
Tae bo uses the motions of martial arts at a much quicker pace and the work out is designed to promote fitness. It is considered to be one of the first 'cardio-boxing' programs to enjoy commercial success. Tae Bo was developed by tae kwon do practitioner Billy Blanks and is an aerobic exercise routine.

Write your own product review.This moment has happened before. Proudly Australian providing. Tae Bo legend Billy Blanks bounds across the springy crimson floor, pauses before me, and leans in close as he lifts a muscular arm, places a hand behind his ear, cocks his head, and waits.Billy Blanks Tae Bo DVD is now available at Australias favourite DVDLand. The bands are used in combination with Tae Bo® exercise videos that include fitness instruction given by Billy Blanks, the fitness professional who developed Tae Bo®.It could be the heat that’s built up in this unairconditioned Southern California dojo, but for a moment I become unmoored from time and place.
I know what to do: "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight," I yell, as forcefully as a sweat-drenched 32-year-old woman can while winded and punching the air. Except, no, that's the real Billy Blanks, and he's leaning into my face. Tae Bo's celebrity clientele is a who's who of the moment: Carmen Electra tells People that she takes class with LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, and Alicia Silverstone."I can't hear you," Billy says, leaning in closer to the camera.
Now Blanks is gearing up to unleash two new programs, Tae Bo Evolution and Tae Bo 2.0, aimed at a generation that has never heard of him. Blanks teaches here several times a week, whenever he's not traveling to fitness expos around the world, taping new Tae Bo workouts, or hosting certification camps alongside his daughter — and potential successor — Shellie Blanks Cimarosti.Despite the fickleness of fitness trends and some legal drama, Blanks has kept Tae Bo alive for nearly 20 years, selling more than 2 million tapes largely by hewing to his original mind-over-body philosophy. "They're all hard," another woman tells me later.I'm surrounded by a couple dozen diehard Tae Bo enthusiasts at the Billy Blanks Tae Bo Studio in Dana Point, a pretty coastal city south of Los Angeles in Orange County. "It gets harder," one woman tells me as I gasp for air.

"I knew that inside of each female, there's a warrior," he says now. He wanted the women in his life to be able to protect themselves through martial arts. He grew up with 14 siblings, five of them sisters. Some women-only karate dojos sprung up to compensate, but even women who did learn karate weren't allowed to spar in the competitions Blanks attended.Meanwhile, he had a new wife and a young daughter named Shellie back home. Dojos could be intimidating for women, who were not particularly welcome in martial arts then. Blanks did it to keep himself in shape, but he also knew he had stumbled onto something bigger.Blanks considered "karobics" (what he called his workout at the time) a gateway for getting women into martial arts.
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He eschewed the then-popular 8-minute abs, get-thin-quick mentality, telling students that his classes would be a slog but that they could change their bodies and their lives if they remained focused and determined.In 1996, the Orange County Register reported that a "new form of aerobics" had taken off in studios across the region, with a number of cardio classes steeped in kickboxing and karate cropping up. Discovering that "karobics" was already trademarked, Blanks pivoted to the name Tae Bo, a hybridization of taekwondo and boxing that doubles as an acronym for "Total Awareness of Excellent Body Obedience."Perhaps most crucially, Blanks zeroed in on a sales pitch that defines Tae Bo today. He analyzed Jane Fonda's aerobics videos, learned how to count a beat by dabbling in ballet, and taught classes from his garage before opening up a studio in the early '90s. Women seeking a new aerobics workout would come to karobics to lose weight and develop an appreciation for self-defense in the process."I knew that inside of each female, there's a warrior, but what will make it come out?"As the legend continues, Blanks refined the workout over the following two decades as he won national karate championships and moved to Southern California, where he trained celebrities and acted in martial arts films like Bloodfist and The King of the Kickboxers.
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Blanks doesn't talk much about race, saying only of this episode, "I didn't really let that bother me because I know it doesn't matter what color you are. Another company had reached out to Blanks earlier, he says, but ended up passing on a deal because the executives didn't believe white women in middle America would buy a fitness tape starring a black man. In 1998, when these longform late-night advertisements were at their peak, Blanks joined forces with an Ohio-based infomercial marketer to aggressively hawk a series of four Tae Bo workout tapes. It's the baddest."Infomercials tipped Tae Bo into full-on mass fitness craze. Boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard trained at the Billy Blanks World Training Center, telling the Register, "I'm in tremendous shape now, and I attribute it to tae bo aerobics." The comedian Sinbad added that he lost inches with Tae Bo, saying, "It's the best. He was able to attract soccer moms and celebrities alike.
By March, the New York Times wrote that Tae Bo had earned $80 million in sales from the tapes and had effectively "swept away last year's fads like so many old sneakers."At the time, the tapes were the only way anyone outside of Southern California could try the real-deal trademark-protected Tae Bo. "You couldn't switch the channel on your television without seeing him doing those sidekicks," says Neal Pire, a certified health coach and fitness consultant who has followed the Tae Bo phenomenon.When the tapes launched in early 1999, they shot immediately to the top of Billboard's video sales chart. My goal was to touch the hearts of people, not just touch black people or white people."Blanks could soon be seen on every TV in America, along with the unabashedly sweaty and red-faced people of all ages and sizes showing off their moves.

A group of Ohio women also filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for making unauthorized charges on their credit cards after buying Tae Bo tapes, while boxing champ Sugar Ray Leonard sued Monea for using his name in an infomercial without permission. Blanks's one-time agent sued NCP for cutting him out of his contract, a case that was settled in 2000. Jilted employees and dissatisfied customers alike took aim at Tae Bo's Ohio-based production company, the NCP Marketing Group, and its leader Paul Monea. A Martial Arts Professional magazine press release noted that "some of his peers in the martial arts community have black-balled Blanks and referred to Tae-Bo as nothing more than a dance routine pawned off as self-defense."With fame comes scrutiny, and Blanks endured his share.Then there were the lawsuits.
In 1999, the LA Times debunked a claim listed on Blanks's website that he once captained the US Olympic karate team.
