DVD REVIEW: DANCING WITH THE STARS – CARDIO DANCE

The Pitch

Feel the burn you couch potato sons o’ bitches…

The Humans

Dancing With The Stars’ professional dancers Ashly Delgrosso, Kym Johnson and Maksim Chmerovskiy.

The Nutshell

Trying to capitalize on the show’s success, three of the pros from DWTS show you how to dance like them…or at least how they think they can show you to dance like them. There’re some basic steps that quickly move to near-pro-level ballroom dancing as the dancers try to challenge you and even themselves. Once you get past the inevitable back, leg and foot maladies, and the therapy for realizing you can’t dance as good as these three, you might actually drop a few pounds.

Aside from whatever infomercial I may come across on TV at 3:00 in the morning, the last time I ever had anything to do with any kind of workout video was 1981 when I saw Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” music video and realized that yes, I was indeed a heterosexual. So I thought it might be a nice change of pace to check this one out. I even had thoughts of actually exercising to it, but of course then I sobered up. Anyway, this is a pretty harmless little exercise (yes, pun intended, shoot me) that takes you through the basic steps of learning four common ballroom dances: the Cha Cha, the Samba, the Paso Doble and the Jive, with more of a cardio lean to it, presented by three of the pros from DWTS, Maksim, Ashly and Kym, the Aussie with a ridiculous body and, as far as I can tell, no underwear.

What’s fairly interesting about this disc is the flexibility with which you can use it. You can play all the dances back to back or individually, and you can even set the order you want to do them, both with the dancers’ instruction or just music. If you even sort of dig ballroom dancing at all, either watching or participating, you could probably get into this. I think, however, if I were going to attempt to shape up with a workout video, I’d probably be Tae Bo-ing it, at least then you could look like you can kick some ass. Here, the manliest thing you’re going to be doing is watching the hot chicks in spandex. Still, as exercise videos go, this is probably one of the more accessible, but it would take repeat viewings to get the moves down, because it gets fairly complicated at times.

There’s the custom dance feature I mentioned before, where you can choose your workout. There’s also trailers for other workout videos, including a truly scary one for Denise Austin’s Fit & Firm Pregnancy. Pregnant chicks in spandex, to paraphrase Seinfeld, “is a turnoff, man.” Finally, there’s a six-minute feature called “Slim Fast Healthy Eating Tips”, which dispenses advice like not eating junk food. I dropped a couple of pounds just laughing at it…