Kickbox Burn

What a find! Kickbox Burn was recommended to me by a reader of this blog and wow, am I grateful! Patrick Goudeau is a new find for me (tho he has been around for a while) but this workout is a little different. He doesn’t lead it. In fact, the top of the DVD says “Patrick Goudeau presents.” The actual trainer for this workout is Heather Corndorf. Patrick does the intro and the first part of the warm up, then Heather takes over and does the remainder of the workout including the cool down and stretch. Patrick does lead the core work at the very end. I have never heard of Heather Corndorf (and an Amazon search of her brings up nothing–not even this workout!) but she leads a fun and killer cardio kickboxing workout.

Kickboxing is one of my favorite types of cardio and I have a lot of favorites. Right now my latest favorite is Susan Chung, but I also love Cathe‘s kickboxing workouts, Ilaria Montagnani and Chalene Johnson. There really aren’t that many great ones out there. I do like Kelly Coffey-Meyer‘s kickboxing offerings that I’ve tried. Heather Corndorf brings the best of cardio and kickboxing together in this fast-paced, intense and fun workout. It really is impressive. I hope she starts coming out with her own kickboxing series of workouts soon–she will be on my auto-buy list. If she creates more workouts like this one, she will be my new favorite!

When you pop your DVD in, it goes straight to a long intro with Patrick and Heather. You skip past that and get the menu. There you will have some choices. You can play the entire workout from beginning to end (61 minutes), you can pick and choose what you want to do from chapters (no warm up or cool down are included in the chapters–just the 4 kickboxing rounds and the core work), or you can create a personalized workout. The “create a workout” has everything–warm up, cool down, all 4 kickboxing rounds and abs. From there you just build–adding as many (or as few) segments as you want in whatever order you want, then you play your creation. Pretty cool!

Kickbox Burn is 61 minutes long; 6 minute warm up, 40 minutes of kickboxing combos, 4 minute stretch, 11 minutes of core work. After the warm up, the workout is set up in 4 kickboxing rounds and each round is approx. 10 minutes long. In fact, between each round there is a few seconds of black out in which you have time to towel off and get a quick drink. I’m not going to break down everything in this workout, but it is true cardio kickboxing. It is high impact, there is lots of jumping, punching and kicking–there are even burpees. I really love how Heather creates and deconstructs her combos as they flow seamlessly, one into the next. There are no difficult to learn moves, but there are a lot of unique combinations. No move is overdone, but nothing is done too briefly either. I wore my 2 pound weighted gloves for this and I was really sucking wind. It was an awesome and intense workout. And afterward? My hips were aching–so all the kicks really hit my lower body.

Patrick’s core work is very plank heavy. I really liked most of the moves, especially something called a knee-to-shoulder with dolphin press. And you get mountain climbers–a lot of them it seemed, but then I hate mountain climbers. There are also some crunch variations. A very effective core routine–especially with all the plank work.