10:13 PM
Salsa Circuit
If you think you can’t dance — think again. And if you think you can’t dance your way to fitness, you haven’t met Louis Van Amstel — professional champion ballroom dancer and one of the pros on the ABC hit series “Dancing with the Stars,” and now a bona fide fitness guru thanks to LaBlast.
LaBlast, created by Van Amstel, is a full-on cardio-dance workout designed to use ballroom dance as a means to weight loss and physical fitness. You can check out LaBlast in a 40-minute class — helmed by Van Amstel —starting at 1:10 p.m. on July 24, as part of the fourth annual, daylong “Are You Game” women’s wellness festival at North Avenue beach.
Presented by Women’s Health magazine, the festival will include: cooking classes, three fitness areas (cardio, dance and yoga), cycling, nutrition counseling, fitness-related merchandise, a beauty and style lab, a rock climbing wall, total body boot camp, music and more.
“The reason I wanted to do something like LaBlast was because obesity is the number one disease worldwide,” Van Amstel said. “When I was partnered with Kelly (Osbourne, in season 9), I started thinking to myself, I’m on the number one show in the country, it’s all about dancing, people are loving the dances, they are seeing how fit we are and how the contestants are transforming, so why not create a dance program people could do without a partner and just feel good about themselves?”
LaBlast is a five-tier workout program (currently not offered in the Chicago area) that incorporates dance steps from the cha-cha, samba, Lindy Hop, jive, paso doble, Quickstep, salsa and more. The routines are designed to create a total cardio/interval training workout.
“When I first met Kelly,” Van Amstel said, “her self-esteem was nowhere. She was this pigeontoed girl, who as overweight, walked hunched over, and I was like ‘What am I gonna do with her?’ But five minutes into our first steps I knew she had enormous talent and rhythm and we just took it from there. As the season went on, people really connected to her transformation, and that’s what LaBlast ultimately does. It builds up your confidence and transforms you on every level.”
One hour of LaBlast burns between 500 and 800 calories, Van Amstel said, depending on the level. Because it also incorporates interval training methods, calorie burning continues after the class is over, he said. The beginner levels center on basic dance steps and easier routines, while the advance levels feature more challenging choreography and more difficult routines. The music runs the gamut from classic ballroom melodies to hip-hop, funk, pop, world and disco.
Van Amstel stresses the class (there are talks of a possible home DVD version) is for everyone.
“Overweight persons should not feel like they can’t do this,” he said. “Tweny-four million people watched ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and from that maybe two million were dancers and 22 million were people sitting at home wishing they could do that. Now you can. And you don’t need a partner because I teach the dances from the left and the right side, so when a class is over I tell the people you just learned to do the routine as both the man and the woman, so now you CAN go home and teach your wife or your husband or your boyfriend.”
You don’t need special dance shoes for the class, either. “Most persons wear sneakers with a nice circular profile under the shoe,” Amstel said. “Just wear what you would wear to the gym.”
As for the upcoming season of “Dancing with the Stars,” Van Amstel said he won’t know until August if he will be returning. “They don’t ask us until right before rehearsals,” he said. “So we’ll see.”
Source Miriam Di Nunzio
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