Beto just celebrated 25 years of Zumba with a special class streamed online. The community is buzzing about it, and rightfully so. Twenty-five years is a remarkable milestone for something that changed the way the world thinks about fitness.
But watching the reaction got me thinking about something I learned about myself during the pandemic.
I tried teaching online. A couple of classes, enough to get a real feel for it. And what I discovered pretty quickly is that it is just not for me. Not because the format is wrong, but because of how I teach and what I need in order to give everything I have.
I need the energy of a live room. I need the instant feedback that only comes from standing in front of real people. I need to feel the class responding in real time, adjusting to what I am reading from the crowd, feeding off what they are bringing back to me. That exchange is not a nice bonus. It is the whole thing. My gestures, my sounds, my movement, my presence, all of it only fully lands when someone is right there receiving it and sending something back.
None of that travels through a screen the way it needs to.
There were also the technical realities. Audio out of sync with the music. Video lagging behind the beat. Sound quality that stripped all the energy out of the tracks. In a fitness format built entirely around rhythm and movement, those are not minor inconveniences. They undermine the entire experience.
I want to be clear that online classes absolutely serve a purpose. For people who cannot leave the house, who live in areas without access to good instruction, or who need flexibility that a live class cannot provide, streaming is genuinely valuable. I am not dismissing it for them.
But for someone like me, who draws everything from that live connection, online teaching is not a format I can ever fully commit to. If anything, a streaming format might suit me better in a different context, something where instant feedback is not the core of what I am delivering. Zumba is not that. Zumba is alive, in the room, in the moment.
That is where I belong.
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