I just got a free trial of the newly announced GaiamTV service and I wanted to write up a quick review of my first thoughts.
There are tons of videos to pick from in each section. The first day I chose to do a workout from the Fitness Videos section. I sorted the list by Level 3 (the toughest) and the type of workout by ‘Weight Training,’ which pulled up only 3 videos, all from the same workout series, and all which looked very much designed only for women. 🙁
So I decided to un-filter all results and then looked for one that interested me. I chose the Balance Ball: Core Cross Train, because I haven’t used my balance ball in a while.
I had lots of time that morning so I did the entire workout, upper body, abs, and lower body. This video wasn’t designed to do all in one day, since normally a person wouldn’t work out upper body and lower body on the same day, but since each section was short enough, I said “what the hell!” and did ’em all.
As you can see from the picture above, there is a plus sign next to each section so that you can add it to your playlist. I think that’s really cool. For some odd reason though, the videos didn’t appear in my playlist in the same order I added them. They were all jumbled up, so I had to reorder them and then save the playlist order. That’s kinda annoying.
My first workout was the Upper Body workout, which I have to admit was surprisingly difficult. Have you ever done arm circles? If you’ve done P90X, then you have, and you know that after doing them long enough, your shoulders really start to burn and you just can’t wait to put your arms down. Well, that’s what this workout did to my entire upper body.
The legs and abs workouts weren’t as tough, but they were still pretty good. After looking over the videos in GaiamTV and seeing that not many of them were designed for men, I hadn’t expected much, but after doing this workout, I’m actually excited to try out some of the others. I must admit that some of the more ‘aerobic’ style moves feel a little silly, but they are few and far between and I got over it.
Based on my first impressions of GaiamTV, I think it’s a really cool service. So far I’ve only looked at the Fitness Studio section, but there are lots of other sections, such as Yoga Studio, Wellness Center, Films & TV, Spirituality, Metaphysics, Explorations, Environment and Vintage Library. My next stop will be the Yoga Studio and then probably the Wellness Center.