Dance Off the Inches: Dance It Off Ballroom

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A 40-minute cardio workout using authentic steps from Cha-Cha, Samba and Jive. There is an 18-minute tutorial to get you started. Kristina Milova instructs.

Advanced beginning exercisers who really love to dance. Most people will find the tutorial really helpful — it removes the intimidation factor.

Unless you have a lot of background in dance, I highly recommend that you check out the tutorial before even attempting the workout on this DVD. Going cold might frustrate you needlessly, and these steps break down very nicely, especially as presented by instructor Milova. She knows how to make the flashiest moves easy to execute. After the tutorial, you should find the workout itself to be simple enough to learn, even though you probably won’t get all the moves right the first couple of times. After a 5-minute warm-up, there are three different 10-minute segments: Cha-Cha, Samba and Jive, each one built around the moves you’ve already learned. They’re fun, great if you enjoy dancing, and with very little tweaking, you can even take some of these moves to the dance floor. It’s not an over-the-top, make-you-sweat-buckets workout, but it’ll raise your heart rate if you’re anything less than intermediate level, and dance-fanatic intermediates might want to use it on light or recovery days. My only complaint is that unless you do this DVD fairly regularly, it’s hard to retain the moves. I did this once, and then it sat around for a couple of weeks while I reviewed other DVDs, and when I came back to it, I had to practice to the tutorial again. But if this were in my every-few-days roster, I doubt that would be necessary.