Zoom, zoom, zooming their way to fitness
If you want to shake it like Shakira all the way to weight loss and better health, then your local park district, YMCA or health club may offer a fairly new class for you.
And odds are, the instructors of those classes are fairly new as well.
About 50 future Zumba trainers gathered Sunday morning at the Wheaton Sport Center to learn how to bring one of the latest fitness crazes to your community.
To be sure, this likely isn't the kind of class where you'll find hardcore gym rats who pump iron or run for two hours a day. Instead, it's a melding of Latin dance and aerobics that's adopted the concept of interval training.
Such training involves intense bursts of near 100 percent effort for short periods of time followed by a near complete rest before another burst.
Zumba also seems to involve something else -- smiles and laughter. Most of the trainees Sunday had no previous dance experience. Some had no previous aerobic teaching experience. And still others had found Zumba as their first foray into exercise that they actually enjoy.
"There are just a few, precious people who love pain," said Zumba trainer Barbara Klontz. "We're realizing that we have to do something to make everyone interested in fitness. We call it exercise in disguise."
Klontz said Zumba participants tend to burn between 500 and 700 calories in one session without realizing how much effort they're putting forth. It doesn't take any real dance skills to be healthy or participate in Zumba, just the willingness to shake your hips.
"It's OK for everybody in the room to be the kind of dancer that they are," Klontz said. "There are 100 ways to do your dancing. None of them are wrong. There's only one way to do a squat."
Klontz and her fellow instructor Debbie Wood said there are more than 20,000 Zumba classes with more than 1,500 trainers teaching the moves now.
Wood said the popularity of the classes is the lack of prerequisites needed.
"You do not need to know how to dance," Wood said. "You do not need even to be fit to start. It's like going to a party, and the instructor is your host."
Find a Zumba class or instructor at www.zumba.com.