Men Stepping Up to New Aerobic Routines

Wearing shorts and a faded, torn T-shirt, Ken Laskey does not look the part of an aerobic dancer.

The engineer is an exception in an activity that is about 90% female--and more associated with spandex than sweatshirts.

Laskey, athletically trim at 43, likes what the exercise does for his body. But he is uncomfortable when he has to do steps that were designed for other types of bodies. “I call them women’s moves,” he said. “My body doesn’t move like that.”

The Reston, Va., man’s problem is one that aerobic dance instructors are trying to solve. They are turning to new routines, taken from basketball and football drills that were designed to keep athletes in shape to play.

“I don’t see it as a huge trend yet, but there are certainly sports-conditioning classes for men and women, getting back to the basics of movement,” said Kathie Davis, executive director of IDEA, a fitness trainers’ group based in San Diego.

Women may be more comfortable with dance because they are more likely to have had ballet or other dance steps in their histories, Davis said. Also, “there’s a social stigma attached to dance for a lot of guys,” she said.

The drill-style moves are a change from the intense choreography traditionally associated with aerobics. They are one part of a trend toward simplification that is seen more widely in activities such as step, in which participants move onto and off a low platform. The more complex moves of 20 years ago were “kind of dancy,” Davis said.

A man might enter one of those classes and feel it’s “not cool, not macho,” said fitness instructor Alison Lowe, director of the Naples Fitness Center in Naples, Fla. She works basketball practice techniques into her routines.

In one drill, two people stand back-to-back and twist toward each other to hand off a basketball between them. Such drills increase agility, “which is really lacking in a lot of aerobics movements out there,” Lowe said.

Programs featuring this and similar moves are getting more people into classes, Lowe said. Men’s participation is up to around 40%, which she called “quite astounding.”

The changes feel fine to Laskey, who thinks traditional aerobics had “more hip-swiveling stuff--more things that tend to be fluid and graceful.”

“I wouldn’t consider myself as fluid and graceful,” Laskey said. “I can be more comfortable doing things that are more the type of power moves.” Besides, he said, he played basketball for many of his younger years before he took up aerobics.