Ilaria Bodystrikes 2 - Review

Bodystrikes 2 is a 48 minute lower body emphasis workout. It starts off with a warm up that includes (and I am not kidding) about 3 minutes of alternating dips. Can you say ouch? Can you say enough?

The warm up also includes a review of the kicks that you are using throughout the workout.

After the warm up, comes the combos. There are four combos total. Ilaria teaches you combo 1 on the right, then the left. She then combines the two, and moves on to teach you combo 2. After you learn combo 2 (using the same pattern as combo 1), you go back to combo 1 and layer it with combo 2. She does the same for combos 3 and combos 4. Each time after learning a combo, you go back to the beginning and run through all of what you have learned.

So by the end you are doing all 4 combos back to back.

Combo Breakdown

combo 1 - front snap, diagonal snap, round house, squat, three front pushes into back push.

combo 2 - squat, squat with knee raise, squat with front kick, dip, front kick

combo 3 -(ballet emphasis) front leg raise, side leg raise for 4, hold front leg raise for 2 counts, hold side leg raise for 2 counts.

combo 4 - crescent knee, crescent kick, inverse crescent kick, crescent kick

Ilaria uses a layered approach to teach the moves and you are repeating the moves through several sets.

This workout was challenging for me. It has a very high rep count so my muscle were fatiguing before the set was over.

The thing that irritated me about the workout, which is typical of Ilaria's workouts are the camera angles. I don't know who her camera person is, but whoever it is for (1) does not listen to her. A few times when Ilaria is speaking the camera is not indicating what she is saying; and (2) the thing that annoyed me the most - is the close ups of the upper body.

This is a lower body workout. Close up of the lower body I can see. However, there is absolutely no reason to have close up of the upper body especially when all the work is being done on the lower body and you can't see what they are doing with the lower body because they are showing the upper body - and these are tight close in shots of the upper body.

Other than that, I did enjoy the workout.

3 1/2 stars