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Mindy's Strength Toolbox (CIA 2501) Review
I did the entire workout for the 1st time today. Here is my review!
Design: The total workout is 103 minutes. It’s divided into 3 sections—weights, tubing, and body weight. Each section is divided into 3, 10 minute sub-sections –lower body, upper body, and core. It’s designed so that you can customize your own workout by stringing several sections together, so you can make it an all lower body or all upper body workout, if you chose. There are no premixes or blender, so you would have to use your own dvd programming or navigate through the chapter menu. Each segment is well organized and while lots of variety is presented, the moves flow well together with smooth transitions.
Instructor: Mindy with 2 background exercisers, one showing easier modifications. Mindy is much less hyper with fewer wisecracks and less chattiness. She’s still very enthusiastic and motivating, and cues and instructs the workout very well.
Music: Very forgettable. I can’t remember a thing about it!
Warmup: It’s stretchy rather than cardio-ish, with body wave moves. It’s effective because the workout is not intense.
Dumbell Section: Mindy uses a club step set to 10 inches and one set of light dumbbells, though suggests we need to heavy up at home to feel the burn. I believe Cathe’s High Step or a BOSU would work well in place of the club step.
Lower body: Excellent series of squat/lunges combined with balance/coordination elements. With the step Mindy does rear lunges with knee lifts and glute extensions, one-legged deadlifts, uneven plie squats with heel raises, uneven squats with soccer kicks, stationary lunge (with rear heel elevated on step) with front foot toe lifts. Without the step, she does additional lunges with toe raises and balances.
Upper body: Basic strength training moves, nothing fancy. She includes back flies, one arm lat rows, chest flies. chest presses, pullovers, pushups, shoulder front and side raises, overhead presses, rotator L-flies, concentration bicep curls, one-arm overhead tricep extensions, and tricep dips.
Core: Includes various ab crunches, back extensions, planks, pushups and a very interesting bridge to arm balance move. I found it easier to use a soft weighted ball in place of a dumbbell, as the weight is sometimes held between the feet.
Band Section: For most exercises, Mindy uses a Spri Ultra-toner (figure 8 band). Mindy comes up with lots of unique and effective exercises for the upper and lower body using this band. You could substitute other rubber resistance products, but it would be very awkward as Mindy moves quickly from one variation to the next. I didn’t have the Ultra-toner, but made a makeshift one by tying 2 ankle bands together. It worked well, but I wouldn’t recommend this option because the knot caused one of my bands to snap as I was finishing this section.
Lower body: Ankle weight could be subbed for the Ultra-toner band but weights would work the muscles differently. There is a standing series of hamstring curls, rear extensions, and forward extensions; a side-lying series of inner and outer thigh work; and an all-fours series of donkey kicks. She uses a Spri Xercuff for a 1 minute drill with step squats, side lunges, and curtsey dips. The Xercuff is not necessary, a light ankle band (like the one used for TLP’s Core Cardio) or the Ultra-toner would work well enough.
Upper body: Lots of great execises using the band. Weights won’t work here, because Mindy changes the direction of the load vector by holding the band up at different positions and angles. She works the back with a series of standing moves, including a bow-and-arrow move and an overhead lat pull down. She wraps the band around her back for standing chest presses and then does push-ups from the floor with the band (extremely tough -- even Mindy drops to her knees for these pushups). There’s also some front/side shoulder raises, external shoulder rotation, bicep curls, tricep extensions.
Core: A lot of similar exercises to the weights core section, just using the band instead. The band didn’t really seem to do much to enhance the exercises; it seemed more of a nuisance than a useful tool here.
Body weight section: This is my favorite section of the 3 in this workout. It’s very yoga-inspired with a lot of moves adapted from yoga.
Lower body: Lots of standing balance and coordination work. There’s a warior 3 pose (while contracting and extending the arms and lifted leg), forward leg extension balance, and one legged squats and balances with leg abducted to the side. She mixes in a few squat jumps in between balance acts.
Upper body: All the moves are variations of yoga poses – downward dog, plank, low pushups, and cobra. She also repeats the bridge-to-arm balance move here. This segment is surprising tough and effective.
Core: This is the best of the 3 core segments. Some bicycle abs, pilates swimming, and a very long and tough plank series. The planks included some innovative new twists such as lifting one leg and-rotating it into tree pose and switching between elbow and arm extended planks.
Stretch: very thorough, with lots of yoga moves.
Overall: This workout is long but doable in it’s entirety because none of it is very intense. Unlike other Mindy strength workouts, there is very little cardio effect, with hardly any jumping. It’s more about targeting the muscles in isolation with weights or bands, or doing slow and controlled yoga moves. There is still a lot of tough challenging moves, but Strength Toolbox is probably more accessible to the intermediate exercisers than other Mindy workouts.
I found this workout enjoyable and effective. Lots of interesting variety and Mindy’s engaging personality made the time pass quickly. Each segment on it’s own didn’t seem to do much (since they are so short), but the cumulative effect of doing them all thoroughly cooked my muscles. However, it was overkill for the abs to do all 3 core sections. One core segment would be plenty since Mindy also challenges the core in the other sections with lots of balancing and pushups. I think this workout will feel even more effective when I figure out the right weights and band adjustments and get better at the balance moves.
Janet
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