I wanted to give a review of this DVD from someone who does mostly weighted lower body workouts and finds that heavy weights do good things for me. My bread-and-butter leg workouts are Cathe Friedrich’s weight routines, and I generally don’t care for unweighted, ballet-style workouts. However, I do like this workout, and it’s the only of Bar Method and Lotte Berk DVDs that I’ve bothered to keep and use regularly.

I think this workout is a great compliment to weighted strength training for the lower body. It really works deep in my hamstrings, which are hard to get at with weight exercises at home. To a lesser degree, I feel my upper hamstrings/butt area, which is always good! To get the most out of the workout, you really need to focus carefully on the instructions, because form is critical on these exercises. It’s a workout that got more difficult after the first several times I did it because I was slowly learning to do the exercises more effectively.

The workout has an 8 minute warm-up, 13 minutes of standing leg work using a barre or heavy piece of furniture (they also show you how to use a wall if you don’t have furniture that works), 5 minutes of “back dancing”, little butt tucks/pelvic tilts done on your back with your knees bent, and a 5 minute final stretch. The DVD also has a bonus workout that is 9 minutes long featuring more advanced versions of the main exercises. The main workout is chaptered for each section, but the bonus workout is not chaptered.

This DVD is great to add on to other workouts because it’s not too long. I often add on just the barre work for a nice 13 minute segment. There’s one mistake in the barre section, though – the instructor forgets to start out with slower-paced reps on the 2nd side of the 3rd exercise, so you end up unbalanced. (That kind of thing drives me crazy, so I pause for a second and do the slow reps on my own.)

Instructor Comments:
The instructor, Kristen Lilley, seems nice and is not particularly note-worthy. I found the instructors in the other Lotte Berk DVDs and the Bar Method DVDs fairly annoying, so being un-noteworthy is actually pretty good! She explains the exercises in detail, which is useful at first – really listen to her! – but eventually makes the workout seem a bit slow. However, no matter how many times I do it, I still *really* feel it in my hamstrings afterwards, so it’s definitely doing something!

KathyW