Instructor with a double life leads U-Jam class.

Maybe you’ve found yourself sweating on a dance floor and thinking, if only you didn’t drink that cocktail, if only you were wearing sensible footwear, if only you weren’t concerned about busting the seams of your pants – then you could count these moves as real exercise.

U-Jam is the manifestation of that daydream, a merge between fitness and hip-hop dance party, a chance to twerk in the name of health.

Maegan Ruiz-Ignacio teaches U-Jam, hot hula fitness and a class called fierce funk, and she views U-Jam as the fitness class that successfully extracts the best of the nightlife scene. “It’s like dancing in a club without the cover charge, without the heels and without people trying to bump on you,” she says.

On a recent night at the Monterey Sports Center, she directs about a dozen women and one man to step, jump, fist pump and twerk to a soundtrack ranging from Korean pop by G-Dragon and Taeyang to Bollywood tunes to hip-hop artists Macklemore & Lewis.

Ruiz-Ignacio encourages participants to squat deeply into a position that will recur constantly. “Everything your momma told you about standing straight up, [forget it]. I need you to lean over,” she says.

By day, she’s Maegan Ruiz-Ignacio, responsible for handling confidential records at the Monterey County Administrative Office, and for years prior, duties as an executive assistant to the CEO of Natividad Medical Center. She wears heels and pearl earrings to work. By night she’s just “Mae,” a fitness instructor who’s not afraid to get down while wearing a trucker hat and baggy T-shirt.

She speaks different languages in each job. When a former colleague and physician attended her classes he got caught up in the gap. “He went on with these big $20 words, and I went, ‘Yeah bro,’ and fist-bumped him,” Ruiz-Ignacio says.

“It’s like theater,” she says of her two worlds. “I have to set aside my problems and go activate. You categorize and compartmentalize; students have to get a great workout and feel great.”

To “activate,” she employs a simple music-based ritual, and listens to her playlist the night before and on her way to the gym. (She teaches U-Jam three nights a week, at the Monterey Sports Center, Gold’s Gym in Salinas and Chamisal Tennis and Fitness Club in Corral de Tierra.)

Ultimately, she’s getting her students to activate too. Other fitness instructors might encourage participants to feel the pain or step it up, and Ruiz-Ignacio encourages people to have a good time. After all, it is a dance party – in the gym.

U-Jam is relatively new, joining genres like jazzercise and the more Latin-themed zumba in the field of dance fitness. It started in 2009 in San Jose, and is now taught in gyms worldwide. It’s officially called an “athletic urban dance fitness workout,” designed to elevate a participant’s heart rate.

I’m used to running or swimming for exercise – linear activities requiring little coordination – and when I attend a U-Jam class it feels less like a test of endurance than a high-energy fete, but Ruiz-Ignacio points out there’s plenty of strength training thanks to near-constant squats.

When we debrief a few days later about the moves, I explain that I couldn’t keep up with some of the simple side-to-side steps, but she says not to worry.

All the squatting, she adds, constituted a popular dance move in and of itself, without me even realizing it.

As Ruiz-Ignacio felt compelled to point out: “You were twerking!”

MAEGAN RUIZ-IGNACIO teaches U-Jam 6:30pm Mondays at the Monterey Sports Center, 6pm Tuesdays at Chamisal Tennis Club and 6pm Thursdays at Gold’s Gym in Salinas. For a full list of U-Jam classes by multiple instructors in the region, visit www.ujamfitness.com