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salud

A fitness phenomenon

ZUMBA takes its basics from Latin dance,
but its appeal seems to be global.

By Andrea Alegría

Alberto “Beto” Perez had been waiting for a chance like this. In an empty gym room in North Miami, he took a couple of deep breaths and began his audition. The past four failed attempts at landing a job in the United States lingered in his mind, but he pushed those thoughts aside.
The music started and he began his dance fitness class for the only other person in the room, his would-be employer. As the audition progressed, gym members started joining in, unaware that it was an audition. By the time he was done, the room was crowded and many were asking him when the next class would be. Beto, the Colombian fitness trainer who didn’t speak a word of English and who had to sleep in a park in Miami when he ran out of money, was hired.
Soon, his dance fitness class became exceptionally popular. His recipe (take a few simple dance steps, add in attitude, and shake well with Latin and international rhythms) evolved into Zumba Fitness, a company he co-founded in 2001. Today close to a million people take Zumba classes on a weekly basis with 8,000 trained instructors in 30 countries. Many more are dancing at home to more than 3 million DVDs sold worldwide.
“I feel like Forest Gump,” Beto tells a group of about 100 students at a recent Zumba training workshop held in Los Angeles. “You know how in the movie, Forest Gump started running and people started following him? Well, I feel like I started dancing and people started following me.”
The workshops, along with the sale of DVDs, are the primary source of revenue for the company. For $220 per person, participants included a wide variety, from teenage girls to gray-haired men, Anglos, Latinos, African Americans and Asians. They were all there to learn the basics of teaching a Zumba class. One man, who listened attentively, flew in from his native El Salvador just to take the workshop.
“This has become a thing of passion, of heart,” Beto explains to the crowd in his heavy Colombian accent. “When you touch people’s hearts, people get hooked. People think they are dancing, but they are really working out.”
As they listened, some of his students were still dripping sweat after taking a traditional one-hour Zumba class that kicked off the workshop.
Beto started off with a merengue and a rhythmic march in place as a warm-up. Soon a man in his 50s standing in the back was smiling as he moved two steps right and then two steps left to a salsa song, and the girls in front, wearing colorful workout outfits, made imaginary eights with their hips as they followed along. The man from El Salvador was shaking his shoulders when a reggetton song came on and Beto, at the front of the room and looking like it was the most fun he’d ever had in his life, started jumping up and down to a soca, followed by a samba. Rock and roll, flamenco, cumbia and Middle Eastern music all made the mix.
“What I did was bring the party into the gym room,” says Beto, who stumbled upon the concept of Zumba when he was a 16-year-old kid working as an aerobics instructor in Cali, Colombia. One day, he walked into his class and realized he had forgotten his aerobics music. His only option was to grab whatever tapes he had in his car. He used a tape that included a mix of different music and improvised for the class. The result was a hit. The music he used combined fast and slow rhythms, and resulted in a carefree routine.
Beto later realized that by mixing slow and fast rhythms of music, Zumba raises and lowers heart rate using the principles of fitness interval training to “maximize caloric output, fat burning and total body toning.” The class that starts off with a merengue and then slows down to a salsa; speeds up to rock and roll and slows down to a cumbia; goes up to a samba and down to a reggaeton. It actually follows an intensity curve most people in the class benefit from without noticing, he says.
Zumba has struck a chord among those who previously stayed clear of aerobics classes because of strenuous routines and repetitions counted down by an instructor, Beto says. It has also lured in crowds of dance lovers who do not want to have to learn complicated choreographed steps to kick back and let loose.
From its launch pad in Florida, Zumba has spread across the United States from coast to coast, to states like California, Texas, Arizona, Ilinois and New York. Recently, celebrities like Victoria Beckham were spotted dancing away to Zumba in Beverly Hills during Beto’s two-month stint in Los Angeles to promote the fitness program there.
It has also become surprisingly successful in places like Ohio, Beto says. In fact, a new Zumba television commercial features Ohio as an example that defies the notion that Zumba is only for Latinos, or big city folks.
“I knew I wanted to do something big, but I never imagined it would be something like this,” says Beto, who spends much of his time traveling around the world teaching workshops as far away as Japan, Taiwan, China and Italy, to name a few countries. “This has become like a philosophy, a religion. It’s crazy; I’m really amazed.”
Alberto Perlman, co-founder of Zumba Fitness, says he was surprised by the high demand for Zumba. “We are growing faster than any other fitness system in the United States. Our base of instructors is growing at a rate of 10 percent a month,” he says. In October, for example, Zumba added 1,000 new instructors. “Classes continue to be packed, the demand is unbelievable.”
It was this demand and the market itself that guided Zumba Fitness into becoming what it is today, he says. The road they took was anything but planned.
Entrepreneurs Perlman and Alberto Aghion, who had grown up together in Colombia but were living in Miami, teamed up with Beto to launch Zumba at a time when they had just sold their Internet company and were looking for their next business venture. They found Beto when Perlman’s mother took a class with him.
“My mother knew that there was something there, but she didn’t quite know what the business would be,” Perlman recalls.
The three Albertos initially set out to produce an infomercial to sell Zumba videos on TV, but didn’t have the budget to do so. To raise funds Beto taught a class on the beach in Miami, and they sold 200 tickets at $20 a person. “The night before the class, we stayed up all night hammering wood planks together to create the platform on which the class would be taught over the sand,” Perlman recalls. “With the $4,000 we made from that, we recorded a short video that we started showing around to investors.”
Soon after they secured a deal with a large infomercial company to launch the concept nationwide. Perlman says the infomercial sold $20 million in six months and the success of the DVDs created a demand for Zumba trainers.
“We started getting calls from people asking us how they could become Zumba trainers, so we had to come up with something,” Perlman says.
To meet this demand Zumba created an instructor-training program that became an instant success. For the first instructor training workshop in 2003 Perlman says they expected 30 people. Instead upwards of 150 people showed up and paid the $300 per person fee. “In one weekend, our company made $45,000. We couldn’t believe it,” he says.
That year, the company held three training workshops. The following year the number went up to 20. In 2005, 40 workshops were held, and by 2006, the number had reached close to 100. In 2006 the company officially created Zumba’s Educational Division, and aligned itself with the Aerobic & Fitness Association of America and American Council on Exercise, allowing it to expand its training even more. In 2007, Zumba hosted over 200 workshops worldwide.
“Everybody wins,” Perlman says. “The instructors profit by getting a new career teaching Zumba, and the consumers win because they are getting healthier and happier.”
Large corporate agreements also have helped propel the Zumba brand forward. In 2003, Zumba teamed with Kellogg’s to develop a fitness campaign for the Hispanic market. Consequently Zumba has been featured in over 1.5 million boxes of Special K cereal around the world. In 2006, Zumba partnered with Emilio Estefan and reality TV and music titan Mark Burnett (of Survivor, The Apprentice and Rockstar) to promote the program.
At the moment there are people teaching Zumba in churches, jails, military bases, and schools, Perlman says. “I think it serves a bit like therapy. I hear people say, ‘I would do Zumba, even if it had no health benefits.’ Zumba is exercise in disguise. We are growing so fast because there is nothing like it out there.”