<B>Dance your way to health</B> <BR>by NAOMI COLEMAN, femail.co.uk <P><BR>If your friends have to drag you off the dance floor every time you go out, then dancing to keep fit could suit you better than dragging yourself to the gym. <P>Unlike many exercise classes which work on specific parts of the body, dancing is an excellent way to achieve all-round fitness because it strengthens, tones, improves posture and flexibility - and is a great cardiovascular workout into the bargain. <P>Better still, dancing is an excellent way to lose weight, because you can burn up to 500 calories in one class. <P><A HREF="http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_article_id=95151&in_page_id=172" TARGET=_blank><B>click for more</B></A><BR>

Excuse me, I put on weight when I took up salsa because I ate so many peanuts from the bar to make up for the salt I was losing from sweating. Yes - even moderators of Critical Dance sweat.

...but we sweat moderately.

Dance nation
It’s time to get fit — and hip — with the class of 2003, says Sally Brown for The Sunday Times.


Dancing is one of the more entertaining ways to break into a sweat. But if the idea of going to a hot, smoky club to get your kicks makes your yoga pumps curl, you’ll have been short of options — until now. This year, dance-based exercise classes, a hip hybrid of aerobics and MTV dance moves, are springing up at gyms across the country. The hottest classes mix hip-hop, latin and garage routines as effortlessly as J.Lo and are booming in response to a distinctly un-diva-like attitude to getting in shape.

“As work and stress levels soar, we’ve seen a real demand for less serious classes,” says Marcus Irwin, the choreographer of the Groove FX dance class. “Punishing workouts are out and dance is the perfect replacement: it’s fun, but it still helps you achieve your fitness goals.”

click for more

Yes, Stuart, and the zhumba (spelling?) is one of those dance workouts that seems to be popular today. Can anyone give their experience in taking zhumba?

It's spelled "zumba."

Thanks, djb!

Reach for the stars to get fit
By Kate Rilley for The Scotsman

IF the mere mention of the word "gym" sets your pulse racing and you find yourself breaking into a sweat, you can rest assured that you are not alone.

Images of treadmills set up like a battle scene from Lord of the Rings certainly aren’t everyone’s idea of fun; in fact, it’s fair to say that many people’s preferred choice of exercise is working out the biceps with a glass of wine or pint of beer in hand rather than a dumb-bell.

All of which leads fitness clubs and instructors on a perpetual search to find new ways of keeping us all interested. And, like all trends, the best of the new ones tend to start in LA - after all, once they’ve got a Hollywood name attached, then health clubs elsewhere can be assured the rest of us will flock to take the latest class.

click for more

Ballet gorilla, since apparently no one who's read this thread has taken zumba classes (or wanted to write about it, perhaps), I'll share my experience taking a "sambarobics" class and a Cuban salsa class that started with a very aerobic warm-up. Those styles of dance are sources of a lot of the movements in zumba (from what I've seen on TV).

The sambarobics class was taught at the Metronome Ballroom in San Francisco by a Brazilian samba dancer (whose name I don't recall). He is a short, compact, wiry, fast-twitching-muscle-fibered man - quite the opposite of my body type. The one-hour class started with about 10 minutes of easy warm-up exercises and ended with about 5 minutes of cool-down exercises. The remaining 45 minutes were filled with routines that required increasing amounts of stamina. Even learning the routines was pretty exhausting, as the teacher would show us the first 4 or 8 beats of the routine, to the music, and we would immediately repeat what he did, and then repeat that bit until we were comfortable with it. Then he'd add some more, and we'd immediately repeat that for awhile, etc. Generally, the routines that came earlier in the class were danced to the slower songs, although a slower routine would usually be added later if everyone looked terribly exhausted. (If you're not familiar with samba, you should know that it involves a lot of fast footwork, so when you get to the faster songs, you are really moving those feet.)

It was one of the most exhausting classes I've taken, but the movement and music were so much fun that it wasn't the least bit unpleasant to get through.

The Cuban salsa class was taught at Dance Mission in SF by Ramon Ramos Alayo, a dancer from Cuba who used to be in both contemporary dance and folkloric dance. This was, I believe, the first class he taught here and was several years ago, so his style of classes might have changed since then. We started with some warm-ups, which included hip and shoulder isolations, which eventually got combined to produce what ballroom dancers refer to as "Cuban motion." We then learned the basic salsa step, done in different directions, with or without turns, with different arm patters, and adding in some steps that you can do to salsa if you're dancing alone, without a partner. Since it wasn't as fast as samba, it wasn't as tiring, but we worked continuosly for long enough that everyone was sweating quite bit. Most of the people in the class seemed to be dancers except my S.O. and I. He had to stop after a bit, even though he was in pretty good shape. I would have stopped too, but my pride in being an EX-dancer made me keep going (silly pride!).

What's great about both of these forms of dance-exercise is that they're low impact and are done to great music that keeps inspiring you.

I forgot to mention that the Cuban salsa warm-up was only for part of the class. The rest of the class was learning salsa moves for couples, so it wasn't tiring at all.

Thanks djb, I have only heard about zumba classes. I do teach the tradition ballroom dances but zumba is a term that I learned of recently. It is kind of like aerobics to latin american dance steps, is what I thought it was and why it was appropriate to this thread. Thanks for the info.

Foxtrotting past fifty
By Karen Shead for The Evening News (Edinburgh)

WHEN 86-year-old Mary Bennett managed to get up out of her wheelchair and foxtrot around the dance hall, she was delighted. She hadn’t done that since she was a young girl, when dancing was her passion. "To think that I actually got round the dance floor," Mary exclaims. "I loved it and I was awful happy afterwards."

The dance class Mary is talking about is Fancy Footwork, held every Monday afternoon at the Eric Liddell Centre in Morningside. People learn a variety of styles - salsa, jive, the foxtrot and even some routines that would go down a storm at the disco. You don’t need dancing experience to attend - the only requirement is that you’re over 50.

For the class is one of the activities organised by the Edinburgh Ageing Well 50+ project, which aims to keep those growing older gracefully fit and active.

click for more

Up to the barre
Want a lean, sculpted body? Then ballet is the exercise for you. By Peta Bee for The Times


ONCE YOU would have been hard-pressed to find many people, other than little girls in pale pink tutus, doing ballet. But with the launch of fitness classes such as those at the Bolshoi and New York City Ballet (NYCB), along with celebrity endorsement from the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, ballet has gone mainstream.
Thousands of gym members in the UK now practise their pliés and pirouettes in ballet fitness classes. And they are not all women — a growing number of men are discovering how ballet can not only give them an athletic physique but improve their chances at sport.

Indeed, top sportsmen and women have spent hours doing ballet moves each week for years. Among these are the Aston Villa striker Dion Dublin, who used ballet to help him to recover from leg injuries last year, while Daniel Caines, the leading 400m runner, practises moves prescribed by Birmingham Royal Ballet’s physiotherapist, Sharon Morrison, to offset similar problems.

click for more

The UK press seems to be obsessed with articles about work outs:

Why it's time to take your tutu to the gym
Kylie does it, and so does Madonna. So practise that plié. After all, the lotus position is so last year...Amelia Hill reports for The Observer

Tracksuits are being swapped for tutus, pumas for plié and asanas for arabesques as the newest fitness trend gracefully pirouettes its way into Britain's gyms.
Classical ballet has gone mainstream and is superseding yoga as the celebrity exercise of choice, with Ashtanga aficionados, including Kylie Minogue, Madonna and Sarah Jessica Parker, listed among its keenest fans.

For those satiated by sun salutations and tired of high-energy routines such as aerobics, the latest fitness trend promises to combine the best of both forms of exercise - as well as tapping into every woman's childhood dream of being a poised and graceful ballerina.

click formore

*************************

Never mind the biceps, here's punk aerobics
By Nicole Mowbray for The Observer

It is not the kind of place you would expect to find yourself during daylight hours. In the night club CBGBs, New York's shrine of punk, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes would not seem very conducive to exercise, but this is the fashionable venue for a fast-growing trend of exercise class - a noisy backlash against the yoga and pilates trends of recent years.
'The work-out that rocks out. No more sucky classes full of brain-dead bimbos in spandex thongs,' the website for Punk Rock Aerobics proclaims. 'This is for fun people with discerning taste.'

Aerobics where people exercise holding bricks instead of dumbbells to fast and furious music is the brainchild of Maura Jasper, 36, and Hilken Mancini, 32, of Boston. After losing their jobs they decided to turn their idea into reality.

click formore

<small>[ 08 June 2003, 02:21 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Ballroom dancing is best step to avoid Alzheimer's
From Nicholas Wapshott for The Times.


DANCING the tango and playing chess or the piano are the best ways to ward off senile dementia, according to a new study.

Over the past 21 years, 469 cogent adults between 75 and 85 were observed for signs of mental decline and memory loss. Those who kept their minds nimble were 75 per cent less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

click for more