Zumba for BEGINNERS

IronMan, goodMood and I all arrived at Zumba for Beginners at the same time. Yes, you read that correctly goodMood was there! How cool is that? He was asking me about the class IronMan and I took last Friday and decided to check it out. It was a welcome surprise.

We suit up and head for various cardio machines to get our heart rates up. MarathonMan shows up looking flustered at the morning crew, all of us staring at him from treadmills and elliptical's - he's not use to seeing us at this hour. I try and talk him into taking Zumba but it's not for him.

Bubbles points out where she posted the newspaper article from her volleyball days. It's over where the questions/comments are on the wall. Check it out, it's a fun read.

This course was held over on the basketball court so there are no mirrors. We're milling around in there when a FORTH dude shows up. I'll talk more about him later but he was another surprise. It turned out to be four dudes and about six girls (seven counting Bubbles).

Bubbles is pleased with this manly turnout and a bit giddy. Before she started she'd told me that she was going to go slower and explain the moves more and then she fires up the music and starts dancing. About three minutes into it I figured out this was the warm up. Bubbles would do some kind of maneuver and then look at us and see if we repeated the move but frankly she didn't care, as long as we were moving all was well.

We were arrayed in the classic high school dance pattern, girls on one end, boys on the other, all of us practically hugging the back wall as far away from Bubbles as possible. None of us wanted anyone behind us where we could be observed by our peers. It was funny.

The only difference I could discern between this course and the one on Friday was that Bubbles would go through the moves twice. You know what? It didn't matter. This isn't what I assume a dance course would be, Zumba is different and Bubbles technique is to teach it through repetition. Just keep showing up and you'll get more and more of it.

I'm pretty sure that 'Zumba' is Columbian slang for, "Bill has no clue." I was even more off then the first course. I'm not gonna put words in the other guys mouths so if they want to email their thoughts I'll post them. But here's what I took from this second pass.

We could generally handle the basic step but the second anything else was added we lost it, arm movements, hip wiggle whatever. I became immediately an uncoordinated mess. I kept trying. Then when the music was added things sped way up and it was just plain fun trying to hang in there. I can't put the move to the beat of the song so I would end up trying watching Bubbles and just come close, well close is subjective. I rarely did but then again I wasn't alone.

At times I would get the feeling that I wasn't really working out. Please take a moment and look at the HR chart at the bottom of this post. I'm no expert but I would posit that chart comes close to a perfect fat burning interval workout for me. I bet it would for you too. Wanna burn fat and have fun doing it?

ZUMBA!

I had a lot of fun and Bubbles makes it fun. She just plain loves to dance and doesn't bother hiding it. That joy becomes infectious.

After the class I was asking the fourth dude how he's doing work outs. He's on a different path than I am but an interesting one. Apparently he'll show up at the gym and get roped into some course. So he's doing it by courses and I'm doing it by machine. I bet both are effective and I'm a tad envious of his willingness to just show up and try it. He deserves a name but I haven't thought of one yet, also I doubt if I'll see a lot of him since he's minding his kids during the morning shift, but I hope I do.

I'm not sure yet if I can get Zumba into my autistic routine. If so it will most likely be Fridays at 11am and Mondays at 4:30pm I hope I can do it, this course is a nice break from the routine.

Well I'm sleepy and have a date with a cardio machine tomorrow.

Try Zumba and be well.