“You’re not in Jazzercise, women,” a trim, tattooed fitness trainer chided me and the roomful of ladies who have been attempting to paintings up to a sweat one morning some months in the past. I’m in no way done Jazzercise. However, I knew what she meant. The caustic cue conjured grainy VHS tapes—the sort that circulates on social media for their Totally ’80s aesthetic—providing a gyrating blonde who’s all limbs, leotard, and embarrassing exclamations like “Find that boogie frame.” My instructor turned into calling us uncool.
Tempting as it may be to dismiss Jazzercise to the dustbin of fitness records, the dance-cardio program—which turns 50 this month—is extra than a punch line. The format founded in a dance-studio basement using Judi Sheppard Missett, the front lady inside the movies, set up the fashion and substance of “boutique fitness,” the fastest-growing phase of today’s $26 billion fitness industry. Jazzercise set the standard for modern-day choreographed offerings and the franchise model exemplified by using Curves, Pure Barre, and Barry’s Bootcamp.
Perhaps most crucially, serving a lady clientele when the workout was perceived because the area of guys, Jazzercise, invited girls to find the “joy” and “flair” in operating out. The application challenged an enduring machismo that still limits women’s complete participation in many workout environments. The experience-accurate fitness language that Jazzercise birthed but blended newly empowering affirmations with antique beauty directives that prized a thin and traditional kind of prettiness—a mixed ethos that pervades U.S. Fitness subculture these days.
We’re nonetheless right here,” Missett reminds me once I ask approximately her career inside the beyond aggravating at some stage in an interview. According to her forthcoming memoir, Building a Business With a Beat, Jazzercise has netted $2 billion in cumulative sales. Taught often in freestanding suburban centers or in-network spaces together with churches and schools, Jazzercise is in every U.S. Country and 25 different nations. At the height of its popularity, inside the mid-1980s, Jazzercise became the second-fastest-growing franchise business in us of, after Domino’s P Boutique Fitness Studios Are Remaking Urban Neighborhoods
