For Women Only/Upper Body

Tamilee Webb, Pepper Von
Year Released: 1995

Categories: Upper Body Strength


This is an approximately half-hour long upper body workout. Tamilee begins with a slow, basic and brief warm-up of dynamic full-body stretches with Pepper. She provides several form pointers, but leaves most of the fairly elementary cueing to Pepper, who leads the rest of the tape. He's a personable enough leader, but he's really there for eye candy: he poses at several points quite deliberately, and his attempts to put "funk" in things (i.e. random hip-thrusty stuff) compromises his form on some of the exercises. This does not concern him nearly as much as it should.

Tamilee leaves after the warm-up, and Pepper then leads us through chest and beck work. He does not really mix things up here, which was a nice change of pace from most of my other weight tapes: you stay with each body part until it's finished, and do all sets of a given exercise at once before moving on to a new one. There are brief breaks in between each set, and they were just long enough hat an ambitious modifier could probably pyramid their weights, or at minimum, go have a drink. Pepper randomly varies between doing 2 and 3 sets of each move, and the number of reps fluctuates from around 8 to around 12, depending on the exercise.

Following this section, Pepper, for no logical reason, attempts to teach a brief funk dancing combo, for which Tamilee reluctantly reappears. Having this combo in here was very strange and did not really make sense, but it was blessedly short and skippable.

The rest of the upper body gets lumped into the final long section, called "arms." Pepper maintains the nice and slow lifting pace he established in the first weight section, but I found his seemingly random exercise selection a bit frustrating. Biceps get what amount to about 60 curls in a row (3 variations, in 2 sets). Triceps then get only ONE exercise! Back gets 2 or 3 different moves, then shoulders get about 5---some of which other videos classify as back moves anyway. I substituted more triceps work here, and feel I got a balanced workout as a result, but I found the division of work here baffling.

Overall, I feel this tape is a good little workout if you know how to modify. Because some of the shoulder work is really for the back, and the chest gets a solid run of pushups, the only muscle group really underrepresented is the triceps. If you are willing to cut out some of the shoulder sets, or if you plan ahead and do your triceps work during that funk cardio part, you'll be fine, and you might even enjoy yourself. Pepper is certainly a personable guy, even if he is not the most meticulous paragon of good form. And since the lifting pace is slow enough and he does at least two sets of each exercise, this tape can be modified to a strength-building pyramid approach. I wish that pepper had been a little more organized and consistent, but overall, I found the tape a solid low intermediate workout, and a nice change of pace from my usual routine.

Joanna

01/16/2001