The Daily Procrastinator

A few years back, I owned a Pilates and yoga studio. As the child of a mother who died young from heart disease, health and fitness have always been very important to me, and my goal with the studio was to make fitness fun.

To vary the offerings a bit, and to give cardio offerings to balance out the strength and flexibility focus of Pilates and yoga, the studio offered several dance classes: salsa dancing, belly dancing and a class called ballet body, which was a lower-impact, ballet-themed workout. All three were popular, but they weren’t the phenomenon that dance-based fitness has now become.

Now, six years later, you can’t leave the house without hearing someone talk about Zumba. It’s branded and trademarked, but the classes that I’ve seen at my gym appear to be fairly basic cha-cha and salsa-based Latin dance, with a touch of belly dancing thrown in. I never would have guessed that I was so far ahead of the popularity curve with those classes.