Crunch: Fat Blaster
Jennifer Mills PalmerYear 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.
05/23/1997