CIA 2301: Awesome Strength

I seriously injured myself doing this workout for the first time. I am an intermediate exerciser in my early thirties. I do some Cathe strength workouts (the easier ones), and I when I tried out this video 2 months ago, I was able to do about 10 pushups on my toes, and several jacknifes/pikes on a stability ball with no problem. I thought I was ready for this DVD. I wasn't.

The specific move that caused me a problem involved doing a pushup with your hands on paper plates. You go down into the pushup, then push your hands away from your body out to your sides, then pull them back in, and then push up away from the ground. I did this maybe twice, then watched in amazement as Mindy kept going.

My shoulder felt irritated after the workout, so I rested it for a few days and didn't return to the workout. Since then I've had felt an off and on mild ache in the front of my shoulder, until 2 weeks ago, when suddenly the joint got irritated (possibly by regular pushups I was doing to a Firm workout) and inflamed. It was a sharp, intense, sudden pain (about 2 hours after I finished the workout. My husband initially thought I was joking; then he thought I was having a heart attack. I've since seen my doctor and she's ordered a week of icing and ibuprofen, x-rays and referred me to a physical therapist.

There are many great things about this workout, and there are lots of ways to modify it. I tried many of them. (Awesome Strength also contains some really explosive lunges, which I avoided, and I recommend others with knee problems do the same.) I'm not one to overdo, but I do like to try new things and in this case it was not a good move.

My doctor was, to say the least, not impressed with the paper plate pushup move.

I'm writing this review for the benefit of those who may be trying Awesome strength for the first time, and for those who (unlike me) are interested in Mindy's Gliding package. If the gliding workouts contain a move like this, you may want to be really really careful with it.

I think this workout's main strength is actually instructional--showing you lots of ways to use lots of different equipment. You can apply this knowledge to other workouts. I don't tend to "preview" my workouts--watching them all the way through before doing them--but in this case I highly recommend it.

This review will be brief, as I have sold the DVD. I couldn't figure a way to integrate it into my collection, among other things.

Although I like Mindy's chattiness, goofiness, or whatever you want to call it, she was really off the wall in this one. In the early part of the workout, I think she was joking with the behind-the-camera crew, and I felt left out of the joke. Plus one of her background exercisers was having no part of the frivolity and that made me uncomfortable.

I felt the workout was a bit unstructured. I purchased the workout because I liked the fact that different kinds of equipment were used and therefore would give the DVD more versatility. However, I wish Mindy herself had demonstrated moves on the step and not just on the BOSU. There were times the background exerciser scrambled to figure out how to adopt a certain exercise to the step, which made it awkward for me to follow. Perhaps if I had a BOSU, the workout would have flowed better for me.

My overall impression was that Mindy wanted us to get out our toys and figure out what was the hardest thing we could do on them. I didn't feel like I accomplished anything.

This was the first strength workout of Mindy Mylrea's I've done and I've concluded I should stick to her cardio workouts.

Different strokes for different folks.

I really enjoy this workout for the variety it gives. There is such an amazing variety to the equipment that almost any equipment can be used and the workout could be modified to any workout (does that even make sense?)

Mindy has two background exercisers in this one...one demonstrates the moves on the floor and the other shows the moves on a step or on a stability ball. Mindy does the workout on a BOSU. For resistence, they use a variety of things: restistance bands, medicine balls, dumbbells.

The set is the usual CIA set...it's a little bit boring and, for some reason, strikes me as cluttered in this video (although that is likely just the impression from all of the many pieces of equipment being used).

The entire workout is about an hour long. It is split up like this:

Warm up: 7.5 mins

Strength training: 47 mins

Sports balance and stretch: 5.5min

I only really have one complaint about this...that is that on my DVD player, it only plays a chapter at a time and returns to the menu in between. I don't know if it is just my player (it's a Panasonic), but that is my experience. I guess an advantage might be that I get a chance to shake out and get ready to get back to it.

The workout itself is fairly advanced and I am not quite there yet. I usually do as much as I can and then switch to something else...but the fun factor in this one keeps it in my collection and the hope that one day I might be able to do the whole thing.