A half-hour workout that uses the stability ball to work your core — your abs and back — and improve your balance and posture. Keli Roberts instructs.

Intermediate exercisers - while the moves appear gentle, they are not all that easy! You will, of course, need a stability ball, plus a mat.

There are a dizzying amount of exercise DVDs out there to work your abs and your "core" — in other words, all those muscles around your midsection that help you with balance, give you good posture and which are essential for functional fitness. It's pretty hard for a workout to stand out from the pack, but Keli Roberts manages to create a routine that adds some unusual stability ball moves. Exercises like "hover squats" and the ever-popular opposite arm/ leg lifts, done with the ball, challenge you in ways you don't get with other DVDs. And Roberts includes traditional moves, like ball crunches, but does them from a couple different angles while offering excellent cueing and explanations so you make the most of them. You also get some real toughies — it'll take most people a bit of effort to master the pike plank push. So the good news is that you'll have lots of new, effective moves in this workout. The downside is that while the DVD is supposedly arranged so that the 24 minutes' worth of exercises (minus the warm-up and cool down) can be divided into 8-minute segments, the programming isn't very well done. The segments don't end at 8 minutes, but keep on going all the way through 'til the end. In reality, the routines work best when you've got a whole half-hour to devote to the complete workout.

 

 

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