Zumba! The mere sound of the word conjures up the tremor of a primitive song, or a dance of lively gyrations that saturate that fitness factory on Salem Road where scores of people, mostly women, travel through their paces in the hopes of dropping a pound or more. It might be called a dance, but more accurately, Zumba is a regimen of strenuous motion that, with a torrid, blaring musical accompaniment, rocks, Millions of people around the world are moving, making joyful sounds and searching for a healthy lifestyle by virtue of the dance.

Assuredly, the pounds fall off making everyone giddy with success, including the bosses at the Conway Regional Health and Fitness Center who support the activity wholeheartedly - this dance and fitness phenomenon.

The fitness center paints Zumba as a hypnotic Latin rhythm that creates a dynamic fitness effort that produces fairly amazing results.Movement and drive - thats Zumba, a dance craze that scores of participants seem to love, burning some 500 to 1,000 calories during an hour-long trip.

Tiffeny Crow, the senior program specialist at the Fitness Center, and other instructors, take their charges through workouts five days a week at various times, helping them experience the electrifying transit by means indigenous Latin music.

All this has come about by pure accident, if one considers the history of Zumba which is the story of Alberto Beto Perez who created the dance craze when one fateful day in his native Cali, Columbia, he darted off to teach an aerobics class and forgot his aerobics music.Not to be undone, he improvised, using his own combination of music from tapes he carried in his backpack (the salsa and merengue music he grew up with). Merengue is a fast dance with tricky moves that originated in the Dominican Republic in the 19th century.Instinctively, Perez created a new kind of dance fitness, one that focused on letting the music move a dancer instead of the dancer counting the steps over the music. People gravitated toward the new sounds - they loved it - and a revolutionary new fitness concept was born - the Zumba Fitness Party.

Today the idea of moving the world to a new beat seems to be the fashion -an exhilarating, effective, easy- to-follow, Latin inspired calorie-burning fitness party that is moving millions of people toward joy and health.

To say the Zumba dance is addictive begs the question. It has become that and infinitely more since its inception in 2001, It has grown to become the worlds largest - and most successful- dance fitness program, with more than 12 million or more people of all sizes, shapes and ages, taking weekly Zumba classes in over 110,000 locations across 125 countries.

If you are new to Zumba, a word of caution: This is the most physically exhausting event of them all, Your instructor will encourage you to perform certain actions - probably unheard of actions - that your body will resist. You will bend in places youve never bent before. But you persevere. Remember the big picture: get fit, lose weight.

The instructor will exhort, almost beg you to stay with the others even if you hate everyone in sight. Your body will ache, but somehow you will be caught up by the excitement even if the Latin music and the fancy footwork are beyond your ken.

Tiffeny Crow and other instructors cajole and set the pace seeming impervious to the demands Zumba present.

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Zumba taking area by storm