Take to the bar for the perfect backside
Matt Keating for The Guardian surveys the national press

Exercising fashionably can be difficult. You've been practising Ashtanga yoga and Pilates for years - but they are just so high street these days. What to do now? "With classical ballet now the celeb fad of choice, it's time to swap your leotard for a tutu," suggested the Daily Mirror .
A ballet workout will help you achieve "a firm, toned but supremely graceful figure à la Audrey Hepburn". Hepburn, as her fans know, was a former student of Sonia Gaskell and Marie Rambert - who trained Nijinsky.

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Taking a few steps to fitness
By NELL RAVEN for The Evening News (Scotland)

IF you were trying to predict the next fitness fad, ballroom dancing would probably be languishing somewhere behind the hula hoop and catching and throwing medicine balls. Its image of sequinned frocks, fixed smiles and even more rigid hairdos, just doesn’t seem like a potential way to feel and look good.

Yet it seems you’d be wrong. For every week, more than half a million people have a ball learning to step in time to music and the numbers are growing - so it’s no surprise that BBC bosses have commissioned a new series of the ballroom competition Come Dancing.

It seems that, bored with the treadmill and intimidated by weight training, a growing number of people have been taking up dancing in all its forms, including ballroom, as a more fun way to exercise.

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Bad bboy
Chasing the latest fitness craze, Stephen Moss went breakdancing. Never again ...
From The Guardian

I asked Jerome Jackson, aka Soopa J, who the world's best breakdancer was. He said it was a teenager from California called Ronnie Ruin. "He's bad, man," Jerome said with a knowing smile.

Now, of course, there's bad and there's really bad - and when it comes to breakdancing, believe me, I'm really bad.

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Called to the barre
by Abigail Hofman for The Times


January is the dreariest month. The days are short, the skies are grey and if, like me, you survived Christmas by anaesthetising yourself with food, the thighs are flabby.

But before you compound your gloom and embark on the Atkins diet, contemplate a different option. Many nutritionists claim that weight loss is based on the simple equation, “calories in” versus “calories out”. And while this, of course, means eating moderately, it also implies exercise.

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I've actually taken up dance for that very reason, I hate gyms!! Dance is the only excercise i do actually enjoy! I've been taking Irish dance classes for about 4 months now and boy are they tough. Thats to say tough in a good way, after my first class i was sweating so much i could feel the heat rising from my body and couldn't walk for about 3 days after!! ) and def alot fitter i'd certainly recommend it.

Hi Elle and many thanks for your contribution to this topic. Does anyone else have any thoughts on dance and fitness?