Why Britain is going crazy for Zumba Six months ago, the fifth annual Zumba conference took place in Orlando, Florida. Up to 8,000 Zumba instructors paid $399 (£250) each to attend five days of dancing and rousing speeches. When Alberto "Beto" Perez tried to lead a class, the people swarmed around, reaching out to touch him and offer gifts, as if he were a modern-day messiah. They queued to tell reporters: "Zumba is not just a dance, it is a life choice." I stumbled on a class in London a couple of years ago, and its quasi-spiritual elements were striking - we sat in a circle breathing together - as was the strong sense of community among the students. "I think the people who take Zumba classes understand friendship better," Perlman tells me. When Hurricane Sandy hit America, he says, "the instructors who had lost their homes stayed in other instructors" houses. They would take in their family, that's how strong the Zumba connection is. So what is Zumba's secret? "It's inclusive and it's fun," says 25-year-old Laura, a trainee solicitor. It doesn't matter if you can dance or not. Nobody is judging you. I've been to a lot of dance classes over the years and it's true that Zumba is uniquely unintimidating. Street dancing is brilliant but the moves are hard. The Latin dances, in which you're aiming for heat and sensuality, can be excruciatingly embarrassing to mess up. Anyone, regardless of age, fitness or natural rhythm, can handle a Zumba class. "Even my mum does it," says Laura. She loves it. Perlman has his own mother to thank for his present success. After graduating from Boston's Babson College in 1998 he got caught up in the dotcom bubble. It was crazy. I started an incubator for internet companies for Latin America. And in 2001 it crashed. Perlman found himself back home in Miami hunting for a new career. All my mum talked about was her dance fitness class with Beto. She told me: 'Go and meet him. Maybe you can start a gym together."" Many 23-year-olds would have replied: "Yeah, right, Mum," but Perlman gave it a shot. Which just goes to show you should listen to your mother. Beto already had a big fan base. One day, in his native Colombia, he had forgotten the music for his aerobics class so he played his own rumba and samba tapes instead. He threw a few dance moves into the mix and found that his clients loved it. He moved to Miami and they loved it there, too. Perlman saw potential in this high-energy style, which not only burned up to 1,000 calories per hour but, miraculously, people seemed to really enjoy. The third Alberto signed up - Alberto Aghion, a childhood friend of Perlman's - and business grew steadily. But it was the recession that made them. We were bracing for tough times [in 2008]. It was the opposite. People who were out of a job wanted to become instructors. People reducing their expenses signed up for Zumba, a cheap, stress-releasing hour of fun in an anxious week. The business has grown 800 per cent since 2008 and is now estimated to be worth £318 million. Zumba Fitness actually makes little money from the classes. The profit comes instead from the video games, DVDs and clothing - and the instructors. They pay around £190 for training and £20 a month to Zumba Fitness thereafter. In exchange, they get music, choreography - from Zumbatomic for children to Aqua Zumba, "the pool party" - and access to what Perlman calls "an internal Facebook where instructors mentor each other." Most Zumba practitioners are female, more markedly in Britain (98 per cent) than anywhere else. In Latin America, where men grow up dancing, it is more like 75 per cent. Perlman hopes to redress the balance, possibly by creating a toning-focused variation for men. But he has more ambitious projects, which include a Zumba record label. He was recently approached by the hip-hop artist Pitbull. He said to us, 'You have 14 million people taking classes every week. You guys are like a radio station."" Pitbull and Wyclef Jean, among other artists, have since debuted singles via the Zumba network, prompting the music industry magazine, Billboard, to call Zumba "the next major music platform." Maybe the Zumba fanatics are right: it isn't just a dance.