Luscious - The Bellydance Workout for Beginners

Buy This Item Luscious - The Bellydance Workout for Beginners by StratoStream - World Dance New York  Available from Amazon  $14.98  on 11-24-2008     Lavish and overflowing with deep, rich, feminine movement, "Luscious: The Bellydance Workout" is made of 100% of bellydance moves and steps It is gentle, but it will work your body to enhance your muscle tone, flexibility, and fluidity, and promote weight loss. With a special focus on muscle conditioning and elongation, the program works each group of muscles deeply - using carefully built combinations to switch between muscle groups and add intensity to the workout. "Luscious: The Bellydance Workout" features gorgeous music and a beautiful flow undiluted by conventional exercises. Systematically addressing each group of muscles to deliver a total body workout, it creates an entertaining and aesthetically fulfilling dance experience inspiring you to do your best in executing each move with the proper depth, range of motion, and articulation. A true dance experience as much as a fitness experience, "Luscious" is beginner level, but it offers you a perspective of challenge and growth. The workout consists of 7 sections, each building consistently upon the dance vocabulary covered in the previous sections through its own series of combinations. The combinations include classic bellydance transitions between steps to help you create the muscle memory to ingrain dance in your body. "Luscious" is an instructional workout. It introduces the dance vocabulary in a careful, systematic way and contains an extensive tutorial section breaking down each move used in the workout. If this is one of your first steps in bellydance, this program will be a fun introduction to all the basic groups of bellydance moves and transitions. If you are a dancer, it's a great way to practice the core of the bellydance technique and vocabulary through functional drills performed in the context of dance combinations and transitions creating an extra layer of muscle memory that isolated drills do not provide. Workout duration - 45 min. Tutorial section - 50 min. The Circles section explores circular bellydance moves. It follows a slow-to-moderate tempo, working both the lower and upper body through isolations. Next is the Infinity Loops section. Together with the stretching and toning impact of every move in this section, infinity loops are the ultimate exercise in fluidity. Undulations maintain flexibiilty of your spine and help develop deep awareness of your core. They are also a challenging full-body muscle-conditioning exercise. The bellydance hipwork section exercises your thighs, glutes, and abdominal muscles. In the Hip Accents section we'll perform traditional bellydance hip moves and then weave them together with the fluid movements: circles, infinity loops and undulations. Hipwork is what gives bellydance such vibrancy and party appeal - these steps look great on any dance floor. The Shimmy - that effortless shaking of the hips - is actually hard work! Join us to shake your way through a few styles of shimmy, and enjoy the wide range of shimmy flavors. The Body Line section is built of moves involving your total body. It shifts focus from working individual body parts to dance steps that offer the most stretching and give you a dancerly posture and carriage. The last section is a short dance routine choreographed entirely of the bellydance moves featured in the workout. Reader Reviews Too exquisite to be called a workout, this seven-part "danceout" as I like to call it, is beauty in motion. The three absolute goddesses who draw you warmly, elegantly, charmingly into the beautiful world of bellydancing, look every bit luscious. Dressed in equally luscious costumes, they create an atmosphere that totally fills your mind even as you watch on your screen. While Neon, Blanca and Sarah may look as if they're dancing the most impossibly beautiful moves, the bellydance beginner can join in. Conceptualized and choreographed by Neon, who has produced numerous instructional videos that have spread bellydancing to many places in the world, this video is targeted at beginners. And it includes the "simpler" moves. If you've recently begun bellydancing and have a video or two focusing on basic technique or better still, if you're taking classes, Luscious will be a lovely way to practice them in a connected, smooth, flowing way. I won't describe each section because other reviewers have done so and the video clip does a great job of telling you what to expect. But I will say, that for the absolute beginner, there's a natural sort of break up in each segment which makes it easier to work with the video a little bit at a time. Another really useful touch is that in the tutorial section, led by Neon, each set of isolations ends with an extract from the danceout. You can use that to practice putting the moves into action. The tutorial section is very thorough and the moves are explained very thoroughly at a pace which a beginner will have no trouble with. For anyone not familiar with Neon, she's particularly experienced with clear, precise and ever-so-gentle explanations and demonstrations of dance movements. She happens to be the one who started me off on belly dancing as a video-only learner and several years later I'm amazed to have reached a happy level with no injury. For more experienced dancers, this is a wonderful video to deepen, intensify and beautify the basic moves without the usual almost-military drills we do. Use it to focus fully on engaging the abs and back while doing a full 45 minutes to strengthen the moves you'll use most often. There are combinations and arm moves sprinkled through the sessions - so it feels like a long, long leisurely dance. It's a very pleasurable way to go through all your moves, for all body zones. It reminds me a little, conceptually, of Jehan's Ultimate Fitness, which of course is a fast-paced advanced workout with complex movements and layering. Two things need a special mention and that's the absolutely gorgeous costumes and the music. The costumes contribute significantly to how this whole video looks and the aura that it creates. They're lush and totally mouth watering. The music. Ah. There are 17 (if I counted correctly) tracks used here. They're beautifully selected and add so much richness to the dance. The most-featured artists are DJ Mosavo and Solace. I've got myself an entire Luscious playlist because the music is so very pretty.

Luscious - The Bellydance Workout for Beginners Available from Amazon Price: $14.98 Updated on 11-24-2008.

SPONSORED LINKS