Zumba

Zumba is a high-energy dance workout that blends upbeat music with simple choreography for a full-body session. It fuses Latin styles — salsa, merengue, reggaeton — with aerobic exercise to boost cardiovascular fitness and coordination.

Its lively, social atmosphere makes it one of the most fun ways to train — you’ll be having too much of a good time to notice the workout.

The honest pitch for Zumba is that it solves the adherence problem. Most people know perfectly well what an hour of cardio would do for them; the difficulty is doing it more than twice. A class you look forward to gets done fifty times a year, and a treadmill you dread gets done six — and fifty mediocre hours beats six excellent ones every time.

Nobody is watching whether you get the choreography right, and the instructor is not going to stop and correct you. You follow along, you miss half of it in week one, you miss a quarter of it in week three, and somewhere in there you stop thinking about it. Four classes run each week.