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.

In the completely awesome ballet film, Etoiles, the narrator asks the wonderful Marie-Agnès Gillot if she loves ballet and she responds that love is perhaps not strong enough of a word, instead ballet is something that consumes you. That’s a pretty strong statement and yet how many of us spent many of our waking hours in some sort of thought or action ballet related?! I know I spend a heck of a lot of time consumed by ballet. I’m constantly looking for ways to work more classes into my already over-packed schedule. I’ve been looking like crazy for a DVD that would fill in the days when a “real” ballet class just isn’t going to happen. In  my opinion, there is no substitute, nothing that is actually an hour, an hour and a half of class. My next thought was to find a way to enhance my ballet work in other ways, so lately I’ve been taking time to do push ups, crunches, foot exercises and stretches. I try to get this in every day but let me be honest and tell you that stretch or get a few more pages done on my dissertation and I’m going to dissertate – not because I want to do that more but the dissertation does sort of have a ticking time clock on it with no mercy even for a dancer-in-training.

So I picked out a workout video that is ballet inspired but not really dance-y. I chose to start with the Ballet Beautiful Blast Series, there is also a 60-minute workout video, but I think we will move onto that later. Please refrain from bringing up that movie starring that person, but yes, this video is by the dancer who trained that person for that movie. I think the point of the video is to end up with a balletic looking body without actually doing ballet… I’m confused by why anyone would want to do that if you want to know the truth! Because in my view, an awesome balletic body would be a great side effect of learning ballet, but I want to learn ballet for the love of ballet itself and the notion of being able to dance from time to time.  At any rate, here is the plan… for the rest of November on days when I don’t have class, I’m going to do this video and see if it helps at all with strength and balance for actual ballet. I’ll review the video and update you on how this goes. I started Monday and I have to tell you the backs of my arms and my glutes are definitely sore today, so that’s a good start.

Stay tuned and fingers crossed!