In the past month life has changed for everyone in the world due to COVID-19. Most people are all experiencing social distancing and shelter in place orders. Many people are bearing the brunt of this horrible virus by losing loved ones, being ill themselves or losing their job and income. Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to telecommute. I am one of those people. This post is for anyone interested but I am writing it in relation to my new reality of working from home.
The fitness community has shown astounding generosity during this time when gyms have been forced to close. There are so many free trials to streaming services being offered that I am overwhelmed. I have signed up for two so far with consideration of a third. I don’t have the time to review the workouts and programs from these streaming sites in the same type of detail that I normally do. But I do want to share my impressions of certain programs to alert others that they are out there. So more abbreviated/general reviews of some streaming sites’ programs will be posting in the next month or so.
Which leads me to Daily Burn and it’s Mini Burn program. Daily Burn is/was offering a 60 day free trial during this pandemic so I signed up. The Mini Burn program is a collection of 24 five minute workouts. These appealed to me immediately. I workout for an hour every morning and that hasn’t changed. But being home all day now gives me the opportunity to be more active than I was when I went into the office. Now, I do not work at a job so restrictive it does not allow me to get up in move around. My job actually encourages people to find ways to be active during the day. We have a gym and standing desks, we are given breaks to use the fitness facility or walk during the day. They have even mapped walking paths in the work center so you know where you need to walk and how many loops to achieve a mile (4 loops). We even employ a health and wellness person. But do I use any of these things? I used my standing desk but other than that, nope. I am a true introvert. I stay in my cubicle working the majority of the day and when I do take fitness breaks they are stretches and mobility type of exercises. I wear nice clothes and make up to work. I am not going sweat at work.
Now that I am teleworking, I wear yoga pants and sports bras, and I take frequent fitness breaks using Mini Burns. Every 90-120 minutes, I do a 5 minute Mini Burn. And I LOVE it. I have a home office so I push my chair aside, turn up the ceiling fan, pull up Daily Burn and do a 5 minute Mini Burn. I have no fitness goals with these little workouts other than to be more active. And they are perfect. Absolutely perfect.
What do you get with a Mini Burn workout? Each Mini Burn is 5 minutes and contains 5 exercises. Each exercise is done for 1 minute. The majority of them require no equipment but if you have a wood floor like I do then you should have a fitness mat on hand. Some of them also require dumbbells. So far I have avoided them but I might bring a pair of light dumbbells into my office and give those a try. Again, I am not approaching these to gain strength. My morning workouts are what I use to achieve fitness goals. My purpose for doing a Mini Burn is to get my blood pumping so light dumbbells will be fine. Mini Burn has low impact cardio workouts, kickboxing, lower body strength, total body strength, upper body strength, core workouts, plyo workouts and even a HIIT workout. I haven’t done all of them yet but I will eventually. I do find myself returning to the kickboxing, low impact and lower body Mini Burns. I really like those.
Now, having written all this, I have to share that when I signed up, I went straight to the Daily Burn website and it was right there on their home page–60 days free. But it has changed. It is back to only offering 30 days free. However, I did find two different links still offering the 60 day free trial: The Skim, and here’s the other one. I suggest you sign up quick if you are interested, otherwise you will be stuck with the 30 day free trial.
So that’s it! A rather unusual post for me. There will be more like this in the coming months. I will be sampling other workouts on Daily Burn plus I am also subscribed to OpenFit and am doing a lot of Xtend Barre.
*few exercises — by that I mean there just wasn’t a lot of variety at all in the chosen movements/exercises
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These mini burns sound really cool; however, I don’t feel comfortable sharing my cc info for the free trial — although I get why they do that, they don’t want people taking advantage of them and just using different email addresses and signing up again and again. I heard that pelaton is doing a free trial (lots of workouts besides just biking ones) without having to put in your cc. I’ll have to look into that, although I’m sure they probably don’t have those awesome mini 5 minute burns. Have you also considered doing 10 minute workouts from all your ’10 minute solution’ DVDs?
P.S. I think some of my recent comments may have went right into your spam folder đŸ˜¦
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Oh no! I get so much spam comments ever day I do not even look at them. I just empty the blog’s spam folder few times a week. It would take too long to scroll through it–I literally get spammed with thousands of comments every week. That really sucks that it is sending you to my spam folder..
I might do something like that eventually when the free trials run out. But I like the idea of them being 5 minutes because I’m “at work” even if I am in my home office. I don’t feel comfortable taking multiple 10 minute fitness breaks but 5 minutes a few times a day doesn’t bother me.
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I get that, 10 minutes is twice as 5 minutes and I could see why you might would feel a bit uncomfortable with
10 minute workouts every hour.
One of my comments that I recall that didn’t get published immediately to your site was regarding Body Shop by KCM. Sadly, that workout bored me to tears. Bad music, few exercises with high reps (not a deal breaker but it did lead to boredom), and I definitely did not feel like I got a total body workout.
Anyway, I know we had a comment convo somewhere but I can’t find it, but I was wondering if you could remind me, if Jessica’s Walk On: Get Strong is more or less challenging than Body Shop by KCM? Also I have NMTZ by Jillian Michaels (haven’t done it yet) and I wonder how that program compares to Jessica’s and also where NMTZ comes in regarding difficulty when compared to Body Shop and Walk Strong?
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It’s been a really long time since I’ve done Body Shop–6 years. I’ve done both Jessica Smith’s workout and NMTZ more recently. So I really can’t give a good comparison. A lot of it comes down to the weights you use. Both Get Strong and NMTZ will be more challenging if you lift heavier weights. If you use the same weights Jillian and crew are using for NMTZ then no, it is not nearly as challenging as any KCM workout but if you really challenge yourself with weights, then yes–I think it is a better overall workout. Same with Get Strong. I think they are both overall better workouts than Body Shop. Even tho I apparently enjoyed Body Shop, upon re-reading the review I wrote I remember that I did not like how it was structured–no opportunity to change weights when the exercise changed and I didn’t care for that. I never returned to that workout for that reason. I want to challenge myself with every exercise in a workout, not just some of them. I have actually returned to Get Strong and NMTZ several times in the past few years.
I don’t if that helps or not. Bottom line, Get Strong and NMTZ motivated me to return to them. Body Shop did not.
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P.S. by “few exercises” I mean that overall there wasn’t a great variety in the exercises that KCM chose to feature
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I think *maybe* I would have enjoyed BS if it was circuit style rather than one exercise for a million reps/sets and then moving on to the next exercise. But yet there there were other things I didn’t like (music, limited amount of exercises,e tc…) that probably would have made me still dislike this workout. (Thankfully I was able to return Body Shop.) Eventually I’ll try another KCM (my library, if it ever re-opens, did acquire a few KCM DVDs that will eventually be available for check-out.) as I’m not completely writing her off. Afterall, I adore Jillian but I’ve borrowed/previewed a few of her workouts from the library that I did not like at all.
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I think you will really like NMTZ then. I think it is one of her more comprehensive workouts. You might not like a lot of KCM’s workouts. Though she does unique (IMHO) exercises, she does frequently do traditional rep/set structure. Meaning you will often superset or triset exercises then repeat the sets 2-3 times. She even has one workout that is excellent in my opinion but you will repeat the superset 3-5 times. That one is called Your Best Body. I would avoid that if you don’t like repetition. If you’re looking for one with no repetition–Lean Body Circuits. That might give you a better idea of whether or not you are interested in trying more KCM workouts. One of her newest DVD workouts Cardio Sculpt Overload also has no repetition and is also excellent, but it is structured differently than her normal 30 Minutes to Fitness workouts.
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I had read many reviews for YBB where people also said that there were just too many sets of the same exercise so I knew I wouldn’t like that one, despite other reviewers being really excited about the cardio/ab work between sets for recovery.
I won’t be purchasing another KCM workout until I see it in its entirety, my library has acquired Amped Up Cardio Live, Cardio Quick Fix, and Sculpting RX. I’m not sure if I’m going to like the first two (although the preview clip for AUCL looks so fun) since it’s just straight cardio (I’m so used to Jillian’s 3-2-1) but we’ll see. Am glad that I’ll eventually get to try them out.
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