” The DVD is customizable, so you can program the segments you want to do, and the order. You can also turn off Billy Blanks’ instruction if you want and just listen to the music. Not that the music is so great, but options are always nice.

I’ve been enjoying this DVD tremendously—well, most of it, at least. I can do the disco and African segments but things go horribly wrong every time I try the Latin segment, so I’ve been programming that one out. (This is an ongoing problem for me. I just don't have the Latin beat in my blood.) I also stick mostly with the low-impact alternative, to save both my knees and the bric-a-brac, since I can shake the floor with too much leaping around.

The routines are built slowly enough but energetically and the steps are fun. The dancers are much less distracting than they are in the last Billy Blanks workout I reviewed. Blanks has a likeable, happy vibe and his cuing is good. The cardio toning segments are a good touch—arm toning after the disco segment (ouch), lotsa squats after the African segment, thigh toning after the Latin segment.

THE SWEAT FACTOR: I can work up a good sweat.

BUT IS IT FUN? Absolutely.

WHEN IT'S OVER: I’m not in peak condition at the moment, so two segments (done energetically) plus warm-up and cool down leave  me pleasantly wobbly.

GEAR AND APPAREL: Most of the workout can be done on a fairly small area of uncarpeted floor, although parts of the Latin segment takes more floor space than I have to go forward and back.

FINAL WORD: I’ve been doing this one lots and probably will do it lots more.

Dance With me Cardio Fit

THE WORKOUT: Dance With Me Cardio Fit

WHO CAN DO THIS: You don’t have to be fit but you do need rhythm.

THE BREAKDOWN: Billy Blanks, Jr., has an abundance of happy, as does his wife, Sharon, who dances next to him in these three fast-paced 10-minute dance workouts—hip-hop, country, and Bollywood—interspersed with two minute faster-paced cardio blasts of jumping jacks, ponies, and such.

The first time I did this DVD, much profanity and hate occurred. The problem is busyness. An overly busy background makes it hard to see what’s happening; overly flava-full dancers confuse the choreography; the sometimes haphazard cueing is hard to hear over the music.

So I tripped over my own feet while I fought to focus on choreography that moves pretty fast, uses feet, arms, head, and chest with flava, and even adds a little vocalizing here and there—a huh in the hip-hop, a yee-haw in the country. I was distracted by the dancers, and then there was Sharon getting all up in my face. I wanted everything and everyone to ratchet back a notch or two.

Often I’ll drop a DVD that frustrates me on the first go-around. But something about this one appealed to me so I gave it another shot, focusing on Billy and the basic steps and ignoring the other dancers. And that time, I got the choreography right and had lots of fun. The steps are fresh and dancey and once I’d mastered them, I got overly flava-ful myself. Well with the hip-hop and country, anyway. My first experience with Bollywood was so humiliatingly awful, I didn’t have the heart to try again yet. Maybe another day. Maybe.

THE SWEAT FACTOR: Pretty sweaty if you do the two-minute cardio blasts. Otherwise, just slightly sweaty.

BUT IS IT FUN? Yep, if you give it a chance.

WHEN IT'S OVER: I felt good, though I probably should work a little longer.

GEAR AND APPAREL: You’ll need enough uncarpeted floor space to go four steps forward, eight grapevines side to side.

FINAL WORD: Thumbs up. And, by the way, if your cable TV offers Video On Demand (Comcast, Time Warner and others) you can try before you buy this workout.

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