This is one of my favourite Joyce tapes. It is a bit longer than the 20 minutes she says it is---the lower body section is about 35 minutes, and the upper is much shorter. But the time goes by really quickly.

You begin day 1 with a very brief warm-up (an innovation mysteriously lacking in workout two) and do some chest and back work, then some lower body and abs. With two exceptions, you do each exercise one at a time, i.e. one set with your lightest weight, short rest, one set with your middle weight, short rest, one set with your heaviest weight. This made the time appear to go by quickly---you knew you just had those three sets and you were done with that activity. There were a few quirks in this section: you do leg work, then you do abs, then you go back to legs again, for example. I would rather have kept all of that together. I also felt that some of Joyce’s lower body work was strange. The lunges were too fast to be comfortable, so I substituted tall box work there. And I could not figure out how to hold weights between my ankles, so I skipped the leg curls and substituted bridge work there instead, allowing me to skip that exercise when it came up later and stop the workout after the abs section. With these two modifications, I really felt I got a good workout and was pleased with it.

Day 2 works the remainder of the upper body. The big omission here was a warm-up. I can’t figure out why she didn’t have one, or why she didn’t chapter the DVD so you could play the warm-up from yesterday. But the workout was very enjoyable. It was slightly shorter than the day 1 workout, and had a comfortable lifting pace. I could go fairly heavy with this section as compared to Joyce’s other programs.

The dvd includes the “Joyce explains” video, which I didn’t feel was very helpful. She basically stands there and recites various explanations from her books. The topics include how to raise your weights, how to ‘cheat’ (she goes on far, far too long with a demo of this) and some very hurried examples of various exercises for each body part. I suppose it was good for one viewing, but I certainly would not have wanted to pay extra money for it.

The video appears easy on first glance, but I found for me, the slower lifting speed allowed me to get a very good workout from it because I could concentrate and lift heavier than I can with her other programs. And I found the structure of only doing one exercise at a time a nice change of pace from Joyce’s other programs. Overall I think this tape is a keeper.

Joanna