Dance Aerobics is So Deeply Uncool…And That's Why I Love It
There are people out there who will tell you that you should never do any form of physical activity that you don't enjoy. While I respect and admire their commitment to approaching exercise with zeal, I have to ask: how? I genuinely love various forms of exercise (which, at the moment, include mat Pilates, swimming laps, going for long walks with my dog, and weeding crabgrass at the community garden), but I've come to think of them as a kind of deposit in my future-happiness account; I know movement will eventually make me feel great, especially now that I'm no longer working out in a constant quest to lose weight, but in the actual moment of moving—and, even more so, the moment before a workout class when I have to squeeze myself into a sports bra and actually get out the door—I'm often full of dread.
This was true, at least, until I attended my first 'fiercely noncompetitive dance aerobics' class at Pony Sweat, a studio based in my hometown of L.A.'s Frogtown neighborhood that describes its practice as feeling like 'dancing in your bedroom to music from a favorite mixtape.' Terrible dancer that I am (unless I've had two to four martinis, in which case all bets are off), I felt nervous and typically dread-filled even stepping through the door of the Pony Sweat studio, but the moment the lights dimmed and the music started, something weird happened: I forgot to feel stupid.
I don't know exactly what it was about Pony Sweat that got me out of my shell and happily dancing around to combinations I'd never seen or tried before, but I'm guessing it was a combination of the gloriously retro '80s soundtrack, the unbridled enthusiasm of the dancers around me (many of whom, like me, weren't perfectly on-beat and didn't seem to have any prior familiarity with the workout), and the instructor, Emilia, shouting what I'm now turning into a kind of exercise mantra: 'Fuck the moves.' I ended the hour-long class with sore calves and an exhausted glow, driving home as fast as I could to gush about Pony Sweat to my boyfriend and pre-book my best friend to attend the next week's class with me—and although I might have expected to feel good after the class, what really surprised me was how much fun I had during and how little clock-watching I did as I bopped around.
There are definitely workouts I've enjoyed in which knowing exactly what you're doing matters—weight lifting, for instance, sort of depends on your ability to listen to instructions and not accidentally injure yourself with something heavy—but the loosey-goosey, 'do what feels fun' approach of Pony Sweat really speaks to me right now as a 31-year-old doing my best to get comfortable being bad at things. I've always resented the aspects of life that are hard for me (math, cleaning, driving, the list goes on), but exercise is a low-key, low-stakes way to lean into the question of what my time and my life would look like if I reframed my idea of perfection and focused instead on trying to have genuine fun while also meeting my bodily movement goals.
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