Monday, May 5th 2008

I am traveling this week and presently find myself in LA.  Yesterday morning I walked by the Fitness Center  of my hotel (on my way to breakfast) and stopped dead in my tracks... In the aerobics room were a mixed group of people in some kind of fitness class.  They were on yoga mats and organized into groups doing a variety of things from stretching to conditioning and it took all the self control I could muster not to run in there and yell: STOP!!!

Let me try to say this in a PC kind of way.... those well intended people were engaged in unproductive (and possibly harmful) activities.   How's that for diplomacy?  It's hard enough to drag yourself into a "workout";  for it to be a waste of time... is a shame! Even worse is thinking you are doing something beneficial when in actuality you are not.  This observation woke me up for a moment as I thought about the studio, about our classes and how they are structured and the trust you place in us to provide you with an hour or an hour and a half which means something. Who has time to waste?  Not me and not you.  And I don't think those people at the hotel had time to waste either.

I wonder how many of you notice these things... an aerobics class or a conditioning class you might stumble upon or take, and find yourself comparing it to your dance class.

When Jane Fonda, a dancer, developed her famous workout it totally rocked the fitness world.  No wonder she was in such amazing shape! She was doing something no one else was doing!  Right?  Here's a fun thing for you to do:  next time you are in a bookstore, pick up The Workout and look at it.  You might be very surprised to see that the workout is very close and I mean very close to the warm up you see in a dance class.  It was new to the public because the public wasn't taking those kinds of classes - those were classes almost exclusively offered to professional dancers in training. Jane, being the visionary that she is, restructured a dance warm up into a workout class for women. She didn't reinvent the wheel, she just found a new use for it.  It was brilliant.  And still is.

The point I am making is that with dance there is so much more beneath the surface than what is visually recognizable.  Dance is the perfect workout.  Why?  Because it has everything.  There's a science behind it.  It's deliberate.  It flows.  It's productive.  And every hour you spend doing it is an hour well spent. I guarantee no one is looking at your dance class and wanting to yell STOP!  And if they do, it's because they want to join in.   --Ofelia