Zumba with me! “Pegate”

Whenever things are stressful and stuff is going on, dancing always has a way of helping me put things in perspective, or even just forget about them and enjoy the moment.  I mentioned before that one of us was supposed to have surgery today, but it turns out that it’s not for another week. We had to reschedule the original surgery day, and today is a post-op appointment that never got rescheduled. Womp wooooomp. Another week to think about it. Well, good thing there’s Zumba later today. Dancing always has a way of making everything better. 

I’ve talked about this before, but for my newer readers (hi!) I grew up dancing (jazz, tap, ballet, hip hop, folklorico and Irish) and taught in high school and college. It was a huge part of my life, all of my best friends also taught and worked at the studio and when I moved to North Carolina to be with the Pilot, it was a rough transition for me. I was in limbo trying to find jobs and figure out military life (which was entirely new to me), suffered from anxiety from all of the changes, and even when we moved to Valdosta, felt a void in my heart where dance used to be. Zumba helped fill that void.

I had a weird preconception about Zumba, because as a dancer, who didn’t like to repeat choruses and moves during the same song, I thought it would be suuuuuper lame. Then, I actually took a class in Orlando and it rocked.my.world. The moves repeat a lot during the songs, but that’s what makes it easy to follow and stick with it for the entire class. It’s also the beauty of Zumba: anyone can do it, whether you have a dance background or not. It’s not super serious, and it’s just a fun way to move and burn extra calories… even though I burn more calories shaking my booty than I do on the treadmill. 

To all of my friends out there who have never tried Zumba and are kinda freaked out by it (I was too, it’s ok), and all of the hardcore Zumba lovers,

Zumba with me!

I made this little video per your Facebook requests last night- I really hope you love it, because I had a blast making it. Even though, I admit that I kinda felt like a goober dancing by myself with the Flip on, but then I just envisioned all of you dancing along with me and got over it 😉 The glory of at-home options for dance cardio classes is that you can try it out with minimal time commitment to see if you might like to take a class near you. You could also mix and match with YouTube videos to create your own at-home Zumba class. 

As I mentioned before, I was kind of worried about copyright issues with posting a song in the video, but per a few of your suggestions, just muted out the song.

I used “Pegate” by Fulanito, which you can get on iTunes (and the whole video is also on YouTube for free) — you’ll just want to start playing it at 1:30 in the dance video. 

 

You can also use any quick-paced song you have and love- I just want to hear what you used 🙂

Please give it a try, let me know what you think and if you’d like to see more like this in the future! 

Take a little time to dance today <3

xoxo

Gina

What’s your favorite kind of workout therapy? An awesome run? Yoga sesh? Boxing class?