NZ Glen : BodyCombat fanatic

If you’ve read my post on BODYPUMP 75 you’ll know that the filming day had been plagued with technical problems – I’ve been to the last 8 Les Mills’ filmings and I’ve never known them to have to bump a filming time back the better part of six hours before! With BODYSTEP now pushed back to a 9:30pm start time every one was pretty rushed and there was little time between the filming classes – literally the BODYPUMP team rushed off the stage so the BODYCOMBAT team could jump up and get started immediately, and again, right after BC the combat team jumped off so BODYBALANCE could start straight away. Normally the time in between classes is when we’re allowed to snap some pics but this wasn’t the case this round. PJ did manage to snap a couple pics before the class began though – so if you do want to see how the team looked jump over to his blog.

Big team this round, Steve Tansey from the UK, Shaz from Australia and Taku the BC Master Trainer from Japan joined D&R. The team were dressed in “Keep it real and stay with the fight” t-shirts and Venum shorts. The theme this release? “Mission Impossible”

Now, as always with these posts on any of the LM filmings I have to keep the choreography and music specifics on the down low – but for BODYCOMBAT I have to be even more careful (for reasons I won’t go into – I’m sure many of you can guess!) so I do apologise for being so vague, I literally have no choice. But I’ll tell you what I can…

Couple of things spring to mind when I think about the release: Firstly, again if you read my post on BP75 you’ll see I was surprised there was so little rock, effectively none, in that release. Well, BC45 is the exact opposite… there’s tonnes!! Actually looking back I think about 4 of the tracks were rock, a couple pop, one kinda R&B and of course tracks 3 and 8 were uplifting trancey type tracks.

The second thing that surprised me (a lot!) was one of the track choices. Now that the sizzler for BODYCOMBAT 44 is out you’ll have seen that the warm up is a remake of Use Somebody, yes the very same Use Somebody that was the cooldown only 4 releases earlier! Weird huh? Well, one of the tracks in BC45 was in BC38. Work that out??!!! Surely there’s enough music in the world that we don’t have to have the exact same song just a few releases later? I kinda understand when tracks from much earlier BC releases are reused, most recent example was Kickstart My Heart (BC22 and BC43) or Excalibur (BC11 and BC42) or Ballroom Blitz (BC6 and BC41), I mean there’s a good 20 or more releases between those ones. But 4 releases (with Use Somebody) or 7 in this latest case? For the track reused in BC45 the versions don’t even sound that different! Hmmm… why?

Okay, so that aside how was the night? How was the release? For me personally, Steve Tansey stole the show. You guys in the UK are very lucky to have him. He presented track 3 first off… and man, without a doubt for me the peak of the class. So so so much fun! The charisma just flowed off the stage and I looked around the room at one point and it was all smiles. Fantastic!

As for the other tracks? The warm up is great – the upper body warm up has a surprise move that threw me a little at first. In fact when I heard the cue to do it I seriously thought I’d misheard it – I was like, this move can’t be in the upper body warm up?! But it was! So expect a surprise there! The lower body warm up was in a very recent BODYATTACK release – same version too I believe.

Track 4 (much like track 6 in BC44) is all about balance and is where the release gets its theme from.

Track 5 reminded me A LOT of Tutti Frutti and Johnny B. Goode from the recent BC releases… 6 rounds, very similar music. If you liked those two tracks you’ll probably like this one too… if like me and you really didn’t like those tracks? Well, this one may not be your cup of tea either.

Track 6 was great – probably my second favourite track behind track 3. Presented by Rach this is a departure from the usual track 6s in musical style… very uplifting. T’is good!!

Muay Thai was very heavy – Steve presented this too. I’ll be honest I think he really oversold this track, in the sense that he pulled it off just because he’s so great at what he does. I’m not sure however when presented by us mere mortals it will translate that well. Does that make sense? Probably not but I can’t really say too much more!

Track 8 musically was awesome! The chorey is different to a typical track 8… hopefully it grows on me. But the music – superb. The track has been used before in both BODYATTACK and BODYPUMP too.

The conditioning was very similar to the conditioning from BC44… so when you see that get used to it as there’s more coming!

So overall what was the verdict? Well, I spoke to tonnes of people after the filming and general consensus was positive… but then again it’s easy to get swept up in the whole filming experience if you’re an international. Me, I’ve been to so many filmings it’s just another class (man what a cynical old dude I’ve become!) so I can step back and review it a little more objectively. There were a couple of tracks I just loved (3 and 6 specifically) and some others I didn’t really rate at all (2 and 5), the muay thai I hope is good “in the real world” once we take it outside the buzz of hundreds of people, disco lights and the smoke machines of LM central.

The final thing I’ll say is that the cooldowns in BC45 and BP75 are closely tied together… not by artist or style but for another reason that you’ll see closer to release date. I wonder if it was a coincidence or planned that way…

And that’s it! My review of the music and chorey in BODYCOMBAT 45 without mentioning any of the music or chorey! Let me know your thoughts! 🙂