PRACTITIONERS OF A NEW TREND – DANCE AS EXERCISE – CLAIM THEY DON’T EVEN REALIZE THEY’RE WORKING OUT
STORY BY Elizabeth Heubeck PHOTOGRAPHY BY Doug Kapustin
I have to admit, I walked into my first Nia class not knowing what to expect. My workouts tend more towards the elliptical at the gym or pounding out a mile in the swimming pool. Dance has never been my idea of exercise.
Everyone can dance, reassures Nia instructor Claudia Salomon. And when she teaches the style – considered a form of “fusion fitness” because its 52 dance moves incorporate elements of the martial arts, dance arts and healing arts – it’s easy to agree.
The easy, flowing movements danced to the beat of world music – from Latin to Gaelic influences and beyond – create an almost hypnotic feel. You’re bending, stretching and constantly moving. There aren’t any pounding or jarring movements in Nia – the name apparently means “with intention” in Kiswahili, a derivation its originators now prefer to the original acronym, Non-Impact Aerobics. The routine is practiced barefoot, and I loved the movements that were easy to follow and kept my heart rate elevated.
A few minutes into the class, Salomon told us to do our own thing, to pretend we were dancing with a large, imaginary scarf, and just move with it. “Huh? ” I thought. “This is not what I signed up for. ” When I take a fitness class, I expect to follow instructions.
Lauren kelly-Washington, left, who developed BLiS moves, and BLiS instructor Stacey Hambro, lead a class at the King’s Contrivance community.Nevertheless, I did my best to dance with my pretend scarf, awkwardly twirling and muttering to myself. But towards the end of the class, when Salomon gave us the same instruction again, I just went with it – and found it was kind of fun.
This is the beauty of a recent trend, when fun, fluid movement is also exercise. It’s not only a chance to work your muscles and increase aerobic capacity; it’s an opportunity to let go, to be expressive, to forget about life’s myriad stressors for an hour.
Indeed, I left Salomon’s class, at the Savage Mill studio, Savage Fit, with a skip in my step. I felt energized but not worn out. And perhaps best of all, my mind was cleared of clutter.
Salomon describes a similar experience when she first encountered Nia. One day she forgot to bring her running shoes to her gym in New York (where she lived before moving to Maryland). “I looked into the dance studio and saw people doing some funny kind of something, ” Salomon recalls. Not one to miss her workout, she decided to give Nia a try.
“After 15 minutes, I was like ‘wow’. This is what I’ve been looking for, ” she says.
Claudia Salomon leads a Nia class. She regularly teaches at Savage Fit in Savage Mill.With so much attention in the past few years focused on strenuous physical workouts — marathons, triathlons and other grueling feats of sheer brute strength and willpower — many, like Salomon, advocate a kinder, gentler workout. And one that Salomon describes as “joyous. ”
Dance workouts represent the opposite side of the spectrum. They invite people of all fitness levels to have fun, even as they get their heart rate up, try out some creative dance moves, bond with other class members, and, perhaps, even get in touch with their spiritual side.
Salomon, an addiction counselor, felt the Nia class she began to take with regularity gave her the healing sort of therapy she needed in her own life. “It’s a therapeutic form of fitness and wellness, ” she says.
Nia was an excellent introduction to my next foray into emerging dance workouts, BLiS Moves (Body Language is Somatic). An offshoot of Nia, BLiS uses similar steps and incorporates dance forms from modern as well as ethnic dance forms, including African, Haitian and Middle Eastern.
BLiS was developed by Annapolis resident Lauren Kelly-Washington, who grew up in New York among an extended family that always included dance at celebrations. “I remember watching someone who was about 80 shaking her hips,” Kelly-Washington says.
Like Nia, BLiS welcomes participants of all ages and fitness levels. Stacey Hambro, who teaches BliS at the Amherst House in Columbia’s King Contrivance community, says her 8-year-old daughter has taken the class alongside 75-year-old students.
“It’s available for everyone, ” Hambro says.
BLiS is a rigorous, yet gentle, workout. It gets your hips moving and your heart rate pumping. Throughout the hour-long class, I never once found myself watching the clock. The music was too invigorating to become boring, and the dance moves – some swirling and others staccato – changed often enough to keep me alert and interested.
I took BLiS in the morning, and it seemed to ratchet up my energy level for the rest of the day. That evening around 7 p.m., I was ready to take a power walk. Most days, after an hour-long workout at the gym, it’s all I can do to stay awake until bedtime.
Though it didn’t seem as taxing, Hambro makes this point: “You can get as good of a workout with BLiS as you would at the gym. ” But that’s where the similarities may end.
“When you tell me, let’s get on a treadmill and exercise, my mentality is yuck! I personally hate to exercise. But I sure do love to move, ” Kelly-Washington says.
Results of the 2012 American College of Sports Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends illustrate how dance workouts are making their mark. Over 2,500 respondents from multiple continents voted dance workouts like Zumba, a Latin-inspired dance fitness program often referred to as a fitness “dance party,” the ninth leading worldwide fitness trend for 2012 — ahead of yoga, boot camp and spinning.
This worldwide nod comes as no surprise to local folks who have incorporated dance workouts into their fitness routines. Charlotte Hellhoff, a certified personal trainer and fitness instructor at Performance Private Training (PPT) in Columbia, teaches several fitness classes. Her most popular class? Zumba.
“It’s a lot of fun. It doesn’t feel like exercise,” Hellhoff says.
Hellhoff became certified in Zumba after one of her clients suggested to her that it was the “new thing.” She says that nearly all of her Zumba students are women, most in their forties. Their fitness level ranges from novices to frequent exercisers. “They laugh, they shout out things. They’re having fun, ” Hellhoff says of her Zumba participants.
That’s exactly what Zumba’s founder, Alberto Perez, intended. The fitness instructor from Cali, Colombia, accidentally introduced his aerobics class to what has now become a popular trademarked fitness program when he forgot the music he normally played and, instead, used the Latin salsa and merengue tapes that were in his backpack. By 2001, Perez brought Zumba to Miami, Florida, and it eventually made its way to the East Coast.
While it takes concentration to follow Zumba steps, there’s plenty of room to “make it your own, ” as Nia practitioners like to say. Adding zip with exaggerated hip movements and expressive arms can increase the exercise while giving you a chance to feel like, well, a dancing diva.
That’s the point of dance workouts. “If we put dance in a box and say it only looks like this or that, we’re leaving out a lot of people, ” says Salomon, who is also a certified Zumba instructor. She says that as a child, she could never follow her dance teachers’ instructions and ended up feeling left out. That’s one reason she loves to lead dance classes. Her fellow Howard County dance-as-fitness instructors would agree: Dance workouts are the perfect mix of exercise, fun and the chance to be yourself.
