The Denver Athletic Club has been offering their brand of aerobic kickboxing since 1996. The University of Colorado at Boulder Student Recreation Center offers a class called Cardio Kickbox Express. And at the Sporting Club of Cherry Creek, Health and Fitness Director Erin Coyne just added an aerobic kickboxing class to the club's offerings because of high demand. So each aerobic kickboxing class is a little different. None of these classes requires special equipment or the traditional martial arts uniforms, called Gis.
People come wearing athletic clothes, most programs ask that students wrap their hands.
Like regular aerobics programs, aerobic kickboxing is performed to music, and each class includes stretching, a warmup, lots of punching and kicking, toning exercises like situps and leg lifts, and a cooldown. While Joe Quatrochi, an associate professor of Human Performance, Sport and Leisure Studies at Metropolitan State College of Denver, sees aerobic kickboxing as a way to fight exercise boredom, he warns of the possibility for low-back injury because of the nature of some of the moves. I wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't in shape at all,'' he says. This is not martial arts,'' explains Mile High Karate's Don Southerton, a martial-arts practitioner since 1971. This is something else.