Does your exercise regimen increase the risk of injury?

Zumba’d: A fitness craze can lead quickly to the ER by Monica Hesse

The patient was a healthy young woman who came into a Washington area emergency room this year because of severe heel pain, which turned out to be a potentially serious injury known as “compartment syndrome.” The syndrome is typically caused by high-impact accidents, like something involving a motor vehicle. The patient had not been in a car accident. The patient had been in Zumba.

“I have seen some interesting things,” says David Pontell, the podiatrist who ultimately treated the injury. “That was one of them.”

People can get injured doing a lot of things that are dangerous or physically punishing. Or they can get injured doing Zumba. Zumba is not inherently dangerous. Its injuries are not any more prevalent than those from any other physical activity. They are just more embarrassing.

“By the end of the class, I was on fire, and not in a ‘Hoo-hoo — I’m hot and sexy!’ kind of way,” Tonya Green, 32, says ruefully. She discovered, through a Zumba class, that she had something called snapping hip syndrome. “It was a salsa movement. I Zumba’d my hip out, real good.”

Some 12 million people worldwide now do the cardio dance bonanza that is Zumba. You know who they are, because they are everywhere. Also, because they talk about it all the time. Also because they are all infused with a golden glow, a healthy bounce, a Zumba smug. Zmug. Zumba has become like yoga or “Game of Thrones” — a hobby that is deeply enlightening and life-changing to the people who practice it. To everyone else, it’s just weird. In 20 years, nobody is going to be talking about tennis elbow. Everyone is going to be talking about reggaeton ankle. 

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