Soviet Shaping

Here are three young ladies, each enjoying her own calisthenic hamster wheel, then putting on a workoutfit, then doing the same exercises again. Google translate calls it "Soviet Shaping": "A piece speeches of Soviet beauties, with role models for women citizens. At 6:57 dressing with a hint of erotic elements."

A cheap shot + men's rhythmic gymnastics

Just go to 1:40.

The trick they do is neat, though. Fancy push-ups, pectoral-enhancing leotards and Mortal Kombat music? This is like the bulked-up equivalent of male rhythmic gymnastics. Still waiting for that to become an Olympic event. It seems to have quite a following in Japan.

Don't bring me down, Bruce.

Continuing my exploration of Olympian workout videos, here we have a bland offering from a bland man who (news to me) won a gold medal for decathlon in the '70s and is now the mascot for those Kardashian thingamajigs. What a life.

I don't really have anything to say on this matter. Go Team USA!

This is what Olympic dreams are made of.

It's the Olympics, y'all! So let's party with a real live Olympian and all-around pep-peddler, Mary Lou Retton. If you were a kid in the '80s, you may remember seeing some of these 5-minute "Fun Fit" segments smushed somewhere in your Saturday morning cartoons. 

Gosh darn it if the lady doesn't look like an 8-year-old boy on a pee-wee wrestling team. Wisdom: "Remember: Your body is your responsibility, and nobody else can find the winner inside of you." It's so good. It's all so good. I'm just going to let the stills take it from here.

"MAKE IT SEXY!!!"

VIDEO: "Pussycat Dolls Workout," (Anchor Bay, 2009)
STYLE: Dance/burlesque
INTENSITY: Mild to moderate
STRUCTURE: Short warm-up; three dance routines, each broken down into separate instruction and performance segments; cool-down
GIST: Good for: fitness beginners, the uncoordinated, and/or those who want to learn how to strut and do the sex-kitten thing. Not good for: intermediate or advanced exercisers, more experienced dancers, and/or second-wave feminists.

This video reminded me sooooo much of "Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease," and that's both a good and a bad thing. Good because I unabashedly (or maybe a little abashedly) admitted in my review of that video that, while the workout was only moderately challenging at the time I had it in rotation, it did a lot to bring me out of my shell in terms of embracing girly sexiness and being all "Hayyyy!" -- whatever that's worth.

"Hayyyyy!"

That's how I want to feel about the PCD workout, but they make it pretty effing hard. Because as much as they talk about "unleashing your inner Pussycat Doll," there's nothing to suggest what exactly a Pussycat Doll is, other than a sexual creature that exists solely to please men and out-compete other women.

Before I get into that, though, here's the deal with the workout: For me, it ranged from "omg if I had bought this instead of watched it on YouTube, I'd be pissed" to "this is pretty fun, and it's slow-paced enough for me to do drunk!" Aside from the warm-up and cool-down, it's broken down into three dance routines, each of which gets an instruction segment, followed by a performance segment complete with costume change. The "Don't Cha" routine is reeeeeeally easy and short -- too short. Doing the same four 8-counts over and over and over, I got bored on the first time through. I had also to stop myself from counting the number of times Robin yells, "MAKE IT SEXY!" or some variation thereof.

The burlesque routine I skipped after a couple minutes, because it was just moving way too slow and also I HATE feather boas, especially when they're used to do this un-ironically:

What I will be doing after work today

This baby finally arrived all the way from the Olympic Village today. Not really. Just from wherever Amazon.co.uk has their distribution center. It's got a stuuuuuuuupid name -- it's an offshoot of those NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC YA HEARD ME compilations -- but it looks tres fun and challenging. And, of course, it uses real tracks instead of muzak. I've been trying to research US/UK music licensing disparities to get to the bottom of why American workout videos never seem to have real music, and why it's pretty common in most of the UK titles I've come across. Investigative reportage! We'll see how that goes.

(As usual, this DVD is coded for a different "region" than American DVDs or laptops will automatically allow. Most laptops allow you to switch regions up to 5 times. I'm playing all my UK vids on an old laptop on which I permanently switched regions. If you want this DVD and you're in America, look into options for working with region compatibility.)

Elmocize!

Well, my loving lament for the National Fitness Hall of Fame & Museum yielded some unforeseen riches, because blurred and tiny in a photo of the old museum's display of fitness artifacts, right next to the aerobics troll doll, is a VHS bearing the unmistakable visage of Elmo. "ELMOCIZE!" I cried, startling my cat, who does not like Muppets.

But it's true.

This isn't a workout so much as a collection of body- and movement-related segments, but as it doesn't take much to get small children bouncing around, I can imagine Elmocize does the trick as well as the Wiggles or whatever the wee ones are wilin' out to these days.

Elmo gets all decked out in a coach-type getup and sings an intro song with his cast of kiddies, one of whom adorably gets to have Slimey the Inchworm bobbing around on her shoulder the whole time. (JEALOUS.)

On our tour of Sesame Street's world of personal fitness, we make a stop at the holy temple of contained rambunctiousness, Gymboree. Talk about flashbacks.

Then, we hear a really odd song by this lady caterpillar who likes to work out. She is now my spirit animal. I took a lot of pictures of her.