fabricflowers

If you live long enough things get repeated, and sometimes even the bad news goes away and then comes back as good news.For example, when I first got into the fitness and exercise business the message was, “You gotta feel the burn or it doesn’t work” or “Work harder until you feel the pain.”

Fortunately for me, my reason for getting into fitness had nothing to do with getting fit. I loved music and loved to dance and along came Jazzercise, the jazz dance based fitness program by Judi Sheppard Missett. To say that it was all the rage is an understatement. The instructor faced the students, just the opposite of other fitness programs of the day, and instructed each dance move in and easy, fun manner that the student could follow, whether they were dancers or not, and built the intensity on an aerobic curve with safety instructions so the student would know when they were working too hard or not hard enough.

Can you imagine that? We wore dance apparel like leotards and leg warmers, flowers in our hair, and yes, we took a lot of heat and giggles. But I loved to dance so much that I didn’t care. The benefit I didn’t totally understand at the time was our training as instructors was an on going commitment with video tapes every two months, with physiology and safety tips built in.

The music and chorography changed with every training tape to keep the program new and fresh, and as time went on, so did the safety tips and the intensity of the program, keeping up with new research. While we were dancing and having fun we were educating the students with the most up-to-date information from the vast fitness world.