This is my favorite Marcus Irwin workout, and in my top 3 favorite hi-lo workouts (along with Christi Taylor’s CIA 9801 and Kari Anderson’s Danceworks). Needless to say, if you don’t like to twirl you will not like this workout – there are twirls in every combo. There are also a lot of pivot turns and 6-point mambos. The final choreography is fairly complex, but Marcus starts with simple steps and builds slowly and logically, making his workouts much easier to learn than others of similar complexity.

The workout is broken down into a 5-minute warmup, 53 minutes main workout in two sections, and 4-minute cooldown, for a total of 62 minutes. The main workout is 7 combos and uses TIFTTing (i.e. “take it from the top”). The first combo is 32 counts of chroeography on each side. Combos 2 through 7 are 16 counts of choreography each, so by the time you are done you end up with 4 32-count blocks of moderately complex choreography.

Section 1: The warmup is a 32-count combo; you never see it again after the warmup.

Section 2: After learning combo 1 right and left, you learn combo 2, then practice both right and left. Then you learn combo 3, practice 1-3 right and left, then split them (i.e. 1R, 2L, 3R, 1L, 2R, 3L).

Section 3: You learn combo 4 and 5 separately, then put them together. Then you TIFTT 1-5 by splitting them. You learn combo 6 and 7 separately, then put them together, then TIFTT 4-7. Finally you TIFTT 1-7 all together, once on each side. (I would have preferred less TIFTTing in the early part of the workout, and going through the final product a couple more times.)

Section 4: The cooldown consists of gentle movements and stretches; there is no more choreo.

The intensity of the workout can get fairly high if you have enough room to move, but is lowered by Marcus’ breaks to catch his breath. The workout is best done with lots of space (I use 15X10) but you can probably get by with much less. Marcus appears to be using about 8X6 himself, but makes comments about keeping his movements small due to not having enough space.

The production quality in Marcus’ Evolution series is much improved over his early Choreography 2 Go workouts, and is now comparable to CIA. The music is mostly instrumental, nothing I recognized but I found it enjoyable. There are two female background exercisers, Nicole and Johanna. The color scheme is blue and black. The set has a black background with several TV monitors, sitting on top of cabinets, playing what appear to be Window Media Player backgrounds in blue. Marcus wears a black sleeveless top and long blue pants. The women wear blue tops and long black pants.

Instructor Comments:
Marcus is charming as usual. His self-deprecating sense of humor comes through as he makes fun of his manliness on the Cheerleader move, his “wobbly bits”, and his occasional mistakes.

Pam Larson