LIVE WELL: Dance, Kick & Roll Around On The Floor with Nia
Posted: Apr 12, 11:47 PMWRITTEN BY: JEN MULSON – COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE, CO
Nia is a fitness class designed to help you dance through life with pleasure.
That’s the main tenet, according to Nia black belt Loretta Milo, who has taught for six years.
I can get behind that.
Nia is described as a blend of martial, healing and dance arts. It’s an hour-long fitness class held in many different locations all over the city. I popped in on a late Friday afternoon at the downtown YMCA, where Milo was teaching.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect based on the description. Would we break blocks with our bare hands and then chant?
The class was overwhelmingly female, with one lone guy there with his partner. The age of the class was across the board, though most were in their 30s and older. One woman, back for her second time, brought her pre-teen daughter who she thought might love it as much as she did.
Milo calls Nia holistic fitness. Carlos and Debbie Rosas are the founders of Nia. They dreamed up the concept in the early ’80s because they wanted some sort of exercise that didn’t involve jumping around, jarring and, perhaps, harming the body. They took their shoes off and began to explore tai chi, taekwondo and aikido.
Each has a different sensation, Milo said. Tai chi is a slow dance. Taekwondo is masculine and punch intensive. Aikido is harmonious, spherical movement.
But they needed to add a splash of fun so people would want to stick with it. That’s where dance arts came in, with jazz, modern and Duncan dance, named after Isadora Duncan, who danced barefoot and child-like with swaying arms.
Now, the practice needed to incorporate body awareness, so the practitioner would not get hurt. They added a pinch of Feldenkrais, the study of how you are using your body, sitting and standing, and re-teaching the body to move more correctly. Then a dab of the Alexander Technique, an awareness of the head, and a splash of yoga, used to help decipher where the body is in space.
With all that swimming in my mind, I took off my shoes to join the other barefooted ladies who were champing at the bit to get going.
The music, thick with drums, made me sway. I tried to remember the advice from zumba class: bend the knees to shake the hips. Everybody else seemed to have this technique down pat. There’s plenty of opportunity to practice in a Nia class. Frequently through class, we stood in place, lightly shaking our hips with jazz hands, shimmying our chests and then rolling out our necks.
The pace of class was like most fitness classes. We warmed up slowly, gently, then kicked it into a higher gear, though the option is there to keep the impact very low. We moved sideways, forward and backward, and then began the martial arts section. It reminded me how much I enjoyed going to kickboxing classes several years ago. The arm workout, with its jabs, punches and uppercuts, will slice the fat right off your arms. The high kicks and roundhouses will firm up the fleshiest rump.
Interspersed were segments where Milo told us to “go for a walk.” The dancers and I free roamed through the gym, making up our own dance moves and creative walks to the beat of the music. The women were obviously loving it. Their faces glowed; they were in their own dance world.
We began to cool it down, winding up on the floor, literally. Using the slipperiness of the floor to our advantage, Milo had us get on our backs and slither around, rolling onto our bellies and back, waving our arms the whole time and whatever else our bodies naturally wanted to do. We did a bit of core work with planks, stretched out with a brief yoga interlude and eventually found child’s pose. Ah, a familiar position! And that was it, Nia was over.
It was an enjoyable hour. I moved, I sweated, I smiled. My heart rate increased and I felt I got a workout, but not to the point of feeling exhausted. This class is appropriate for anybody, all ages, all fitness levels. Regular attendance can result in increased flexibility, agility, mobility, strength and stability. And one nice thing: classes are always different. You won’t be doing the same choreography every time.
Before you think Nia is only about the physical movement of the body, there are five belts involved that allow a student to explore their mental and emotional worlds as well. It follows the traditional martial arts model, progressing from white to black. For instance, the white belt sets its sights on physical sensation, while the black belt is all about creativity and transformation.
There are 13 principles in the Nia world. Students study these as they move through their belts. Awareness of the body is a big one. As we live inside our bodies 24 hours a day, we don’t necessarily pay attention to what they need. Milo believes Nia can encourage people to listen to that body intuition and learn to honor it.
Sheri Slike has a black belt in karate and is a three-year student of Nia.
“I’ve always wanted to incorporate dance into martial arts,” she said.
LaSheryl Olson, a brown belt, has been a Nia lover for three-and-a-half years and now teaches as well. She brought her young daughter to class, trying to improve her grace for gymnastics and to become more comfortable in her own skin.
The practice helps the young and the old alike, she believes.
“I love that we go to the floor. In our aging population, it’s so important to be able to get yourself up,” she said.
“The primary purpose of Nia,” Milo said, “is to do it until the day you die.”
