While you can do these workouts with paper plates, I feel like the disks are sturdier, and more comfortable to use. Especially for the moves where you are using two of them. I use them on carpet and I'm finding they slide much better than my paper plates did when I used them in the past. I think they are well worth having for the ease of movement they allow and I really feel more confident using them than if I had paper plates for the types of exercises in this series.