Sooooo… the review of this Ballet Beautiful Blast Series DVD by Mary Helen Bowers…

It’s nothing revolutionary. It’s a grouping of pretty routine exercises done in 8 counts with 4 sets of reps. So basically, you do a lot of each exercise. This is the breakdown. It’s four 15 minute segments: arms, all over, and 2 segments on the butt.

Swan Arms: It’s 15 minutes of flap like a swan. It would be interested if Mary Helen talked about technique but she doesn’t. The most direction you get from her is to keep your elbows up on classic swan arms and that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong, 15 minutes is a long time to flap, a good wind and you might even fly somewhere but since you don’t really know where the emphasis should be or any real technique the fact that your arms are burning could signal a good workout or that you’re hurting yourself and you just don’t know it.

The Body Blast is some crunches, reverse push ups, and leg lifts. Very little to zero instruction but if you’ve ever worked out in your life you’ve probably done some version of each of these exercises so most people wouldn’t need to much direction – I guess. I have wonky wrists so there are some reverse push ups that I can’t do without my hands going numb for about 4 hours, so I substituted different push ups for that part.

The butt part 1 & 2 is basically every kind of leg lift that you can imagine. It’s a good workout honestly. You can definitely feel it. If you’re looking for the ballet part, I don’t know what to tell you, wear a tutu while doing the DVD perhaps!

Final tally –

Positives: It’s a good workout. The video is clean and bright with little distraction. Mary Helen isn’t too annoying and wears lovely leotards. There isn’t anything that an average person couldn’t do really, no difficult choreographed moves, no strange contortions, just pretty straightforward not very fun exercises.

Negatives: No music – what is a “ballet” workout without music! No instructions – I always watch a new workout video all the way through first to figure out what I’m doing before I try it and I recommend that since she just starts in. Not terribly interesting. Not a lot of fun.

All in all, it is a good workout and I am seeing a difference in tone but haven’t noticed any real difference in strength in class. Of course it’s only been a week so I’m going to keep going. But if I had to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, I’d say save your $22 bucks and do some jumping jacks in your living room to Adele blasting on your iPod.