After Atalanta

I never, never jump into the latest fitness trends. It took me years to get into both Step and indoor cycling. But for some reason I tried Zumba a couple of weeks ago and have been twice now. Not sure how long Zumba has been around (wait--according to the website it came to the US in the early 2000s), but it just came to my gym. Zumba is--this my description--a dance aerobics class. The foundations of the movements are in Latin dance. Here is what the Zumba website has to say about its product: Zumba® fuses hypnotic latin rhythms and easy to follow moves to create a dynamic fitness program that will blow you away. Our goal is simple: We want you to want to work out, to love working out, to get hooked. Zumba® Fanatics achieve long term benefits while experiencing an absolute blast in one exhilarating hour of caloric-burning, body-energizing, awe-inspiring movements meant to engage and captivate for life! (The rest of the description is here .) I haven't decided exactly how I feel a...

This is a very interesting and well-done article about the difficulties women in Israel face trying to find time and space to work out in a culture which does not support women's physical development--especially when it gets in the way of their duties to family and community. We can see some similarities in the obstacles American women face when they want to be active: carving out time during the day between household, community, and occupational duties. But there are sooe obvious differences as well: many American gyms have daycare; a fit female body is a status symbol in our culture and thus encouraged for certain women; and we often don't have the same community obligations--to entertain when a neighbor pops in, for example. [So few neighbors are popping in on one another these days.] An additional problem with the concept of Israeli women working out is the need to do so in sex segregated facilities. The article actually focuses on the one facility, The Eden Club, in a ...

I have been teaching in higher education for about 6 years now and have always been very conscious of my pedagogical practices. And I have been going to the gym since...well...a long time but have not, until recently thought about the pedagogical practices aerobics instructors employ. And even more recently I have been moonlighting as a spin nstructor. So I have decided to combine all my interests as well as my work on women's activity and its empowerment potential and write a paper about feminist pedagogical practices and spin/indoor cycling. This is very convenient because while I am taking and/or teaching spin classes, I am also doing research. I have made many observations thus far some good, many bad (many instructors continually reify the hegemonic female body and the male model of sport) but last night a good thing occurred. During one of the sprinting drills which was done in stages the instructors described our effort level by encouraging us to visualize another biker j...

Swimming paddles are plastic discs of various shapes and sizes that swimmers and water aerobicizers put on their hands when training. They create greater resistance and so build upper body strength while helping swimmers with their stroke. Casually browsing in a major sports store yesterday I came across swim paddles made by TYR. They were all different colors that corresponded to their respective size (XS-XL). I had never seen swim paddles sized and so I flipped over the package to find out how the sizes were measured. The size chart was very interesting. XS paddles are meant for beginner swimmers. S are meant for intermediate swimmers. OK--this makes sense. Then things started gettting interesting. The descriptions for who shoud be using each size became more intricate, listing various levels of swimming such as high school. junior nationals, senior nationals, collegiate, etc. But they also became gendered. For example a female collegiate swimmer should use size M but a male collegia...