Kelsey, who was peppy but emphatic, instructed us to push, skip, reach, clap, march, roll our shoulders, shake our booties, twist our torsos like a dishrag, and pay attention to our cores. My heart rate was pleasantly high, my brow sweaty. I began to think that the muscled men boxing and bench-pressing in the next room were missing out. “Jazzercise is not complete without a little Meghan Trainor,” Kelsey announced—not something you’d hear in 1969—before playing “Let You Be Right.” “Listen to your bodies, ladies,” she urged us. “It tells you what it needs.”

First Class? No Sweat

Walk into any Jazzercise and you’ll discover a safe, friendly, motivating Instructor-led group fitness class. Your Instructor is an upbeat, trained & certified fitness expert who will guide you through dance cardio and strength training that will change your body and boost your mood. With over 10 different class formats plus new routines added every 10 weeks, it’s impossible to plateau but inevitable that you’ll see, and feel, results.

The best part of burning up to 800 calories in one 60-minute Jazzercise class?

You’ll have so much fun, you won’t want to stop.

Grab your cross-trainers (or other supportive fitness shoe), moisture-wicking clothes you can move in, a bottle of water and maybe a towel. Then, get ready to strengthen, lengthen and tone during the happiest hour of your day.

Before I knew it, I was doing thirty-five classes a week, and I lost my voice,” Missett went on. She realized that she had to branch out, so she trained five of her top students to teach their own classes. “By the time 1980 rolled around, I had over a thousand instructors all over the country.” At first, she sent out notations of the choreography on paper, but the arrival of home-video recorders allowed her to make training tapes, which the company would distribute along with music—packages of thirty or forty albums, which gave way to cassette tapes. (The advent of iPods made things much less cumbersome.) “In the eighties, it was a lot of disco and Donna Summer and KC and the Sunshine Band,” Missett said. She turned Jazzercise classes into commercial franchises—the other “hot franchise” at the time, she recalled, was Domino’s Pizza—and in 1981 released a gold-selling “Jazzercise” album, with tracks including “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Girl from Ipanema.” A workout video followed, featuring Missett as a goofy yet nudging taskmaster. (“Come on, find your pelvis! I know you’ve got one!”)

Nothing to be nervous about here. You’re going to do great!

(Psst…we were all new once.)

We can’t wait to see you.

Find a class near you to check class schedules and pricing.

The night before I met Missett, I stopped by the CompleteBody gym in the Flatiron district, which offers the only remaining Jazzercise class in the five boroughs. (The brand is more popular in the suburbs.) As someone who is fervently anti-exercise—but pro-jazz!—I wondered how I would fare. I half expected to see perms and pastels, but there was no trace of the Reagan era. Instead of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” the playlist was what you might hear at a night club at a beach resort: Afrojack’s “SummerThing!” and the dance anthem “I Just Got Paid.” There were fifteen students; I was the only man. According to Missett, just two per cent of Jazzercise students are men (“I think it’s because dance has a stigma to it”), although, for whatever reason, there are more men in warmer countries, such as Mexico and Italy.