I was only 10 lbs under my prepregnancy weight of 164 in this picture. I was a size 12 before I had my daughter, and was a size 8 in this picture. That's a lot of muscle! Most people don't believe you can be 155-160 and a size 8, but I was!

Here are two pictures of me at 6 months pregnant, and one picture of me at 8 months pregnant. I tried to do a full length TTAPP workout twice a week beginnign at week 15. The only move I omitted was at 32 weeks and it was lawnmowers, because the bending to the side and down seems to make the baby uncomfortable. I also tried to do 4 sets of hoe downs per day to help with circulation and lessen my chances of water retention. I took Teresa's CRT Alfalfa tablets to help with water retention as well. I noticed in the first few weeks that my calves and thighs have both slimmed down.. calves by 1/2 inch each and thighs by 3/4 inch each. TTAPPing during pregnancy was hard sometimes, but I feel much stronger and more alert when I am good about it.

Lillian Hazel was born November 26, 2002 at home, in a birthing pool, after 3 hours and 50 minutes of labor! I did in fact use some TTAPP principles during labor to help me cope... the cat stretches from the cat crossovers move (arching my back during contractions holding my abs tight and tucking my tush during the peak of the contractions) helped a lot! I have a birth story, and some pictures of the new baby. let me know if you are interested in knowing more about the experience.

I began doing a mini TTAPP workout 6 days post partum. I did Organs in Place, Half Frogs, PBS, Oil Wells, TTAPP Twist, the first set of lunges, and Hoe Downs for a while. I have lost 37 inches and over 30 lbs since Lily was born, and am wearing large tops and size 10 jeans. My arms and legs are in better shape than pre pregnancy with Lily, and all 12 inches I still have to lose to get back into my size 8s are in my abs, waist, and hips. I try to do a full length workout 3x per week, and I would love to work in some floor work every day. It is hard to find time with a young baby around, but nursing exclusively and chasing the 3 yr old seem to be working pretty well for me!

In case you have never heard of TTAPP, I thought I had better supply an anwer here instead of just giving links to the webpage. The official TTAPP site and the sites of the magazine and trainer that I list here do say it better than I can, but I can give a lay-person description that might be easier to swallow.

"What is TTAPP?"

TTAPP stands for Teresa Tapp, the creator of a workout system called TTAPP, or Better Body Basics for Women.

Here are two links that break down what the moves are like and talk about how the creator of it put them together, what her background is:

http://lanibetterbodies.freeservers.com/custom2.html

http://www.t-tapp.com/healthandfitnessmag/default.htm

At http://www.ttapp.com, there are articles to read about the moves and clips you can download to see parts of the videos. One of the veteran TTAPPers has actually come up with a routine that, if you can download and see the articles and the video clips, you can do to "try before you buy" the tapes. Here is a link to her post on the ttapp discussion forums:

http://www.geocities.com/dyfalck/freetrial.html

The total workout video comes in instructional, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. There are additonal tapes that target specific areas (Point of Perfection videos), an ab tape (Hit the Floor), tapes that you can customize your own workout for variety (Mini Max tapes), and really challenging full body workout plus full ab workout combination tapes (Maxi Max tapes). TTAPP to Tempo, a 40 minute version of the full body workout, was released late last fall. Torso to Tempo is in the works. it will concentrate on the upper body (great for us shrot torso people!) Hit the Floor Harder is also in the works. There are Point of Perfection (POP) tapes for many moves also. These take one move or sequence and break it down into minute detail, and are designed to help you more fully understand the finer points of each move. I think there are more than a dozen of these. There is a great tape that is sort of TTAPP yoga, called "Extended Stretching and Linear Alignment", and it will be my next purchase. Fantastic for inner thighs, especially, and it's a fairly short tape.

The moves are low impact, rehabilitative, and great for all ages and fitness levels. The moves combine aspects of ballet, dance theory, tai chi, pilates, and yoga. The theory is to warm up the body, put it into proper alignment , and then fatigue large muscle groups layer by layer. If you work the muscles on the outside layer really hard, you have to use deeper muscles... this is where her knowledge of physical therapy comes in.

Compound complex muscle movement combined with isometric isolation is what realy stimulates the inch loss. You are holding your tummy tight, your butt is tucked and tight, your legs are in her copyrighted KLT position (knee to little toe), your knees are bent way deep so they are further out than your toes.. (this protects the knees and the back from injury).. and your shoulders are back way far like someone put ice down your back. You hold these contractions for approximately 45 minutes while you do 8-10 reps of each move she has, plus stretches and water breaks... and building that core and holding those muscles really really makes you work. It takes a while to get it all going together, but over time you get it. It is a more difficult workout than just watching it through once and getting everything. It seems deceptively easy at first, but the better you get at holding those contractions, the more difficult the workout becomes. Do not merely watch the instructionals and then move to the beginner rehab tape. Do the instructionals for as long as you can stand. I did them for a total of 4 months, then I moved to the beginner rehab, which I did for 5 months.

Her workout is also great for your immune system and lymphatic circulation. Lymph vessels are right next to your blood vessels all throughout your body... but unlike the circulatory system that has the heart to pump the blood, there is no heart-like organ to pump the lymph through the vessels. Walking is a great exercise to get the lymph flowing, and many of the moves in TTAPP are designed for it too.. the muscle contraction and release is the thing that works it the most. Teresa Tapp's mom died of brain cancer at age 29, so Teresa was interested in ways to avoid cancer and to study it as she grew up. She is genetically linked to the same cancer that killed her mother. She actually has a swollen lymph node that drains down to the size of a grape when she is working out regularly, and swells to the size of a walnut when she doesn’t.. its her own personal barometer barometer for how well her body is coping with toxins, carbs, and medications. I have personally felt the lymph drain down the sides of my neck and out of my groin area during stretches.. its what her workout is designed to do.. as well as rev up your metabolism and shrink your body as far as inches. I attended 2 three hour workout sessions with Teresa at the Washington DC TTAPP clinic last December, and learned a phenomenal amount about the workout from her detailed instruction.

The initial investment is hefty, $79 for the instructional/beginner set, which includes the two instructionals, the beginner tape, whichever free POP tape they happen to be putting in the orders this month, and Mini Max 5. (I think that’s what’s been going in them), along with the written instructions. You can sometimes find the tapes on ebay. I find the tapes totally worth the money, and I am always wanting to add to my regimen. If you think about what a gym membership would cost per month, the tapes are much cheaper. You cant buy them in stores yet because they are too new, and they don’t come on DVD. (They do come in the European video format if anyone reading this lives in Europe.) Some people complain about the quality of the tapes, she was on a pretty low budget when she started. Some of the tapes were shot in her living room! She has recently re-shot the instructionals, which are available at the TTAPP website. They include a wide range of ages, there are men and women in the new instructionals, and the new camera angles are better at showing the correct way to do the moves. I was not the least bit deterred by the fact that they were not superbly produced and flashy and perfect. The workout and the inch loss are what motivate me, not how expensive the tapes were to film.

After you get to a point where beginner rehab seems to long, purchase TTAPP to Tempo, and then get Hit The Floor. I did nothing but what was in the $79 set, the instructionals and beginner tapes, for the first 9 months I did TTAPP and I lost nearly every inch that way. So don¿t think you need to continue to fork out money to see results. I love this workout. I love the results it gives, I love the inch loss, how good I feel, strong, energized, my posture is better, I know infinitely more about my body and how it works and why fat collects in certain areas based on my body structure... It’s so hard to talk about all the benefits of this system, there are so many. There are no other workouts based so firmly in science, and making the body healthier from the inside out, at least that I have ever come across.

A lot of people report chronic pain being lessened or gone entirely if they do this workout faithfully. (I got my realtor started with TTAPP and she told me that it made her chronic neck and back pain from a car accident 12 years ago vanish as long as she kept to the every other day workout regimen doing the ttapp tapes), people who are diabetic and on insulin have reported that they have had to have their insulin dropped several times in a short span of weeks (one is a personal friend of mine), and a man who attended the Washington DC clinic I was at has gotten increased nerve conductivity in his back after an accident, measurable by his doctor. The great thing about Teresa Tapp is that she loves to hear about inch loss success, but health benefits of the TTAPP workout are what she gets really thrilled about.

Speaking of results.... everyone is different. Your proximity to your goal weight will have an effect on how fast you lose. people with a lot to lose, like I had at 185, tend to lose a lot of inches quickly. BUT, the closer I got to my goal (size 8), my inch loss slowed to a crawl.. because I was getting close to goal. Keep these things in mind as you are waiting for results. Common form mistakes are not bending the knees deeply enough, not pushing the knee out to little toe far enough, not keeping your shoulders far enough back. I lost a total of 36 inches off my measurements from March 2001 to December 2001. I went from a 14/16 to a size 8 doing Weight Watchers and TTAPP. I lost about 20 inches doing both, and about 15 more not on WW but still doing TTAPP. I feel better when I am on Weight Watchers, but it does not seem to have an effect on my weight maintenance or inch loss. I in no way would recommend going off program, and have had to fight hard to make myself get back OP. Your mileage may vary, and not everyone loses as fast as I have.

I am incredibly passionate about TTAPP, and want to become a TTAPP trainer next year after the baby comes. When I get my personal fitness trainer certification, I can work towards becoming certified with Teresa Tapp and can hold classes and teach at clinics. I am really excited about that possibility, having done TTAPP for more than a year and still seeing fantastic benefits at 5 months pregnant. I am currently trying to get together a Raleigh area TTAPP support group, where those of us that do the TTAPP tapes and those interested can get together once a month to do a TTAPP workout and share form tips and get to know one another!

NEWS!!!

I am a TTAPP merchandise distributor/retailer. If you live in the Raleigh/Durham/Cary, North Carolina area and want to order videos at a discount, please e-mail me at jenibug_ttapp@yahoo.com . Thanks!