Self Magazine: Bikini Ready Fast – DVD review

I am an absolute, confirmed fan of Ellen Barrett’s now. Her Pick Your Spot – Pilates was so easy and smooth to work with and made a great introduction to Pilates. Now, I find her Bikini Ready Fast equally clear and straightforward to work with. It’s a 40-minute workout from Self Magazine’s fitness series and focuses on strength training and sculpting using light weights. It’s only after working with Ellen’s DVDs that I realize how important it is to have an instructor who tells it like it is without making a whole lot of noise. In other words, Ellen’s signal to noise ratio is rather good. An occasional “good job” is about all the cheerleading you’ll hear, and yet she keeps you motivated and going. Quite possibly it’s to do with the flowing pace and clarity of instructions. I worked on Bikini Ready Fast today for the first time. And loved it. In fact, I feel like having another go at it now, a few hours later, am thinking I’d better not push it. Obviously the Bikini Ready workout is set on the beach. How wonderful it must feel to work out there… but for those of us who can only but dream of that, we’ll have to remain contented with just looking. The workout starts with a good warm up. It uses lots of wide plies and reaches, which keeps it close to the moves you’ll actually be doing in the main workout. You pick up your weights straight after the warm up. Now, Ellen and her two companions keep to a restricted set of exercises. To add variety, challenge and to target more muscles, they introduce variations on the same exercises. That makes easy to learn the workout. I managed to do the workout straight through without watching it first — and that’s saying something. The exercises include lots of squats (with the weights), expansive arm moves, curls and reaches, plies. Nothing goes on long enough to become boring, though overall I can see that one will need to move up to something mroe challenging soon enough or perhaps add it to a collection of favorite workouts to do now and then. Have a look The beach girls then move on to a segment of the workout in which you do a few easy enjoyable jumps and one-leg squats. That’s minus weights, thankfully.And then you slow down and cool off. But before the end of the DVD, there’s a 10 minute bonus workout. This is a pilates section targeting the abs in particular. Ellen gives some solid and good advice on exercise and diet. She says to lose weight, you have to add cardio aerobics to this workout. Walking, cycling, aerobics, dancing.. anything that keeps your heart reate up and keeps you moving. Also, a sensible diet, which doesn’t mean giving up stuff so that you go about craving it but rather, eating what you want more carefully, now and then, in nice little quantities.