| This boxed set contains four 30-minute exercise videos from professional belly dancers Veena and Neena Bidasha: Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Hips, Buns, and Thighs: Most of this is a buttock and thigh workout starting with traditional leg lifts and lunges and leading to belly-dance-inspired moves like squeezing one buttock at a time or circling the hips. The fun begins later with "hip drops" and "hip lifts" with added leg and arm positions. Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Arms & Abs: This video helps you tone arms and abs with isolations that use smooth, flowing movements. Special motions of the wrists and fingers make the moves look dramatic and fluid, sometimes snakelike. Meanwhile, you're working your abdominals by lifting, shifting, and circling your ribcage. The workout includes some difficult abdominal moves done on the floor. Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Fat Burning: This is a belly-dance-inspired cardio workout done barefoot. The routine builds from simple foot movements that establish rhythm to more intense moves with hops and jumps. Don't expect your belly to do the dancing in this video--the legs and feet do all the work here, except for some hip moves during the cool down. Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Basic Moves teaches body isolations--head, arms, shoulders, ribcage, and hips--that are incorporated into dance movements later. It's not really an exercise routine as much as a class of basic belly-dancing moves, though your abs and hips will certainly get a workout from all that rib-pushing and hip-rolling action. --Joan Price |