First, a little about me: when I was in high school, I was in fantastic shape. I played sports, I walked to school, I was active all the time. When I went to college, I unwittingly became completely sedentary and, at the same time, began eating copious amounts of garbage. I gained fifty pounds in just a couple of years.
A few years after I graduated, I decided to get it together - I improved my diet and began exercising moderately. I lost over thirty of those pounds, but I could never get back to my ideal weight.
Two days before my first child was born, I got hit by a car, which impinged my shoulder. Since I work from home and take care of the baby, I was on the lookout for an exercise routine that I could do inside without aggravating that injury. I'd never heard of Barry's Bootcamp when I picked it up; I got it because it was cheap and because it was well-reviewed on Amazon.com.
Barry's Bootcamp is a resistance band-based high-intensity interval training workout program, in which you do each exercise at your maximum intensity for sixty seconds, take thirty seconds to recover and set up for the next exercise, do the next one for sixty seconds, and so on.
The Barry's Bootcamp Complete Workout System includes a transformer ball with a foot pump, two resistance bands with handles, three DVDs, a workout calendar, a tape measure, and an introductory booklet with diet guidelines and recipes.
All the exercise routines are hosted by Barry Jay and Cindy Whitmarsh - Barry talks, wanders around, yells, and motivates while Cindy leads the exercises. Barry is endearingly obnoxious, but he grows on you, and his cheesy encouragement will wear down your resistance and take root.
The basic workout is the Fat Blaster, a twenty-one minute program (fourteen exercises) with three additional minutes of warm-up on the front end and three minutes of stretching on the back end. You go back and forth each day between the Fat Blaster Blue (lower body) and the Fat Blaster Red (upper body). Both workouts alternate between strength-building exercises and cardio-oriented, heart rate-boosting exercises. Some of these exercises feel kind of silly while you're doing them (my wife says, "Oh, he's dancing around with the propane tank again."), and you really might not want other people watching you, but fat and dignified is no way to go through life.
There are also six supplementary Mission Specialist routines: Abs, Upper, and Lower, each in Beginner and Advanced. These are each twelve-minute, eight-exercise programs focused on toning a particular area; the advanced ones feature more strenuous exercises and faster reps of basic exercises, and are often stacked to hit the same muscle group repeatedly. All six Mission Specialists routines are on both DVDs, so you never have to change discs in the middle of a workout.
The Barry's Bootcamp basic kit also includes the Code Red DVD, a fifteen-minute, ten-exercise workout that compiles some of the most intense exercises from the Fat Blaster DVDs and adds a couple of new ones. This workout features actress Natalie Raitano, who disrupts the Cindy/Barry interplay (you don't miss it until it's gone) and brings nothing to the table except cleavage (which is never in short supply in any of the Barry's Bootcamp workouts). It's billed as a "6-day rapid-fire weight loss workout," but if you keep up with the calendar's schedule, you'll never use it.
Just about all the exercises in all the workouts range from fairly intense to incredibly intense. Many exercises in the Fat Blaster and Beginner Mission Specialist programs also include modifiers to make them easier or more challenging, but few are ever easy, especially when you're starting out. The workout calendar included with the kit starts you with just the basic Fat Blaster workout and takes you through four full weeks of increasing difficulty until you're finally doing the full workout: one Fat Blaster, two Beginner Mission Specialists, and one Advanced Mission Specialist each day. In all, the calendar's full prescription is about an hour a day, six days a week, with one day to rest (and plan your meals, it says).
The great thing about the Barry's Bootcamp workout is that it scales up with you. Since you give one hundred percent of your effort on each exercise, you can continually increase your output on most of the cardio exercises. And you can always add tougher bands for the strength exercises. The workout system comes with two resistance bands - you'll start with the green, move to the black, and then to doing most exercises with both bands (the handles can hold up to three bands at a time). Barry's Bootcamp sells a total of four different bands; these are nearly impossible to find.
While the basic materials have generally been quite durable, my black resistance band finally broke (the cap on one end wore through the rubber from being taken in and out of the handles repeatedly), but I had outgrown it, and was only using it as a second band for chest exercises.
Fortunately, Lifeline USA makes compatible bands in ten different resistances, most of which are thicker than the bands Barry's Bootcamp gives you (the Lifeline bands are also about a foot longer, which isn't a huge problem for most exercises). You can buy these on their website, on Amazon.com, and at Sports Authority. (you can also get identical handles). In short, there's no reason why Barry's Bootcamp shouldn't always challenge you.
The Booty Bands, which are featured in the relevant exercise programs but which are not included in the basic set, add resistance to both the Fat Blaster and Lower Body routines. In my experience, these have not been durable: both pairs I've used broke in two weeks. You can tie the broken ends together to prolong their lifespan, but they just aren't well done. Lifeline USA makes (or used to make) an identical-looking product called Monster Walk, which is available in a variety of resistances; I don't know if the quality is any better.
Barry's Bootcamp has a lot of plusses. For one, it's convenient. You don't have to plan or analyze; you just put it in and follow. One of Barry's corny platitudes is, "Don't think, just shrink," and it's largely true. As you progress, you'll want to change up your routine somewhat, and that's fine, but when you put in an exercise program, you can just focus on doing the work because you know it's hitting every part of that region of your body.
Another nice thing about Barry's Bootcamp is its affordability. Yes, gear breaks, but if you have to buy a new resistance band a couple times a year, you can move up to the next size, and you're not spending more than fifteen or twenty bucks at a time. And you can buy a completely new Barry's Bootcamp kit for less than forty bucks. Compare that to what you'd spend for an in-home fitness machine of a high enough quality that it didn't feel like it was going to shake to pieces when you used it (and which wouldn't work huge chunks of your body, as well).
Most importantly, Barry's Bootcamp is effective. I don't have the time or inclination to spend more than an hour a day working out, but I want to maximize that time, and I'm willing to do just about anything in that hour. In that regard, Barry's Bootcamp is great because of its high intensity.
When I first got Barry's Bootcamp, I was in average shape; I was exercising moderately on a daily basis. But on the first day, the Fat Blaster Blue absolutely kicked my butt - it was working all kinds of muscles in my lower half that I'd been neglecting. The next day, the Fat Blaster Red kicked it again, but to a slightly lesser extent, because I'd been working my upper body for a long time already.
Because you do so many different exercises each day, Barry's Bootcamp really gives you a total body workout. I committed to the program, and I grew into it quickly. I saw fast and significant results, and for the first time in a long time I had hope that I might actually undo all the damage I'd done to myself in college and get back to my high school weight. My progress, coupled with Barry's cheesy but relentless encouragement, inspired me to take his exhortations to heart and further improve my diet. This I did, eating smaller portions, cutting overall calories and drastically reducing sugar. And the results came faster. Honestly, my diet changes have been responsible for over sixty percent of my weight loss. But diet and exercise go hand in hand - faithfulness in one inspires diligence in the other.
A concern I had when I bought the workout kit was that I would get bored of it - after all, you're just alternating the same two DVDs every day. But after four months, I hadn't, in part because each day when I go to work out, I look forward to earning more results, and in part because the sheer variety of short exercises keeps things reasonably fresh.
As of this writing, I've been using Barry's Bootcamp faithfully for about four months - I've memorized the sequence of exercises and half the dialogue in every workout and I know the names of all the supporting cast. In that time, I've lost that last twenty pounds and added muscle, and for the first time in almost ten years, my body fat is under ten percent and I'm wearing pants with a 34" waist.
Over these four months, I've grown well beyond the calendar. At the time of this writing, I alternate each day between Fat Blaster Blue/Advanced Lower/Beginner Lower/Advanced Abs and Fat Blaster Red/Advanced Upper/Beginner Upper/Beginner Abs.
Barry's Bootcamp is the best workout I've ever used. It's convenient, affordable, and effective, and I'd recommend it to anybody.
