Doctor Lynn's Anti-Aging Workout

I just got this out of the library and did it once.  That was enough.  It was pretty bad.

[Editing to add -- Please see my postcript at the bottom of the review.  I changed my opinion of this video after I woke up the next morning feeling really good.]

The instructor ("Doctor Lynn") talks in a monotone that irritated me a lot.

She's described on the box as being a Naturopathic Doctor, and as a baby boomer and a grandmother.  For a grandmother, she looks fantastic -- as if she had discovered the Fountain of Youth!  She had two older-looking people as her background exercisers.

There are three segments -- flexibility, balance, and strength (no aerobics).  The flexibility segment consists of yoga poses done on the floor.  I thought it was ok, until she started doing the cat stretch, and she was saying to inhale as you lower your head, and exhale as you lift your head and arch back.  But that's the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do!  In yoga you always inhale as your chest expands (which it does when arching back) and exhale as it contracts.  So that was strange.

Some of the poses I had trouble with, even in modified form,  because I don't have enough arm strength and/or I'm not flexible enough - in particular I always have trouble with downward dog and plank -- they're my least favorite yoga poses -- and in the video she did them in all three segements!

The second segment, balance, consisted mostly of standing yoga poses, though, oddly, not the usual balancing poses.  

The third segment, strength, requires 3-pound hand weights, which I have, and a stability ball, which I don't (she used the ball like a bench).  So I improvised, using standing and sitting-on-a-chair exercises that I've learned on other videos, to work the same muscles she was working.  One thing I noticed was that she wasn't giving any pointers on form, and I think that's important to do whenever weights are involved, because otherwise people can hurt themselves if they don't already know what they are doing.

Editing to Add :  I did the tape and wrote the review last night before I went to sleep.  Now it's the next morning, and I felt I had to add a postscript to my review, because I woke up feeling great!  I could feel muscles all over my body had been worked -- they didn't hurt, but I could feel that they had been used.  And a wider range of muscle groups were involved than is usual for me after a video workout.  Also, I felt very relaxed and in an upbeat mood, which I believe is the aftermath of the yoga poses.

I didn't expect to feel this good.  I disliked the video while I was doing it, and I didn't feel anything immediately afterwards -- but now I have this delayed reaction of feeling great, knowing I worked many different muscles, and realizing the workout was more effective than I had thought. 

So I'm going to change the rating of the review from 1 to 3, and I would consider doing the workout again.