In the end, all his exhortations, all his gleaming and dripping muscles, all his tough-guy-heart-of-gold coaching couldn’t alter the fact that the Insanity workout was wrong, wrong, wrong for me.

Still, I came away wiser.

If you haven’t heard of Insanity, you must live on a planet without informercials. It has one of the most persuasive pitches out there, and its YouTube trailers get millions of views. (The one below is at nearly 4 million.)

It is Amazon’s most popular exercise video and most popular DVD overall — no small feat when the listed price is $144.80.

Here’s the basic concept: Try harder. To wit: Typical “interval training” involves several minutes of moderate intensity and then a minute or so of high-intensity push — a sprint, if you will. The Insanity workout flips that formula, so that you do longer high-intensity intervals and then have relatively short rests.

That approach struck me as meshing well with a wave of recent research findings that shorter, very vigorous workouts can provide surprisingly strong health benefits. And, as I wrote when I embarked on my Insanity, I was inspired by a 58-year-old doctor I deeply respect, who reported that the program was certainly intense but did not have to be truly insane. He ended up with lower body fat and feeling great.

So I took the plunge — well, a discounted plunge. I found a set on Craigslist for just $60, and met the seller in front of a pizza restaurant for a transaction that felt oddly illicit. (My apologies to Beachbody LLC, the company that makes Insanity among other workouts. I’d naively assumed the Craigslist set was used, but the set was clearly brand new and I’ve now learned that Beachbody is plagued by piracy. If you suspect a set for sale might be counterfeit, you can report it to piracy@beachbody.com.)

Insanity was my first venture as part of CommonHealth’s summer fitness initiative, Shake It Up, a series of forays into new forms of exercise — at least, new to us. Rachel has tried Nia and a trampoline workout, and I figured that I’d commit to Insanity — or perhaps one should say, be committed to Insanity — for the full 60 days.

Ha. I set up a corner of the attic with floor pads and a DVD player. I watched the long warning about checking with my doctor, and Insanity not being for everyone, especially people with a history of knee or back injuries. I took the fitness test. I put up the poster and checked off the box for the first workout, the “Plyometric Cardio Circuit.”

Now do it as fast as you can

I mimicked the lithe crowd on the screen. Jogging. Jumping jacks. Hopping from side to side. Running with knees high. Running with my heels coming so high behind me they almost hit my bottom. Quick front kicks. In short, a whole bunch of moves that I hadn’t done since high-impact aerobics were hot in the 70s and 80s, and  John Travolta was courting Jamie Lee Curtis in lycra.

Then Shaun T, the gruffly charming trainer, kicked up the speed, extolling “The best cardio you’ll ever get in your life, y’all.” It was the same sequence of moves, but getting faster and faster — “Push through! Dig with me, I’m right here!” — and then, “Ready? Jack it out, as fast as you can!”

That was the beginning of the end for me, though I didn’t yet know it. In the days to come, there were many more high and higher impact moves, and a recurrent theme of “Do it as fast as you can — but of course without losing your form.”

I worked up a very quick sweat with each workout, and an efficient half hour or so most decidedly felt like enough exercise for a day. But every instinct was telling me, “No. You’re asking for trouble. Your middle-aged woman’s body does not want this high-impact violence to your joints and muscles. Especially day after day with no real break. Stop.”

So first I tried doing Insanity DVDs only every other day, and then I finally quit altogether. (Judging by a couple of reviews on Amazon that blame Insanity for back problems, perhaps not a moment too soon.) But no regrets. I came away with several lessons, and exercise experts I spoke with afterward imparted many more.

My own lessons:

• Even fitness experiments that fail can still add valuable elements to our exercise repertoire. These days, if I want to warm up before doing weights, I sometimes use a few minutes of an Insanity routine, and enjoy it.

• Being pushed by somebody else — even an unseeing coach on a DVD — is a helpful reminder that we can probably try harder, if we choose. My big takeaway from Insanity is that I may sometimes want to extend my higher-intensity intervals to two or three or four minutes, and though they may not be quite so intense, I can squeeze more of a workout out of my limited time.

‘Extreme conditioning’

I spoke with Dr. William J. Kraemer, a professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut and an expert on the biology of exercise, including “extreme exercise.” (One recent paper warns of common injuries in soldiers who try “increasingly popularized extreme conditioning programs.”)

We are just starting to learn more about “extreme conditioning,” he said, and there are many commercial programs like Insanity that fall into that category. Their number one target is body composition, he said, and “Their whole shtick is to get you ‘cut’ in the shortest possible time.” To do that, they exercise you very hard.

The trouble with that, he said, is that there tends to be very little variation or “periodization — it’s just going hard all the time. When you go hard all the time — you don’t ‘periodize’ between hard metabolic workouts with moderate workouts and light workouts — your body starts to accumulate stress.” The stress hormone cortisol rises; so do inflammatory responses and free radicals, he said. Without time to recover, the body has a harder time adapting to progressively harder demands – and that adaptation is the goal.

In exercise physiology, he said, “catabolic” refers to muscle breakdown, and “anabolic” to muscle build-up. With programs that push you hard six days a week, your body never gets a chance to build back up.

‘Catabolic nightmares’

“You may lose the weight and look good, but with such extreme catabolic programs, some of the people we are starting to look at are catabolic nightmares,” he said. “They look good because they’re young and can tolerate it, but in reality their measures of catabolism are two, three, four times higher than normal.”

Another problem: Workouts which use no weights, like Insanity, may build strength but cannot provide the type of heavy loading needed to fight bone loss in women, Dr. Kraemer said.

Not to mention that the dropout rate tends to be high, he added, “”and in preliminary looks at such extreme workouts, the injury rate goes up because you have all this breakdown stuff floating around in your body and you get injured.” A recent study, he said, found that when you do high numbers of repetitions, even of a simple exercise, your technique tends to start to fail.

In essence, he said, an Insanity-type workout is what body-builders do at the “cut phase,” several weeks before a competition: They’ve built up their muscles, and now “they want to get ripped, they want to get definition.” The trouble is, he said, the guys in the inspiring “after” infomercial photos may just be “genetic freaks with great bodies. Come on, in 60 days you’re going to look like that?”

Longer intervals?

Not that I ever thought I’d get a six-pack, but how I love the fresh ring of expertise-infused truth! Just one lingering question: What about my idea of lengthening my high-intensity intervals?

Dr. Kraemer sounded dubious. “You’ll never be able to do three minutes as intensely as you can do one minute,” he said. “It’s just physiological. You can do longer intervals to burn more calories but you cannot keep up the same intensity for three minutes that you can do for one minute.”

True, but is there any reason not to aim for longer intervals, if I’m fit enough? I checked with my favorite health book author, Tim Caulfield, author of “The Cure For Everything,” and a health policy researcher with encyclopedic knowledge of the literature on diet and fitness.

He replied:

Most of the studies that look at interval training use fairly short intervals on ONE activity (e.g., 15 secs to about 1 min). But some are longer.

I think the intervals have to be short enough that you can maintain a fairly intense level of activity. Again, it is all about adaptation. Also, I think it is important to mix it up.

This is a fairly solid sum of the benefits of Interval Training. So, not sure there is any documented harm to long intervals… beyond the usual associated with exercise, etc.

Mike Bracko, an exercise physiologist based in Calgary, offered further reinforcement for the idea that a truly high-intensity interval cannot last very long. “You can sustain a really high intensity for maybe 30 seconds,” he said, “and after that, just because of waste products and available energy, you’re still working hard but you’re going down to medium intensity.”

But research shows excellent results from medium-intensity intervals too, he said. As for workouts like Insanity, he’d suggest “Buyer beware.” But “if you can handle it, if you can do it, then it’s a great fun way to exercise. We’re in the industry to try to get people to be more physically active, so if they want to do high intensity interval training, go for it. And maybe that’s the start of their exercise program, and they think, ‘I like to exercise but I can’t do this, so I’m going to try something else.’ ”

A moment of deep sheepishness

That sounds about right. One last lesson: Dr. Kraemer, in his wisdom, pointed out that we all tend to be bad consumers of fitness products; “We want this thing right now.” When you’re thinking of buying a workout, he said, you should ask yourself whether this is the right time to do a particular workout, and why you want to do it. “Everybody can push harder, he said, “but the question is, why are you trying to push harder?”

Why? My first answer is, well, it looked like fun, and a respected source recommended it. But when I really looked into the mirror, I had a moment of deep sheepishness.

Damn. I fell for it. I really fell for it. Insanity has famously brilliant marketing, and those before and after pictures are just so powerful. Of course I knew I wouldn’t get “cut,” but somehow…somehow….I wanted to be more like the people in the trailers. At least, a little more.

Maybe I can settle for being wiser instead.

I used to be a dancer. And sometimes, when I dance around the living room with my kids, I miss my younger dancer life deeply. So when a friend encouraged me to try Nia, a dance-y, “fusion” fitness class that draws on Tai Chi, Tae Kwon Do, Aikido, jazz, modern dance, yoga, Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais, it appealed to my inner Martha Graham.

At moments during the class I took last week — as the sun poured in the mirrored studio, and a Kate Bush-like song called “Japanese” urged me to connect with the sunrise — I did feel like a groovy dancer again. I got caught up in the easy flow and rhythmic momentum that I never, ever get plodding along the jogging path or, even worse, on the Stairmaster at the gym. And it seemed like all the other middle-aged women — from chubby to highly sculpted — who came to this class in Wellesley felt pretty groovy too.

Nia was started in 1982 by former aerobics teacher Debbie Rosas and her partner Carlos AyaRosas who yearned for a more holistic, fun and barefoot practice that would soar above the “feel the burn” gestalt of the era. Each rhythmic, flowy routine (they have names like Opal, Passion, Butterfly, Sanjana, Girls Night Out) has a specific focus, for instance listening to the music, or honing in on a certain body part — my class was about hands “the messengers of the soul” as the instructor said. The sequences started off modestly with head movements and arm undulations, then came “tail” rotations and more and soon we were gliding across the floor, doing an eclectic mix of turns, karate kicks, Sumo stances, shimmies, swimming arms and body dips. After a few missteps, the movements became fluid and suddenly I remembered how powerfully expressive a body can be. “Use pleasure as your guide,” urged another instructor.

The traveling sequences evolved into “free dance” — a time to roam around the room, experiment with twisty arms and sashays and infuse a bit of personal interpretation into the mix. The cool down included floor play, where you kind of crawl and roll around the ground. And in our class at least, there were movements that involved caressing your own legs and body. Kind of nice on a Friday morning at 10 am.

Nia definitely has an Inner Goddess, self-love vibe to it. And frankly, at first it struck me as slightly crunchy and contrived (I’m a New Yorker; Inner Goddess is tough for me). But after a while I thought: here’s a room full of imperfect, grown-up women dancing their hearts out. From that perspective, it’s pretty cool.

Nia doesn’t promise toned abs or burning 500 calories in a 60-minute class. Its aspirations are higher: “cardiovascular and whole body conditioning for your body, mind and spirit,” according to the promotional materials. Not to mention “body awareness, holistic fitness, personal growth and lifestyle benefits.”

In the end, Nia is neither pure dance nor pure rote exercise class. It’s more of a lovely tasting menu of moves served up to make you feel better in your body. I asked another friend, who had never heard of Nia until she took her first class and is now hooked, to describe her experience. Here’s what she wrote:

I was immediately taken by the music and the movements—there is fluidity and a gracefulness that I aspired to and wanted to be a part of. I was never a dancer, but Nia makes me feel like one. I’ve only been doing Nia for 5 months and can remember the first few classes when I felt stiff and awkward until half-way through the class. Now I loosen up pretty quickly. It is also a very liberating exercise class —- not so focused on right or wrong, but just do it.

Compared to step aerobics which I did in my twenties, Nia is less about someone shouting out footwork to you and taking your pulse every 10 minutes and more about “make it your own” and “feel the music” and “let the spirit move you.” NIA feels so right for my body. It doesn’t strain or stress your joints, but stretches and strengthens every part of you.

It is an empowering exercise and encourages you both to vocalize (as in karate) and to be at peace with oneself (as in yoga) and to dance. The choreography of NIA forces you to stay “in the moment” and there is a certain joy of mastery when you learn the steps. It’s the perfect exercise in that it gets you moving in a body friendly way — one that you could do into old age.

Here’s where you can find a class in Boston. And for more details on the technique, here’s South African Nia Instructor Zoë Katakuzinos:

And read the earlier posts in our Shake It Up series on trampoline aerobics and the Insanity workout.

I met Dr. Folch, a 58-year-old Chelmsford primary care doctor, last year when I was  reporting on a growing movement called Lifestyle Medicine. It helps doctors actively tackle their patients’ unhealthy habits, in part by sharing their own fitness experiences. Dr. Folch was walking the walk, literally, on an office treadmill, and with his low-key but warmly enthusiastic coaching, I’m sure he could inspire even a lifelong laggard to get moving. Or a middling-fit person like me to push much harder.

Dr. Folch ran his first half-marathon this fall. When I checked in with him last month, he said his latest fitness exploration was “Insanity,” a super-intense DVD workout that requires no equipment. I’d repeatedly run across used Insanity DVDs for sale on Craigslist, and figured it was some sort of scam, one of those Bowflex-style deals that make irresistible promises that you’ll get impossibly ripped.

Not at all, Dr. Folch said. Not in his experience.

But before I get to his persuasive account of Insanity, let me remind you: CommonHealth has just launched its new spring fitness initiative, under the title “Shake It Up,” and to join is exceedingly simple: Just post in the comments below your plan to try something — anything — new in the realm of exercise. Yes, you need to stick with what works for you. But healthy fitness is a lifelong journey, and research suggests that it’s best to vary our workouts. Rachel has already begun by trying trampoline aerobics, and I’m about to descend into Insanity. So what’s your plan?

Back to Dr. Folch. I interrogated him about his Insanity experience. Its concept of long intervals of exertion interspersed with short rests sounded efficient if exhausting. But wasn’t it leaving masses of injured or discouraged people? He replied:

I decided to try Insanity after I saw a program with Dr. Oz. Up to that point I thought it was too dangerous and for a younger crowd. Shawn T. presented a 15-minute workout where Dr. Oz participated and I decided to do it. It was challenging but both Dr. Oz and myself were able to finish. I was sore for a few days. This was a program designed to be done daily for 15 mins. I did that for 3 or 4 days and decided to go for the real thing. Today is the end of my second week. These are my initial impressions.

1. The program is hard but not as hard or crazy as I thought – I ran 3 miles after one of the workouts and another time I wanted to move the rest day one more day, so I did weights an extra day.

2. They tend to push you but emphasize that if you are tired, you need to rest and should take a rest. In the video, Shawn asks some of the people who are working out with him to take a rest and sends them out for a few minutes when he sees them struggling. When you talk about frustrations, whoever is going to do it needs to make peace with whatever level of participation they can do in the beginning since you are not going to be able to do what they do the first few times. I would not recommended it for people that may be at risk of heart disease unless they get a stress test first.

3. The dietary recommendations are excellent but not practical for a busy person. Eating 5 times a day and preparing their meals can be really challenging. If you eat healthy and know something about combining proteins, carbs and fats, you can do basically the same thing with less work.

4. I like the fact that you do not need any kind of equipment to work your body hard. That was one of the things that attracted me the most. It is an answer for the people that either do not have the money or do not want to join a gym.

Hmmm. Not sounding so bad. I messaged Dr. Folch that I was tempted but didn’t quite dare try it, and he replied:

Carey, you should do it. You are not competing with anybody except yourself and it is OK to pace the exercise. It is not as hard as it seems even though it is “insane”. You get tired the same way you play racketball or squash for an hour or do interval training by sprinting and walking. If you follow the instructions, you will not get injured. You can do it at home anytime you have available! Nobody is keeping score. It will transform your body and your psyche – as Shaun T says “YOU CAN DO IT!” Give it a shot, you will not be disappointed and after a few weeks, will feel amazing.

Dr. Folch finished his own spell of Insanity last week, and says that while his weight has stayed the same, his body fat went down from 19.5% to 15%. He didn’t lift weights for those two months, but found his strength lost no ground.

It has been incredibly powerful. My core is like a rock, my body has “shifted” – not sure what word to use – since my weight is the same but my body fat is down 5%. I can see that my shoulders, torso in general, and abs in particular are a lot more defined. Actually my whole body, since my legs are also. My wife says I am more agile. The second month is brutal. I am still not able to do all the exercises at the pace he wants us to do it but I can see that a lot of people on his team have to take a rest also…

One of the marvelous things about Insanity is that I can do a full workout in my little office without any equipment, just my computer to put in the DVD. I think that is a big plus. Tight space and no equipment – no problem.

So what could be bad? Well, actually, I know what could be bad: Injuries. Wicked soreness. Feelings of incompetence and pathetic weakness. But life is dull and entropy ultimately triumphs if you stay in your comfort zone. And I’ll just keep reminding myself that this is not high school gym or the army. I’m a grown-up now, and I call my own shots — especially when the instructor is on a DVD and can’t even see me. Please stay tuned. And please do share your own plan for a fitness novelty in the space below. What’s the exercise you’ve long meant to add to your routine? Please stay tuned for more suggestions in the weeks to come.

Exercise is no different. Since I’ve had kids, it’s basically running and yoga, and for me, it’s the perfect regimen. (I’m going to my 30th high school reunion this month thinner than I was in high school. ‘Nuff said.) Still, I’m aware in some abstract sense that a little change, sometimes, is good.

Trampoline aerobics have been on my mind for over a year. I kept meaning to check out the classes at SkyZone, an indoor trampoline park in Boston but have conveniently found one excuse after another not to go (it’s a schlep, it’s not Zen, it’s risky, etc.)

Yesterday though, I did something different. Pushed by our new Shake It Up series, and the prevailing exercise wisdom that trying something outside your comfort zone forces your body and mind to stretch in healthy ways, I ventured to Hyde Park, to experience SkyRobics, which is basically an aerobics class on a trampoline.

Jumping, it turns out, is really, really fun.

After paying my $6 (the first class is half-price) and putting on my little blue trampoline shoes I started to jump, tentatively at first, but then I really got bouncing. Instantly, I experienced a rush of physical memories: jumping as a kid, the ease a body can have when it’s unburdened by gravity, the pure thrill of flying through the air. (The class alternates between jumping and more traditional exercises, and when we did crunches, leg lifts and push-ups, all of my gym-resenting, anti-eat-your-peas, grown-up negativity crept back. But every time I got back to free-form bouncing, I was drawn into this deeper, almost-dormant girlhood place, like a very old part of my brain had reawakened.)

The class, taught by Terry Young, a super fit runner, cyclist and former high school track coach went like this: we warmed up with jumping jacks (these are jumping jacks in their truest form) and then moved on to tossing a ball back and forth while jumping, with orders to do additional exercises and calisthenics, like spins and more sit-ups, if we dropped the ball. (There was only one other person in class with me, Lisa Bello, of Needham, a SkyRobics enthusiast preparing for a Triathalon this month.)

I got a little worried when Lisa threw the ball and it hit me in the face. My nose hurt and I feared my expensive glasses frames were damaged, but I recovered.

After the ball game, we advanced to SkyLaps, where we moved from trampoline to trampoline around the large “court.” This really got my heart going and when I was finally able to travel around the course with only one bounce between trampolines — quite challenging — I got a glimpse of what a great workout this could be if you pushed yourself hard. (A flyer for the class says you can burn up to 1,000 calories per hour. I’d like to see the data.)

The we did some core work and arm strengthening with rubber straps (while jumping) and moved to the wall (a trampoline wall) for some very odd looking “arm digs” where you vibrate your arms as fast as possible while leaning into the trampoline. I’m slightly sore today so I guess the digs worked.

Lisa told me she got into SkyRobics because it’s different and fun, and by the end of class she’d worked up a sweat. I was more cautious and less sweaty: though I loved being airborne I was anxious about getting injured, so I held back a little.

And though I got a decent workout, later that day, when the sun came out, I put on my running shoes and took a short, reassuring jog along my usual path.

Last spring, we at CommonHealth launched a 3-month, get-healthier project called FreshStart, and quite a few people said it helped them set smart goals and work toward them. (Check it out here, reading oldest to newest.)

This year, we want to try something new: Trying something new. That is, in terms of exercise. One staple of fitness advice is to find what works for you and stick with it. But it’s not a contradiction to say that we also need to shake it up. So that’s the theme for this spring: Shake It Up. Try something new. Not necessarily brand new to the world, just new for you. And let us know how it goes.

As I write this, Rachel is off on a Shake It Up mission at an exotic exercise locale — she’ll report in tomorrow. Your own mission, should you choose to accept it, is to think about trying at least one new form of exercise — or more. Tomorrow, we’ll ask for your plan, and later on we’ll ask you how it went. We’ll report on fun new exercise innovations; share gory details of our own experiments; and hope you’ll share your own adventures back.

For inspiration, please consider this passage from the excellent recent book on exercise science by physicist Alex Hutchinson, “Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?” In its final chapter, it offers three conclusions: Do something rather than nothing Figure out your goals and monitor your progress. And last but not least:

• Try something new. Whenever researchers line up two or more exercise techniques against each other, the conclusion is almost never “A is better than B” or “A and B are the same.” Instead it’s “A has these strengths and weaknesses, and B has these other strengths and weaknesses.” Moreover, all programs suffer from diminishing returns after a few years — if you always bike at the same pace and do the same five strength exercises, your improvements will be measured in a fraction of a percent. Trying something new every now and then will force your body to adapt in new ways, and keep you mentally fresh.