AeroSpace AeroBarre - Thoughts

AeroBarre is a 50 minute workout that combines ballet and boxing interval cardio and sculpting sets. It features Leila Fazel as the "demonstrator" of the moves and exercises and Michael Olajide Jr as the narrator.

The set is a boxing ring, although Leila doesn't use the ring. She exercises in front of it.

The workout contains 11 rounds, but the rounds are short. There is a warm up and cool down round and in between that, there are rounds that feature ballet moves, boxing moves and a combination of ballet and boxing moves.

Leila uses a light set of hand weights and a body bar in various parts of the exercises. There were simple cardio burst dispersed throughout.

This is a really unique workout and I felt quite challenged. I am not very good at ballet or boxing, although I like them both. Leila varied the tempo quite a bit. The faster she would go, the harder it would be for me to controls the move and it didn't matter if she was doing boxing drills or ballet drills. It was difficult for me to maintain precision.

Michael did a fairly decent job of cuing the workouts but there were two or three spots where he was off from her count. There were times when I would look at the tv and found she had moved on while he was still cuing a previous move. It wasn't that annoying as I was having hard time keeping up when the speed increased in the various drills. So a few times, I was behind her count.

I used my FIRM dowel for the many body bar sections and picked up my 8 lb FIRM sculpting stick for the bicep curls. The dowel and stick worked nice for these sections.

I used 1 lbs hand weights for the boxing. At one point, I did try 2lbs hand weights but decided they were two heavy when the tempo picked up.

The ballet moves I need to practice. The moves look cool when Leila was doing them but I was all over the place.

Oh the music. Love it. The workout is choreograph to the beat of the music and I almost always like that.

Another point, there is some stoppage as Leila moves from one round to the next. I know some people hate this because their heart rate comes down. You do get a lot of recovery time at the end of each round. Which after round 6, the toughest for me, I felt I need. The other rounds I didn't think I needed as much recovery time.

There is a great introduction round to the workout where Michael and Leila go over different types of punches, ballet stances and boxing stances.

I really like this workout and I give it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.