Aerobic Dance

Aerobic Dance, as I understand, is nothing new to Thailand. It's everywhere. People of all ages and sizes embrace it, run with it, and make it their own.

For further explanation see: Aerobic in Bangkok



I have to admit, I enjoy a good aerobic dance. It's fun and sometimes challenging, good exercise, stress-relieving, and altogether refreshing. Throughout Thailand, there are plenty of opportunities to partake in aerobics whether it be at a rural health station or a Tesco Lotus parking lot, or a park or someone's house. Most of the times it's completely free and open for anyone.

Side note: 'aerobic' in Thai sounds like 'Arabic' thus, I used to think when people said aerobic dance they were referring to Arabic dance. I was actually excited to learn how to Arabic dance from the Thai people (although, I wondered how they came to practice Arabic dance throughout Thailand) You can imagine my confusion and humor when I found out what the aerobic dance actually looked like.

The To-Be-Number-One Program is an aerobic dance program for teenagers. The concept of the competition is to promote teenagers to form groups and practice aerobics to compete in To-Be-Number-One competitions. The program promotes health, happy living, and deters from drug/alcohol abuse as well as at-risk behavior. Teenagers who form groups learn how to work together as a team to develop a successful routine. It's unclear to me where it originates from but I stumbled upon some information about a program started by the Nestle Corporation (see also: Nestle Program) that may have something to do with it. My counterpart tells me the budget for it comes from the Central Government and Royal Thai Projects.

A couple years ago, my local health clinic received funding from the To-Be-Number-One program and they had leaders come from the province to hold aerobic trainings. Ever since then, it has become so much more than just a program for teenagers. In my local sub-district, people of all ages form aerobic groups and compete twice a year. Each of the 4 schools has at least 1 team and each of the villages has teams for nursery kids, teenagers, adults, and elderly. When they compete, it's serious. Some groups practice year round while other's get serious only weeks before competition. In the midst of it all, I got sucked in (albeit, no one really made me) to the aerobic dance fever and joined the girls and women of 'moo 11' (village 11 in which I live). I joined with a co-worker of mine later on and the two of us were poor excuses for representing our team--I looked so goofy and couldn't help but thinking I was there for show. I must say my colleague and I did an okay job especially having learned the routine in 2 weeks. Not to mention, having just expended a ton of energy (mostly on maintaining my sanity) from the SAO trip.

Somehow we ended up with 3rd Place. The only way I can make sense of this is that having a tall, white, goofy looking farang with black shoes (when everyone else is wearing white) and stockings falling down somehow helps win extra points.