The Charge

Feel the burn. Feel it, chump!

The Case

Nuclear-powered Christi Taylor is ready to smack you upside your Pringle-eating head with another dose of calorie-incinerating cardio workouts. Cardio Collectibles is an hour-plus compendium of fast-paced sweat-inducing, groin-pull-baiting workouts, headed by Taylor herself and two helpers who can likely beat me in a foot race and brag about it to their girlfriends.

The DVD is chopped up into four components: "Warm-up," "Step," "High/Low," and "Cooldown." The meat of the workouts is the "Step" and "High/Low" routines, which are book-ended by the light-duty stretching of the preamble and closer maneuvers.

And wow is it meaty. Again, while I can't personally attest to breaking a sweat with Taylor (I don't have the room in the living room to bust a move), the choreography is clearly demanding, and—ready for this?—Taylor-made to get the cardio system pumping. The step workouts, which involve one of those plastic steps give way to the high/low stuff, which, as far as I can tell, are different because one needs a step and the other doesn't. Regardless, I predict you'll be panting heavily throughout both of them if this is your sort of thing.

Presentation-wise, you're looking at a no-frills set up. Taylor and her comrades look to be doing their thing in a converted basketball court with a backdrop behind them. The music is fast and techno-rich, though bearable. The opening sequence, however, sports some of the worst title music I've ever heard: techno garbage voiced over by what sounded like a Muppet on a dirt-bike. The chapter skip between workouts and the rewind button—the most important features—work, so you should be all set.

Technically, it's 2.0 stereo and full frame with the only extras being a brief MoveMaster program that slowly lays out the choreography and some bloopers that run with the DVD credits.

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