Product Description

Join Veena & Neena Bidasha for a wonderful introduction to the extraordinary benefits of Bellydance. This ancient form of artistic movement has been practiced for thousands of years and remains exceptionally popular throughout the world. Once performed as entertainment for royalty and common people alike, these beautiful movements evolved with strong links to womanhood, sensuality and even fertility. But Bellydance is also one of the safest, simplest and most effective ways to achieve lasting fitness.

Bellydance Fitness for Beginners: Arms, Abs, Hips, Buns, and Thighs was designed to concentrate traditional Bellydance movements on the hips, buns and thighs. The moves are easy to learn and will isolate, stretch and strengthen your lower body. The captivating rhythms of the original soundtrack enhance the experience and in no time at all you will feel and see dramatic improvement.

The key to a healthy and fit body is regular exercise, but it is not always easy finding a fitness routine that is truly enjoyable. This workout is not only fun, but also a delightful way to develop personal expression through movement. It is an experience you will look forward to every day!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11706 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-12-11
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 70 minutes

From the Back Cover
This ancient form of artistic movement has been practiced for thousands of years and remains exceptionally popular throughout the world. Once performed as entertainment for royalty and common people alike, these beautiful movements evolved with strong links to womanhood, sensuality and even fertility. But bellydance is also one of the safest, simplest and most effective ways to achieve lasting fitness. Join Veena & Neena Bidasha for a wonderful introduction to the extraordinary benefits of bellydance. They have practiced bellydance since childhood and traveled throughout the world to perform and develop their techniques. They teach popular classes for a wide variety of folk dances from around the world and have performed in film, television, theater, music videos and even during the Academy Awards. Their amazing talent and delightful style will keep you captivated and totally motivated.

Arms & Abs - Developing strong and shapely abdominal muscles is important for maintaining good posture and a healthy back, and is also meaningful for projecting an image of feminine beauty. Conventional abdominal workouts can be extremely strenuous and uncomfortable, but this program will teach you moves that are easy, sensual and fun. Accompanied by the wonderful rhythms of the original soundtrack, this workout will strengthen all your abdominal muscles while flowing arm movements will tone your upper body and arms. Bellydance is the perfect exercise to help you achieve your goals, feel good about yourself and have fun.

Hips, Buns & Thighs - This workout was designed to concentrate traditional bellydance movements on the hips, buns and thighs. The moves are easy to learn and will isolate, stretch and strengthen your lower body. The captivating rhythms of the original soundtrack enhance the experience and in no time at all you will feel and see dramatic improvement. The key to a healthy and fit body is regular exercise, but it is not always easy finding a fitness routine that is truly enjoyable. This workout is not only fun, but also a delightful way to develop personal expression through movement. It is an experience you will look forward to everyday!

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Customer Reviews

I love both these routines
I don't technically have the DVD yet (it's in transit as I post this), but, I have both routines on video.

If this is a direct transfer, it can't help but be wonderful :).

Neena and Veena have made my boring exercise maintenance into a fun and muchly-anticipated part of my week. I did these routines near daily for 3 months, and then transitioned them to once or twice a week (doing other things, also). But, during that three months I improved my flexibility (I can reach *past* my toes!), my muscle tone, and learned to pinpoint my muscle isolations.

These two workouts have a good mix of "traditional" exercise movements (squats, lunges, crunches, etc.) and movements unique to belly dance. I think the twins provide an almost flawless method to learn the movements, as the routines are slow enough that you don't need a separate teaching segment, but, fast enough to keep you improving once you know what you're doing. I really appreciate their teaching style. They wear snug spandex workout clothes with dainty scarves, so, you can clearly see what they're doing. Plus, there's two of them, so, if the camera angle is a little "off" on one, you can see what to do from looking at the other.

The arms and abs routine is dedicated to strengthening your arms, rotating through a variety of arm movements, and an almost yoga or pilates style ab workout. These seem to be a bit more general, in the sense that you're working your full arms and shoulders for the arm routine, and most of your abdominals at the same time, for the ab routine.

The hips, buns and thighs routine is more focused on isolated movements. There's also a good stretching section that I really like.

What's particularly nice is that they teach you "real" belly dance movements but in the structured environment of exercise routines. So, you can enjoy these workouts if you're looking for something a little different, or, to build up a basic collection of movements. However, if you want to learn to dance properly, you'll have to look elsewhere. These are exercise routines, not dance lessons.

Solid Workout
This series of videos contains workout videos which incorporate belly-dancing moves, rather than belly-dancing itself. You could say that it is a workout that will benefit you to develop greater stamina for belly-dancing as well as give you a chance to exercise and improve your health, whether you desire to pursue belly-dancing or not - in a fun and enjoyable way.

It is one of my favorite workout videos.

Buy it on video!!
A caveat to begin:
I bought two (defective - skipping straight out of the case) copies of the DVD before getting it on video. Emails to Natural Journeys Customer service went unanswered. The "extras" on the DVD consist of bonus performance footage (the same footage at the end of each of the videos), benefits of bellydance (goes on for pages and pages - essentially every positive benefit you could ever want) and commentary. Pretty useless. Buy it on video.

I'll start with the negatives... and with the aforementioned commentary.
- Most of the bellydance exercises are ineffective if you use improper posture and form. Unfortunately, there is very little guidance as to proper form. I was hoping the commentary would provide this, but it is mostly dead air interspersed with the twins talking about buying costumes in Egypt, and saying "this exercise is great for toning...."
- The routines are very slow-paced, and could be quite boring for many people.
- Although the twins have wonderful form for dance moves, I wince watching them perform the more standard exercise moves. Ex. lunges where knees go far past the toes, bad form on crunches..
- The twins have distracting "stage smiles," and the voice-over narrator keeps making reference to how "sensuuual" everything is.

The Good:
- These are great, short exercise routines for the beginner. For someone with an interest in bellydance who doesn't mind a slow pace, they could be quite fun. The only exception to this is that the end of the ab tape is WAAAYY harder than the rest of the videos. My abs hurt for days.
- The twins have great dance form, and are cheerful. The cueing is pretty good.
- On an interesting note, one of the twins appears to be a far better dancer than the other. The camera work focusses on her, however.

A tip: when doing bellydance you should have very upright posture, with the shoulders back. If you do not do this with the arm exercises you will only work your shoulders. With the shoulders back, some of the work is shared with triceps/biceps etc.