Kick this!

Kickboxing is making 'aerobics' a four-letter word

by Celeste Perri

"Kickboxing. Ever heard of it? The sport of the future? I can tell by your face you haven't," the curiously lovable Lloyd Dobler, a young John Cusack, says in 1989's Say Anything. Fast-forward 10 years and anyone who hasn't heard of kickboxing hasn't turned on cable TV to see the Herculean Billy Blanks upper-cutting his way into the hearts of America's fit-crazed wannabes. Kickboxing, dear Lloyd, has indeed arrived.

But the kickboxing that has swept America in the late '90s probably deviates dramatically from the martial art nirvana prophesied by Dobler. Kickboxing, the sport, was developed in the '70s by American karate followers who wanted to build on the competitive aspect of traditional "point-fighting" or sparring. To the uneducated observer, it looks like a cross between traditional boxing and a Jackie Chan movie. To the devoted kickboxer, it is the marriage of the power of the mind and body in competitive form.

Regardless, it's kickboxing, cardiovascular style, that has invaded the fitness center nearest you. In 1989, Billy Blanks, a California martial arts champion-turned-fitness guru, developed what he calls tae-bo by crossing kickboxing with the music and mentality of a fitness class. Blanks took his product, in the shape of a four-video set, to the infomercial circuit last year. The enthusiasm from tae-bo set off a chain reaction of cardio-kick classes across the country.

To some, cardio-kick is simply the latest in a long string of fitness trends, yet its focus on strength, self-defense and toning, rather than simple weight loss, marks a serious change in the way women exercise -- and in what women are saying about themselves. Kickboxing represents an outlet for women who have been looking for a way to build strength and express their aggression in a controlled way. Some simply favor this novel approach to fitness, and tout its intensity as a workout.

It used to be that women's fitness came with a leotard and a supermodel teaching you to aerobicize, sometimes with minimal sweat. But the face of women's athletics and fitness is changing -- the WNBA packs arenas all summer long; US soccer star Mia Hamm is taking on Michael Jordan in Gatorade commercials; and it's Muhammad Ali's youngest daughter, Laila, who's looking to follow him into the ring. If kickboxing is the sport of the moment, the female seems poised to be the athlete of the millennium.

She arrives at the perfect moment.

The supermodel as cultural icon died last year -- her face was replaced on the cover of Vogue with the very human bodies of Oprah and Hillary -- and American women have long been seeking to expand the traditional definition of beauty. Now, the pouty waifs with hollow cheeks and obliterated thighs are vanishing ideals in the fashion world. Fitness for the sake of health and muscle tone is replacing them.

In a decade where the platform shoes of the Spice Girls represented the most hyped feminist platform to hit the mainstream, kickboxing is a quiet revolution. Even those women who have skipped the "Take Back the Night" rallies the last few years out of pure apathy are heading to the gym. Unlike the second-wave feminism of the '60s, it's feminist now to be wholly unabashed and proud of your female body -- to wear your skirt short, while keeping your sass straight.

Kickboxing embodies this: while women who kickbox are burning calories and their muscles, they're also releasing stress and aggression. While kickboxing isn't going to revolutionize the workplace, the sport's message of self-empowerment and physical strength has the potential to radicalize the way that many women think about their bodies.

But can yet another fitness craze really be taken this seriously? Arlene Gorton, professor emeritus and former associate director of the Brown University Athletic Department, who taught the popular Sport and Society class, says, maybe so. "I see sport as a social institution which plays a role in establishing and perpetuating social values that our society deems important. There's clearly a change in attitude for women to be able to do kickboxing. We have been tied to our bodies and we have been restricted by what society says we can do with our bodies for a long time. Then, suddenly, we discovered that we had more power in our bodies than we had given ourselves credit for."

Gimme the gimmick

I'll be the first to admit my own intoxication with fitness gimmicks. My basement is a graveyard of "As Seen on TV" geegaws. Spend five minutes there and you'll see everything from Get In Shape Girl weights to my neglected Nordic Trak. I've jazzercized, aquacized (yup, water aerobics), and I powerwalked when Oprah told me to. Anything to make shrinking my waistline "easy" and "painless."

After 10 years of this, I've gotten a little jaded about any purportedly simple solution to make love handles a thing of the past. So when my best friend came home from a kickboxing class with her oversize gloves, I couldn't help wondering if they would soon find themselves bunking with a broken juicer under the trampoline in my basement. But when she tried to air-kick a brawny 6'3" male friend and he actually flinched back in fear, I decided to skip my next aerobics class and check out kickboxing for myself.

The first stop on my cardio-kickboxing tour was KBOX in Smithfield. Kickboxing, fitness-style, has two varieties: cardio-kick, which is all cardiovascular training, and bag classes, in which participants aim at a boxing-style bag. This 9:30 gathering is a bag class, and I've dressed the part: my sports bra says Everlast, just like Holyfield's waistband. I'm official.

But before I can roundhouse kick anything, Rui Rodrigues, KBOX's owner, has to show me how to wrap up my hands just like the pros. "For years," he tells me, "women have been wanting to participate in martial arts. Kickboxing is martial arts without the formalities."

I don't know about him, but wrapping up my wrists before I go to smack the hell out of a stuffed bag makes me feel pretty formal. Protecting my wrists like this says, I'm about to do something dangerous. I'm about to risk something in the name of a contoured bicep. The only time step aerobics ever really seemed to pose a serious threat was when I stepped down the wrong way on a "Funky Repeater," and had to wear an ace bandage for a week. (Try explaining that injury with any sort of glory.)

KBOX is an all-female program, but that's the only constant in the room. Blue-haired AARP members in baggy sweatpants line up their bags next to tank-topped teen-agers. There's no dress code, either. The garb worn by my classmates extends from tie-dye and old soccer shorts to DKNY work-out outfits. There are moms with kids in tow, and career women punching cell phone keypads before turning their attention to the bag.

Before class gets under way, Xochitl Gonzalez, 21, a student from Providence's East Side, tells me, "Kickboxing is to aerobics what sex is to hand-holding; once you've tried it, you'll never go back."

What I'm here for, I quickly realize, is to twist my body in a way that I'd never expected, but which seems very natural Though I used to be a competitive swimmer, my gimmick-less workouts have lately been limited to 30-minute power walks, 45 minutes of aerobics and an hour of weightlifting on alternate days of the week. After a vigorous warm-up, it's time for the gloves. They're so gargantuan, they feel like stage props at first.

We start out with a series of jabs, punching the bag with one arm for two minutes. In a cross between contact therapy and pure adrenaline, my tension dissolves. Ten seconds, and there goes the mean teller at the bank this morning. Thirty seconds, and -- pow! -- there goes the fight with my roommate over who finished the skim milk. Stress and I have been warring for a while, but now I'm vanquishing it.

And that's even before we go "power." This is where we jab the bag as hard as we can, relentlessly, for thirty seconds.

"Work it!" Rui screams. "Work it! Stay Strong! Almost there! ALMOST THERE!"

Jab. Jab. Cross. Punch. I'm Rocky. I'm a martial arts star. I'm Grrrrrrrrl Power with as many Rs as I feel like.

"ALMOST THERE!" Rui screams again.

It's dare, I say, orgasmic?

"DONE. Fantastic," he breathes.

Kick this!

Indeed, much of kickboxing's allure stems from the fact that it's a very intense workout. Many Americans have seen the economy boom while their hours at work multiply -- and are coming to appreciate the reality of no pain, no gain. Similarly, kickboxing isn't easy and it doesn't pretend to be. At the same time, it gives many women an appreciation for their untapped aggression and physical strength.

"I think a general idea of toughness is here," says Brittany Kesselman, an instructor at KBOX. "Women get really excited when we give them their gloves. They can't wait to go home and beat up on someone. The idea of being able to do that and punch and kick, not just burn calories, is something you see a lot."

The thirst for this sort of activity was evident when Jill LaPoint, an assistant director of athletics at Brown, added a cardio-kickboxing class to her aerobic offerings this semester. The first 200 people in a 7:30 a.m. registration line were there to sign up for kickboxing. "Kickboxing empowers you. That's a big draw to many women," says LaPoint.

Yet the sense of confidence that kickboxing inspires may be false. Substituting kickboxing for a self-defense class might not be a good move for women, LaPoint cautions, since kickboxing doesn't offer drills with a mock attacker. And while participation in her kickboxing class has exploded, enrollment in a self-defense class has dropped.

Image control

A look at fitness celebs is revealing in reflecting the changing face of fitness. In the late `80s and early `90s, Richard Simmons accrued a negligible sweat to an oldies beat. He wore funny looking shorts and appeared as if he'd lose a thumb wrestling match with a couch potato.

Billy Blanks, on the other hand, is an enormous seven-time martial arts champion. When he tells you to push, to work it, to scream, you want to obey him. You don't look like him, you don't sweat like him, you don't yell like him. But kickboxers are striving to gain a measure of Blanks' strength (while burning 800 calories an hour during the peak level of activity), rather than chasing the weight-loss goals of earlier fitness trends.

"Once you experience that really great sweat and your endorphins are flying, it's contagious," says LaPoint.

Or, as Christen McLaughlin, 25, a cardio-kickboxer for more than a year, puts it, "After you've been kickboxing for a while, you have much more muscle tone. After you lose weight from aerobics, you just have nothing."

Around the country, women are losing the irrational fear that lifting 10-pound weights a few times a week will make them look like bodybuilders. Says Kesselman, "The women who are kickboxing are certainly looking to get more muscular. They're not at all anxious or looking to avoid that."

Mary-Ann Gordon, fitness director at Future Fitness in Cranston, epitomizes this definition of the modern woman. She has the face of the girl next door, but the tattoo on her shoulder and the fact that she can make both of her legs simultaneously go vertical -- in different directions -- while punching the bag lets you know she's not the peaches and cream type. "Most women want to be aggressive," Gordon says. "Once they take a kickboxing class, they realize it's okay to be that way. It's a safe environment to do it in."

Gordon practices what she preaches. Her bag class, which I take a week after Rui's, is focused much more on the body. "Come on!" she screams at her charges while they're hooking their bags, "You must know someone who needs a punch like this." With a giggle she adds, "By the end of the class you'll probably think it's me."

Cardio-kick

There's something different about the cardio-kick class at Future Fitness. Testosterone is involved. These guys look like they could have played football in college. The presence of these men adds credence to my view that this is real exercise, not some watered-down fitness for fickle women.

"Men are constantly telling me, `Oh I would never do step aerobics, but I'm dying to get in there,' " says Barry Crins, a Future Fitness staff member.

For those of us who have been alienated from group exercise by the synchronized dance moves of a step aerobics class, cardio-kick provides welcome relief. As we go through a warm-up similar to the one at KBOX, everyone's already on their own level. Some of us look like we could put the Rockettes and Jackie Chan out of a job, while other kicks resemble a crippled limp.

"To go to an aerobics class, everyone feels they have to look a certain way," Gordon says. "At kickboxing, you don't have any time to think about how you look." For some fitness followers, "Aerobics is a four-letter word now."

We do jumping jacks and kick. Once to the front. Once to the left. Repeat. We punch the corners. Kick from the hip. And then we do it all in double time. Within 20 minutes, my face matches the color of the fruit punch Powerade I'm sucking down, and my body is shiny with sweat.

As the class winds down and we gather to do 300 stomach crunches, Elaina Figiola, 24, says, "It's over? I was just getting into it."

Longevity?

Whether kickboxing has staying power remains to be seen. "People are fickle," says Gail Ruggieri, a personal trainer who's been teaching aerobics for 15 years. "They're tired of step. They're tired of walking outside. This is the thing of the moment."

Yet kickboxing, as I see it, has the stuff to go the distance. As women release aggression and firm up our bodies, will we ever go back to the Jane Fonda workout? Since kickboxing works most every muscle in the body, taking a few 60-minute sessions a week seems way more fun and efficient than visiting the weight room, the aerobics instructor and the therapist.

Plus, there's an honesty to kickboxing. Unlike past gimmicks, no one's pretending this is anything but tough. You will sweat. You will hurt. Muscles you didn't even know existed will burn for days after your first class. As Gordon says, "Kickboxing takes your aerobic threshold and brings you higher. You do it and you like it, or you drop out. But it doesn't get any easier."

Meanwhile, third-wave feminism is plumbing the delicate balance of sexuality and power. And, as women redefine body image, release aggression, exercise -- all while packing a punch -- and the kickboxing trend kicks on.

"I think it's very exciting," says Arlene Gorton. "We're trying to free ourselves from the stereotypes of what we must be like. The more that society comes to accept that a woman can do different things, we will change. We're finding our way."