I recently splurged on a bunch of Jane Fonda classic workouts, and I'm going to do a little assessment of each one in this thread as I do it, probably one every few days. I owned a lot of these years ago on VHS, and I still had her yoga workout, which made its way into my rotation about once a year. However, after really hitting the home gym hard this year due to working from home and not having as much access to other workout spaces, I managed to make it through every other workout I owned and needed to return to something both new but also vaguely familiar. For many of these, it's been over 20 years since I've done them, and I also wanted to be entertained by the hard '80s vibe of it all.
First up was the classic original Workout, from 1982. There are two workouts on this DVD (which was mastered from an original laserdisc, and the logo proclaiming that at the beginning was pretty awesome). The DVD collection actually just came out a couple of years ago, as Jane does a little new intro and looks like she does on
Grace & Frankie; I actually didn't watch the intro but had it on mute, as you can't skip to the menu without letting it play. (I may watch it another time, in case she gives warnings that some exercises are now quasi-dangerous or something.) The two workouts are Beginner (35 minutes) and Advanced (53 minutes). I opted for Beginner today but will switch to Advanced next time, and may then never go back to Beginner, because it was way, way too easy (I have been spending the year with the FIRM and Jari Love, for the most part, and have managed to build up quite a lot of cardio and strength endurance). This workout contains very little cardio, no weights, and is somewhat based on ballet, yoga, Pilates, and possibly even Callanetics. It all feels somewhat Tracey Anderson-esque (I think this style of workout influenced her, actually). There was a lot more floor work than I remembered. Ultimately, I burned very few calories, and the only really challenging move was the cool down, which consists entirely of doing a shoulder stand to plow pose and back again. I remember at 16 I was really good at that, but not so much at 45.
I just kind of did as best I could, but ultimately I feel like that move is a little dangerous and if it's in the Advanced workout, I may swap it out for just hamstring stretches or something.
It was a lot of fun, though. So many leg warmers! Lots of whooping and shouting in the studio, which was annoying at first but then grew on me. If you hate cardio and want something retro that you could do on a day when you don't have much time, this isn't a bad choice.