Crunch: Fat Blaster

Jennifer Mills Palmer
Year Released: 1995

Categories: Floor Aerobics/Hi-Lo/Dance


Fitness Level: intermediate
Breakdown: 5-minute warm-up; 20 minute mixed level workout; 5-minute cool-down.
Impact: mixed
Choreography: moderate, but hard to follow due to inadequate cuing
Music: Can't remember--it was overshadowed most of the time by those wild and crazy "whooping walls"
Production quality: fair. Grainy looking photography
Setting: studio
I bought this one on impulse before our website here was on-line. The packaging talks about Crunch being a place where you can work out without feeling insecure about how your body looks. At the time, I was seven months post-partum, still breastfeeding, so it was a weak moment for me! This workout, like Donna-Mite (which is distributed by the same company, and Donna, of course, co-hosts Crunch's TV show), includes a variety of body types. Jillian from Donna-Mite and 4-Day Rotation is here, too--and I'm built almost exactly like her. The opening credits even made me giggle a little bit--"nice place you've got here" and other cute comments. So here we have this friendly group of people, and motivational/fun comments on the screen between segments and combos, and we're all having just a great time. But alas, it's a few leis short of Hawaii. The aerobics is only 20 minutes long--that's usually when I get my second wind and want to do MORE! The choreography is not any more complex than that in Donna-Mite, most of which I could follow the first and second time around, but Jennifer isn't as good at cuing in this tape as Donna is in hers. It could just be inexperience, though, or maybe the producers were going for a "just have fun with it" approach rather than focusing on instruction. But the real sin here is in the sound. Whoever thought of adding a "whoop track" to the Crunch tapes ought to be condemned to 50 years of living in this studio with the walls rigged so you can't turn them off. As we say in Kentucky, that'll "learn 'em!" It's encouraging to read that Jennifer's Double Crunch tape is getting good reviews here at VF. This particular tape isn't worth the $10 I paid for it, but I really like her and wish her well in her future endeavors.
Grade: A for Jennifer
C for this tape

Instructor Comments:
Jennifer is in the crew for Donna Richardson's Donna-Mite and also her 4-Day Rotation tape. She looks like she's having a great time in both of them--I guess hanging around Donna will do that to you :) Her Double Crunch workout has gotten good reviews, so I think that the tape I'm reviewing just isn't showing her skills off to their best advantage.

Melissa Cooper

05/23/1997