The Charge

An Infinite By The Minute Workout System!

The Case

I was totally hyped about this disc. I like Minna Lessing and her workouts, and this one promises something new: You get to choose what kind of workout you want and the DVD magically creates it for you. We are promised a workout, "based on the most cutting edge DVD technology." So does it live up to the hype?

Um, in a word—nope.

The disc segments include:
• Introduction & Explanation (5 mins)
• Warm-Up (3, randomly selected, running 3 mins each)
• Choose Your Workout
• Cool-Down (same deal as the Warm-Ups)
• Fast Track Workout (a 3 minute sequence and a 4 minute sequence for those REALLY short on time)

The hook of this DVD is the "Choose Your Workout." The basic idea is way cool. You are prompted to choose your target area, intensity, and workout length. The DVD then randomly plays the magic number of the 115 one minute workout segments. This is supposed to result in limitless combinations, but unfortunately it results in some body parts being overworked while others are ignored. For example, to begin with I chose a 16 minute upper body sequence. I worked my shoulders and chest for 10 minutes and my triceps for a whopping 0 minutes. One shoulder sequence repeated 4 times. I tried the abs workout. My obliques were burning, while my upper abs got almost nothing. If you do the total body workout, you are jumping from one area to the next and back, along with getting on the floor, jumping up, picking up weights, and putting them down again over and over. This is a pain, but also where most of your cardio work comes from.

There are a few of Special Features, but only one of them is actually useful. That would be a 7-minute stretching routine that I highly recommend doing after the main workout, since stretches between moves last literally one second. We also get "Techniques & Tips" and "How to Get the Most Out of the Program". These are written information, many which are verbally explained during the main stuff, so they are fairly pointless. The other "special feature" is the credits. That doesn't really count in my book.

Minna may give you ideas for some new moves and is free to go. But for their not so "cutting edge DVD technology," I sentence Sony to do the push-up sequences over and over again.

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