DVD Review: Dancing With the Stars: Dance Off the Pounds

[Image: Amazon.com]

As promised, here’s the first of my dance workout DVD reviews. The first one that I reviewed was Dancing With the Stars: Dance Off the Pounds, where Kym Johnson, Lacey Schwimmer & Dmitry Chaplin teach some routines for the Swing, Jive & Quickstep.

Kym starts us off with a Swing routine and she’s a terrific teacher. She explains everything very well and shows us only a couple of steps at a time so we can build up to the whole routine. The dance moves are fun, only a little challenging and since swing is my favorite style of dance to do, this section was my favorite.

Then Lacey walks us through a Jive routine. It too was easy to pick up with her excellent instructions. The moves are very similar to those of swing, so it was also a lot of fun.

Finally, Dmitry takes over to teach us some Quickstep moves. This is one of the most difficult dance styles to learn, but he takes it slowly, step by step and it wasn’t as tough as I expected. This portion of the routine is really fast, once we learn the moves in the routine, but it gets the heart pumping and is a great workout.

All three dancers take us through a stretching Cool Down section where we do simple stretches and take breaths. It felt so good after the intense dancing.

Overall, I loved the dancing and the instructions were very well done by all three dancers.

One thing I would have liked more would have been to have more interesting music. The music they chose for it wasn’t very exciting, but it does allow us to hear the instructions clearly, so it’s a trade-off.

The DVD gives us the chance to customize our workout. We can choose one, two or all of the dance portions and we get to choose whether we want to hear the instructions, or turn them off and just dance.

I loved this DVD and will definitely continue to use it. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.