Ripped

Jari Love
Year Released: 2005

Categories: Total Body Workouts


Others have done in-depth reviews, mine will be relatively sparse. I'm a personal trainer and a huge influence on me is exercise physiologist and author Douglas Brooks. Douglas always stresses "risk vrs reward" in terms of making all exercise and execution choices. There are things in this program that I would never use for myself or my clients because the risk, even when small, isn't worth the reward when there are better safer choices that can accomplish the same goal.

Overall impression

Good overall exercise selection and form pointers but I issues regarding safety concerns which I will mention in the positives and negative comments below. To me exercise selection.

I’m just going to mention a few points/exercises that concerned me.

Repetition tempo:

Positive: I like the “idea” of the variety of tempos within the exercises

Negative: I felt her “singles” are too fast for eccentric loading with these types of exercises and could put a lot of people in danger, especially for the deadlifts and pullovers. For someone with experience and good body awareness this might not be a problem because they'll know intuitively how to adapt the tempo to be safe and not worry about keeping up with her exact tempo(I went a little bit slower).

Dead lift/Bent over rows:

Positive: Dead lifts are a great full body exercise.

Negative: Bent over rows aren’t a good risk versus reward choice. One arm rows are much safer while still being very beneficial. Also, when she goes into the fast single count eccentrics that makes both the Deadlifts and Bent over rows (which are already somewhat risky) very high risk and definitely not worth the reward.

Skull crusher/Triceps press combo:

Positive: interesting combination to use with DBs.

Negative: Doing the triceps press with a barbell can put unnecessary pressure/stress on the wrists (I did all the exercise w/ DBs).

Seated Lateral Raises

Positive: safer exercise than overhead presses for many people.

Negative: I think doing them from a standing position (especially a split stance) is better because you integrate your body more and the feet are a better base of support than the glutes. I think seated positions can put unnecessary stress on the spine.

Abdominals Section:

I don’t have a specific positive, I tend not to be a fan of crunches or oblique crunches because most people don't need extra spinal flexion. If someone is going to do crunches I think they are much safer performed at slow tempos which a sustained contraction and using less reps. On Ripped they are performed at a fairly rapid tempo which can lead to poor form and the use of momentum. I feel that planks, side planks and rollouts are better for training the core's true function with less chance of injury to the spine.

Instructor Comments:
Jari overall does a good job, is very-business like and easy to follow.

Scott (Yogadad)

12/28/2009