So you want to “get fit.”

 But prolonged periods of training are dangerous; you eventually find yourself sporting a Borat leotard and kissing your own biceps in the mirror. When you’re finally sick of post-workout Jamba Juice and hating the entire contents of your ipod, you quit—but you don’t make a clean break with your training. You tell yourself you’ll go back; you just don’t feel like going today. Or tomorrow. Or all next week or year. But you’re still paying your monthly dues, because this is San francisco, where only the dead don’t exercise. Surely you’ll go back.

Why not try something new? Dance—any sort of dance—demands consideration of an aesthetic end as well as physical rigor, so it can wipe the floor with physical training in terms of keeping your mind engaged. You’re tasked with not only completing a complex set of movements while sweat streams into your eyeballs, you also have to make it beautiful, and every dance has its own ideal of beauty. If your legs have no turn-out, maybe ballet isn’t for you, but jazz is more forgiving. If jazz involves too much jumping around, maybe the smoothness of belly dance is the right fit. I’ve heard from particularly fearsome and sexy friends that Zumba is both fearsome and very sexy. It must be a conflation of “zoom” and “rhumba.” My hips hurt just thinking about it.

You can try out these and many others for $5 (all-day, as many or as few classes as you wish) on January 28th at Lines Dance Center in the old Oddfellows Hall building off Market street. Please don’t show up in your Borat leotard. (info here)