Cardio Hip-Hop

Cardio hip-hop is the fitness adaptation of hip-hop dance: street and commercial vocabulary — bounces, rocks, grooves, isolations and party steps — stripped of battle context and freestyle, arranged into repeatable counts and driven at aerobic intensity. It emerged from the group-exercise industry of the early 1990s, when hip-hop displaced high-impact aerobics as the sound of the studio, and it reached mass audiences through home video. MTV's The Grind, on air from 1992 to 1997 with hosts including Eric Nies, spawned a run of hip-hop aerobics tapes, and Shaun T's Hip Hop Abs, released by Beachbody in 2007, became the top-selling workout video in the United States that year. Classes are typically taught in layered eight-counts with a low-impact option shown throughout, and often close with a floor or core segment. The relationship to actual hip-hop dance is the source of most of the friction around it: the groove is usually flattened, the weight is lifted rather than dropped, and the cultural apprenticeship of cyphers, crews and sessions is absent. Instructors with genuine hip-hop training close much of that gap, and many use the class as an on-ramp to technique classes. On its own terms it is an effective, high-adherence cardiovascular workout.