Salvador Shake: Kimberly Miguel Mullen's Brazilian Dance DVD

LOOKING FOR A LITTLE CULTURE with your cardio? Take a lesson from Kimberly Miguel Mullen, whose new DVD "Dance and Be Fit: Brazilian Body" ($15, Acacialifestyle.com), takes viewers through segments devoted to samba reggae, maculele and capoeira. If those don't sound like same old moves, it's because Mullen is a dance ethnologist, who specializes in the northeastern part of Brazil, a region where African slaves, Portuguese immigrants and indigenous people interacted to create new movement traditions.

Twelve minutes isn't nearly enough time to master any of these three dances, but Mullen tries to give viewers at home a quick taste. "It's a warrior stick fighting dance," she says of the maculelĂȘ. "When we clap, that's when the sticks would be coming together." Samba reggae (which reigns during Carnival) has more recent roots. "It was influenced by Bob Marley," Mullen explains. And capoeira is a martial art disguised as a dance, developed during the time of the slave trade. Her idea was to take these high energy dances and "translate them to the fitness realm." The hopping mimics a standing crunch and big arm movements tire the upper body, but if viewers get entranced by dance, Mullen thinks they won't mind. And even if they're not being entirely accurate, with every step, they're getting closer to the South American nation's renowned physique. "They developed the thong. Who doesn't want a Brazilian body?" she says. Probably more people than she'll ever be able to shake a stick at.