At 66 years of age, doing the side splits still comes effortlessly to Christina! — CHRISTINA YAP
Renowned English ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn once said that: “Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art.”
This quote would aptly describe Christina Yap.
Many recognise the bubbly lady as the local franchisee of Jazzercise – a workout that combines jazz dance elements with exercise.
The Ipoh-born 66-year-old always had a penchant for dance, but wasn’t allowed to take formal lessons because her traditional Asians parents didn’t think she could earn a living from it.
“Back then, the fee was only RM12 a month for ballet classes, so I’d lie to my mother that I was going cycling or swimming and take the class.
“I was quite good and progressed fast until the teacher wanted to enrol me in exams, but I had no money so I had to tell mum the truth.
“Mum said she knew it all along and was waiting to see how long I would go on with my secret!
“When she realised I was really passionate about dance, she started paying for my classes,” Christina recalls, adding that one of her ballet classmates was actress Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh.
After schooling, she furthered her dance training at the now-closed Bush Davies School of Theatre Arts in the United Kingdom.
Right after graduating, she returned to Ipoh and started teaching dance before getting married to her sweetheart, Raymond Yap.
In the mid-80s, the couple relocated to Japan where Raymond, who worked in the oil and gas industry, was posted.
It was 1984 and Christina was struggling to lose her post-pregnancy weight after delivering her first child.
In the area where they lived in Yokohama, there was nary a dance or aerobic class, so Christina scouted around and stumbled upon Jazzercise at the Yokohama Country Athletic Club.
She had no clue what it was, but decided to give it a try.
Simplifying the dance
Prior to 2008, Christina (front) just taught her own Jazzercise classes, as can be seen in this 2003 filepic, as the brand was not interested in expanding to Malaysia.
Jazzercise was founded by American Judi Sheppard Missett in 1969.
As a dancer, her goal as a 25-year-old instructor was to bring her love of movement to others, especially women who felt as if exercising was a chore.
She noticed her dance classes, which initially focused on traditional jazz techniques, weren’t getting a lot of return students.
“They all said: ‘We love the class. It’s great, but it’s really difficult.
“‘We don’t want to be professional dancers. We just want to look like they do,’” Missett was quoted as saying in an interview with Business Insider last month (Nov 2024).
“I thought, maybe I just need to make this simpler and more fun.”
She changed her approach to teaching, turning students away from the mirror (a traditional dance-teaching technique to provide instant visual feedback) and instructing them to just follow her lead instead.
She simplified the choreography, mixing jazz dance movements with common exercise steps, and motivated the students with high-energy music.
Her first class had 15 students; by the third class, the number had quadrupled to 60.
From there, Jazzercise began a community that spread, first to California in the United States, where the company is now headquartered, and then globally.
Now 80, Missett continues to teach classes and do choreography for her company, which has more than 2,000 branches worldwide, over 55,000 students in the US alone, and raked in US$77 million (RM344 million) worth of sales last year.
Today, at 55 years old, Jazzercise is the world’s longest standing dance fitness brand.
Christina recalls: “My first class gave me such a great workout and I fell in love with it immediately.
“After the class, I saw a bunch of girls discussing how to become instructors and I said I was interested to become an instructor too.”
As a dancer, the movements came easily, and within a mere month of taking daily classes, Christina shed all her excess fat and regained her trim pre-pregnancy figure.
She was among the first batch of 10 instructors to be certified in Japan, and when Raymond was briefly posted back home in 1984, Yap introduced the original dance party workout to Malaysia.
Sweat and smile
All three of Yap’s children have taken Jazzercise classes with mummy (back row, second from right), but only her daughter (third from left) is a certified instructor. — CHRISTINA YAP
Like Missett, Christina’s first classes saw only a few students in attendance, but soon, word spread and the size grew, especially among women.
She says: “I approached Jazzercise to have a local franchise, but at that time, they were not interested in growing the business here, so I did my own thing and taught many corporate classes.
“I didn’t need any advertising or a studio, but was able to earn quite a lot.
"It was pretty much me, myself and I.”
Eventually, Jazzercise agreed to open a franchise here because Christina told her boss: “I’m a dinosaur and if you don’t want me to go extinct, you better come here.”
He agreed and she flew to the US to become a certified trainer of trainers.
Christina subsequently officially opened the franchise in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2008, and has since trained 108 instructors.
“I gave up teaching dance as I was raising my two sons.
“Besides, with Jazzercise, there was less pressure – no need to think about preparing students for ballet exams, pleasing parents and staging concerts.
“Here, I can dance and exercise, have fun, get fit and get paid for doing it – it was easy!
“My boys used to follow me to all my dance classes and I’m proud to say they can both move pretty well,” she says, adding that they now prefer going to the gym and climbing with their father.
From organising dance concerts, she turned to organising charity “Jazzerthons”, which she aptly called Sweat2Smiles – no Jazzerciser leaves the hall without a smile.
Over the past four decades, Christina has organised 20 such fitness events and the funds raised keep growing.
The recent one was in October, where she raised RM313,500 for non-governmental organisation Persatuan Dialisis Touch.
After 15 years of following her husband on his overseas postings, the couple settled back in Malaysia in 1997.
They also had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1999.
Christina says: “She’s now my sidekick as I roped her in to become an instructor – she started teaching in 2017.
“Sometimes I take her classes!”
Rebecca, 25, chips in: “She’s my cheerleader in class!”
These days, Christina teaches low-impact Jazzercise at her studio in Shah Alam, Selangor, three times a week.
Since the workout is all-inclusive, she doesn’t do anything else to keep fit.
“If Judi is still fit and teaching at 80, ‘youngsters’ like me cannot quit!” she says, laughing.
Numbness not a barrier
However, when she reached 60, the grandmother of three noticed her body changing.
Both her legs would go numb from the knees downwards, despite her not having any health issues.
Several check-ups later, she was diagnosed as having peripheral neuropathy, a condition where the nerves that are located outside of the brain and spinal cord (i.e. the peripheral nerves) are damaged.
Christina reveals: “It’s genetic as my pelvic bone is deformed, so the nerves in my lumbar spine get trapped.
“By the end of the day, my lower limb is numb and I lose my balance.
“That’s why I only teach morning classes and take cordyceps before class, or else I won’t be able to complete the class.
“I still jump a little bit, but it’s low impact.
“When you stop jumping, I think it does something to the body and you go downhill from there.”
Christina has no plans to slow down and keeps herself busy with multiple charity projects.
She says: “You have to live life with a purpose – people talk about retirement, but you need to retire to something, or else, you may go into depression.
“I will teach as long as I can stand on my two feet.
“If I don’t, I’ll probably drive my husband up the wall!
“No, he doesn’t dance, but I dance around him and make him look good!”
