This morning I did Strong and Lean - I did the strong and lean interval premix, which consists of intervals of kickboxing and lifting. I also did the extended add-on. As I suspected from the preview: I love this one! The workout flowed well, I enjoyed the moves and time just flew by.
Kelly has two background exercisers here; Sammy and Jayne. The Strong portion is by body part, with three different moves each utilizing the barbell, then dumbbells, then tubing. You could easily sub dumbbells for her barbell moves. The body parts are: bi's, back, legs & glutes, tri's, shoulders and chest. Since I was doing the premix, you had one round of kickboxing and then one round of strength training by body part for twelve rounds total.
Pros: as with CSO, great uncluttered bright background. And, as with CSO, lots of nice premix choices. I really liked the format of the strength with different moves and equipment for each segment. Definitely helps with the boredom factor - and why I wasn't really watching the clock with this one. The boxing segments were nice tie-ins to the weight work - segments moving at a medium-to-fast pace. I really liked the second boxing segment; it was a lot of fun. Kelly really shines in this one, IMHO; great repertoire with Sammy and Jayne and encouraging in general. There were transition slides in this one but not all of them had voice-overs and they were much shorter, so I found them very smooth and really barely noticed them. The extended add-on was really good too - short but powerful. It had hip thrusts w/the barbell, knee-ins, reverse crunches and then a modified turkish get-up with the dumbbell.
Cons: Extremely minor quibble - at the very end we went to chest and she had the transition slide that said chest and we did barbell presses and then the slide came on and she said chest again and I thought: nooooo - no way am I doing presses again lady! but luckily it was just a blip and it went straight to the next move (flies). Like I said, minor quibble, just a minor editing blip. And since I didn't have to repeat the presses, all was good.
Like I said, for me this one was a winner! So glad I ended up pre-ordering this one (I was really on the fence). I think this will get a lot of use in my collection.