More Zumba To Come

If the lights were any lower, Helen Ansari’s Zumba/kickbox class at Mount Kisco’s Saw Mill Club could be mistaken for a Miami Beach disco—floor-pounding beats, a bevy of bright clothes and more backfields in motion than a Dolphins’ spring practice session. All that’s missing are the umbrella drinks … and they might have to lose those basketball lines on the floor, for ambience’s sake.
But this ain’t no party, nor is there a disco that requires this amount of hard work, even if it’s to Salsa, Merengue and Macarena rhythms. After 15 minutes, Ansari, decked out in a lime-green top, is glistening with sweat, all the while shouting out encouragement to her students. “I need to see your shoulders and back muscles! Come on! Pump it, girls!”
Maybe the volume isn’t disconcerting to Ansari—she was once a member of Jackson State University’s marching band, aka “The Sonic Boom of the South.”
Ansari, born in Hattiesburg, Miss., has been teaching aerobics and physical fitness for more than two decades, and the fitness bug runs in the family; her daughters, Shahidah and Tarajee, also teach, sometimes alongside their mother.
While instructing the women to “bring their elbows around into their armpits” and other feats of physics, Ansari herself gets quite the workout, and one could scarcely believe that she is 56 years old, a grandmother and a breast cancer survivor.
“Pop it!” she shouts joyfully, walking over to one of the students and flashes a smile, encouraging while correcting small flaws in technique. This is a one-hour class, and the students barely get a breather. In fact, not all of them can manage to stay for the entire sweaty 60 minutes, but many feed off Ansari’s positive vibes.
“Helen is an inspiration to all she teaches and comes in contact with,” said Jamie Kilgore, a local photographer who has known and trained with Ansari for 12 years. “She is like a magnet; she attracts people to her and the energy and spirit she gives off have people flocking to her. When you are around Helen, you have no way of keeping any of your own bad energy.”
Nor does Ansari, a former winner of the Miss Black America contest, get a breather throughout a week of 15 classes (Zumba, spin, yoga) and as a personal trainer to some of northern Westchester’s fit and famous. In fact, on this day alone she’ll teach four classes after rising at dawn.
Her aerobics career began at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, teaching the wives of military personnel, and continued in Ismia, Turkey. After returning to the U.S., she began a competitive aerobics career at age 40, eventually finishing fourth in the national masters divisions of the Reebok Aerobics Championship in 1995.
Just four months after that triumph, Ansari was stunned to learn she had breast cancer. However, buoyed by the support of her students, she was back teaching within a month. “They love my spirit,” she said. “They tell me my class is like going to church.”
Ansari is using that spirit to promote awareness of breast cancer, which strikes more than 200,000 women each year. (Shortly after her operation, Ansari lost a sister to the disease.) On Sept. 12, the Ansari family and the Saw Mill Club will pool resources at a “Zumba-thon” at the club to raise money and awareness for Northern Westchester Hospital’s expanding Cancer and Wellness Center. Along with her daughters, she is hoping the September event will strike another blow against the disease.
“We have to continue to raise awareness and fight this battle,” she said. Nearly one in eight U.S. women will be affected by breast cancer. By leading a class, she said, “I wanted to give something back this year.”
Ansari has always been an innovative teacher, devising a yoga stretch class at the Saw Mill Club, which she describes as “a soothing fusion of yoga, fitness stretch and self-healing.” She caught on to the latest trend, Zumba, a year ago, and the popular class brims with 70 students at its weekend sessions.
The Zumba-thon, a three-hour dance/ workout party co-sponsored by the American Cancer Society, will begin at 2 p.m. Sept. 12. Participants are certain to have fun while getting a workout to this inspired dance/ fitness craze founded by Colombian Beto Perez in the 1990s.

This has been borrowed from The Examiner By Brian Kluepfel