Welcome to CDLocker.com - Information on Dance music

FITNESS buffs who want to connect with their African heritage and burn calories have a new and fun workout option. Capoeira, a high-energy aerobic workout that fuses martial arts, dance and African and Brazilian music, is the latest exercise to explode onto the group fitness circuit.

Capoeira (pronounced capwear-ah) traditionally featured precise kicks, spins and gravity-defying acrobatic moves. However, the latest incarnation of the art form, known as Boneco Capoeira, has been designed as an exercise program taught at Bally's Total Fitness Centers nationwide.

With a kickboxing background, Allegra Feamster, group fitness instructor and personal trainer in Chicago, was a logical choice to teach capoeira. She studied with Mestre Boneco, co-founder of the L.A. studio, where capoeira classes first kicked off, literally. "The music kind of drives it," says Feamster, noting capoeira's infectious theme music, which is accented with Portuguese chants, drums and the berimbau, an African string instrument. "I even learned a little bit of Portuguese."

Participants might find themselves moving easily to the upbeat music while Feamster demonstrates the ginga (pronounced jin-ga), which is the basic movement in the workout that includes four steps, starting with a backward lunge, or back ginga, which progresses into a side turn and a squat, followed by another turn and forward stance. The controlled series of ginga moves create an effective lower-body workout, averaging from 500 to 850 calories per workout, depending on an individual's body type.

During the samba portion of the workout process, Feamster often has members of her class find a partner to perform a face-to-face dance/fight routine, which takes participants out of the workout mode and into the party mode. "It's fun. People tend to stick to the things that they enjoy," says Feamster, who stopped teaching step-aerobics because the exercise was becoming too stressful on her knees and hips. "[Capoeira is] low-impact, which means that it is very joint-friendly."

"Capoeira is amazing to see," says Charles Little, national director of fitness education for Bally's. "It creates this spirit and breaks down those walls of communication. It kind of celebrates the body and the soul interacting."

Little is quick to point out the history of capoeira, which began in Africa over 400 years ago. One theory is that denizens of Angola practiced capoeira as a way of defending themselves in their African homeland. Upon being forced into slavery and taken to Brazil, these Africans continued to practice capoeira, but had to disguise their method of self-defense from their owners. In order to mask their training, the slaves incorporated dancing, singing and acrobatics into a seemingly harmless form of entertainment, complete with drums, agogo (bells) and other instruments.

As it has evolved from the high-powered kicks and flips into more of a cardiovascular workout, capoeira has also begun to enter popular culture in the form of movies, including Catwoman, starring Halle Berry, and Ocean's Twelve. Capoeira was even featured in Usher's Caught Up video.

All of which is part of Mestre Boneco's plan. "When I first saw Taebo, I said, I can do that with capoeira," recalls Boneco, a capoeirista, or expert, from Brazil with 30 years of experience, who trained Berry for her ultraathletic Catwoman role. "I taught her basic movement. They wanted her performance to have a different atmosphere of fighting," he says.

Even so, the ultimate goal of capoeira is not to defeat your opponent; it is to learn self-confidence and how to harmonize with those around you, as you become part of a community, according to the experts. And it gives you a good workout, too.