Build Up Your Muscles!

4 full length workouts by Gin Miller ALL on 1 DVD!

General Description - back cover:

Building your muscles with weight bearing exercise is a great way to strengthen your body and burn calories - even at rest! Your bones will become more dense, protecting your from osteoporosis, injury and fatigue. Your joints and postural muscles will thank you as you increase your daily energy levels and reduce the pain associated with arthritis. Your figure will thank you as you delay muscle loss and enhance metabolism. In just a few weeks of training, you'll begin to build muscle mass - seeing and feeling reductions in body fat, which will also improve your insulin sensitivity helping to reduce the onset of diabetes.

Choose your intensity by starting with a light weight or resistance that will allow you to practice the workout. As you become stronger, slightly add or increase your overload each week so that you gradually build your stamina over six weeks. In time, you'll be boasting a new physique as well as a renewed outlook on life.

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This 4 in 1 DVD features full length (apx. 50 minutes each) strength workouts by Gin Miller, each using a different type of equipment for maximum results.

Dumbbells - Light to moderate weights / chair
Resistance Tubes - Light to moderate resistance xertubes - red or green / chair
Weighted Toning Balls - Light to moderate soft weighted balls / chair
Ankle and Arm Weights - Light to moderate ankle and wrist weights / chair

These workouts feature standing exercises and exercises using a sturdy armless chair - there is no floor work. On the tube workout, the chair is used to anchor the resistance by threading the tube through the back of the chair.

Fitness Magazine - 10 Best Workout DVD's

" Best for Learning to Lift Weights: Build Up Your Muscles

Calories Burned About 300 Per Routine

Why We Love It: Instructor Gin Miller presents four simple but effective weight routines. Plug in your equipment preference and fitness level for a total-body workout.

Our Tester Says: 'I love the way Gin breaks down each exercise so you always know the correct form.' (204 minutes total, 48 to 52 minutes for each routine...)"

 

Review by Paula Z

Crosstraining is a fitness term that means varying your exercise activities. Most people think of crosstraining as alternating cardio and strength days, and perhaps adding a stretch day here and there. But you can also crosstrain within the same activity, and that's exactly what Gin Miller is offering in four strength training workouts on this DVD. If you've been only been using dumbbells for your workouts, here's your chance to branch out and add exercises that use wrist/ankle weights, tubing, and small weighted balls to your strength training repertoire.

Build Up Your Muscles is an excellent way for beginners to learn correct technique, but these workouts are not just for beginners. Each total body workout is done standing or seated, there are no floor exercises, so you'll work on your balance and/or posture with every exercise. Much of the time upper and lower body are worked simultaneously, so you'll work on your coordination and agility too. Gin's long sets usually start with a lower body move. Then, after gradually increasing the range of motion of the base exercise, she often adds either an upper body move, or a balance challenge, or an extra leg lift...or sometimes all three! From one workout to the next the exercises are similar, but by using different types of resistance and working from slightly different angles, you'll be targeting the muscles in slightly different ways.

Of the four workouts, the Dumbbells workout will feel the most familiar to you, although Gin manages to sneak in a few unusual exercises. You'll see most of the exercises repeated in the other workouts, although the upper and lower body exercises are usually paired up differently in each workout. Since all the exercises are done standing or seated, the lower body is worked with squats, hip hinges (deadlifts), lunges, and leg lifts. There are no plies in this workout, but the calves and quads are targeted in isolation. Upper body is worked pretty evenly, including the chest which gets push-ups on the chair.

The Arm & Leg Weights workout focuses on muscle endurance for both upper and lower body, using light resistance during long sets. The lower body is worked with compound exercises like squats, lunges and plies. Here the ankle weights don't come into play because your feet are planted, and the weights are not lifted during the reps. It's in the isolation exercises -- outer thigh lifts, ham curls and hips extensions -- where the ankle weights really make a difference in intensity. The upper body exercises focus mostly on the shoulders which get many long sets of straight-arm lifts in all directions around the shoulder joints. The upper back gets some attention during the rear shoulder exercises, biceps and triceps each get a couple of sets, but the chest is not worked in isolation this workout. As you'll see in the workout details below, most sets also involve balance work and coordination of upper and lower body moves. The exercises themselves are not as complicated at they read, because Gin does an excellent job of cueing, introduces the add-on moves gradually, and lifts at a slow, deliberate pace.

If you've been looking for another way to use the weighted balls from Leslie Sansone's walking workouts, Gin's come up with some inventive moves in the Exercise Balls workouts that will challenge your balance and improve your muscle endurance. You'll also work on coordination as Gin pairs many different arm moves with squats, hip hinges, lunges, plies and leg lifts, often using a bigger range of motion on the shoulder exercises because of the light balls. At times this workout feels like a ballet class.

Of all the workouts on this DVD, Tubes feels the most complicated, because getting the tubing ready to use for each new exercise takes a bit of fussing around. You have to deal two things that get easier only with practice: securing the tubing so that you can pull on it safely, and getting the right amount of tension for the particular exercise. Although this is a total body workout, and you'll again be doing plenty of squats, lunges, leg lifts and plies, the resistance provided by the tubing is mainly applied to the upper body. Light tubing works best until you're familiar with the exercises. As with all resistance training, once you're familiar with the exercises you'll want to invest in a couple of different strengths of tubing.

About Paula Z -

Paula Z is an ACE certified personal trainer who has personally done over 900 workout videos. She offers 2 websites for home exercise enthusiasts: The Video Fitness Training Website and Paula Z's Exercise Videos and DVD Reviews.

Paula offers complete reviews, including Modifications, Options, Pointers and Strategy for every workout that she has ever done!

If the above does not answer all your questions about this DVD, you can read more about it on Paula Z's website - Video Fitness Training