Dance Benefits

Dance Your Way to Prime Fitness

Dancing is an excellent aerobic activity, which helps in toning the entire body. Whether you dance at a competitive level or just for fun, it is a regime, which will help you in attaining a healthy and fit body. Dancing works like a stress and tension reducer. For people on a hectic schedule it can become a passion that helps you improve your attitude and increase your confidence in both social and business situations.

That's what makes dance the ideal exercise! After all, dancing is a mild aerobic workout, minus the boring part! When you take dance lessons, you make exercise a fun and enjoyable social event.

Over the past few years, dance as a form of exercise has really caught on especially with the popularization of Jazz dance, Salsa, the Bharatnatyam or Kathak.
In fact some gyms are also giving people options of learning various dances like the Jazz dance, Freestyle dance or even Dance Aerobics. The latest dance craze all over India is Salsa. What makes Salsa so appealing, apart from its sensuous movements, is that it's a solo dance (Shines) hence you don't need a partner to learn the shines. That apart its extravagant arm movements make it a very good exercise.

Benefits of dance:
Energetic dance forms raise your heart rate to somewhere between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of your maximum, which has definite benefits for your aerobic fitness. Also studies have found out that some dance forms like Salsa or Jazz is as aerobically challenging as jogging and that dancing the tango can work your heart harder than a game of squash over the same period of time. Doing dance over a prolonged period helps to develop muscle tone, especially in the abdominal area and the legs. It helps in boosting personal confidence. Olympic athletes often include dance in their training to sharpen their control, agility, speed and balance. Dance is considered to be one of the top five physical activities. It helps you in attaining good posture and body alignment. It makes your body more flexible in agile. It helps in increasing your stamina. As an aerobic exercise, dance benefits your cardiovascular system as you swing and sway from hips to shoulders. Some doctors recommend thirty minutes of dance, three times per week. The chances of injuries are minimum. However, the best part is that since you are having so much fun you hardly notice the sweat.

1. Forever Young. Dancing is tremendously beneficial in keeping us young. It retards the aging process immensely. It benefits our heart, cardiovascular system and increases our lung capacity. Fact: The muscle exertion and breathing rates of dancers performing in one dance Show is equivalent to those of cyclists, swimmers and an Olympic-level 800-meter runner.

2. Strong Bones. Lubricated Joints. Dance aids in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis, which is a major concern for woman, especially during post-menopause because of the significant drop in estrogen that occurs at this stage. A decrease in our estrogen levels is what stops calcium from being absorbed into our bones. Dance also keeps joints lubricated, which helps prevent arthritis.

3. Calorie Blaster. Dance exercises our bodies to allow for increased circulation. It helps us burn those calories away, while improving our stamina. It is estimated that dance burns anywhere from 5 to 10 calories per minute depending on speed and intensity. For example, swing and Freestyle burn more calories than a slow waltz. Check out approximately how many calories you burn while dancing to your own tune:

Style of Dance Approximate Calories Burned Per Hour

4. Better Blood. New research has discovered that it is necessary to measure both good and bad cholesterol levels when determining our health. Dancing aids in lipid control, which raises our HDL (good cholesterol), and lowers our LDL (bad cholesterol). Dancing is also great for diabetics because it aids in blood sugar control.

5. Mental Mastery. Dance improves our memory by making us recall steps, routines and dance patterns making it a great mental exercise for our brains. The big benefit is that increasing mental exercise keeps your mind young, quick, alert and open.

6. It's All About Balance. Balancing yourself in one position may be easy, but balancing in the numerous types of positions involved in dancing is much more difficult. Dancers have mastered the ability to balance themselves in a number of positions. This strengthens our stabilizer muscles, while protecting our core and keeping us less prone to injury in our daily lives.

Dancing also aids in co-ordination and helps strengthen our reflexes. It is a great way to keep our Central Nervous System and Peripheral Nervous System in tip-top shape by improving the connection of our bodies to our mind.

7. Socially Satisfying. Dancing is recreational and entertaining. It creates a social life for us, while affording us the opportunity to make new friends. Friends helps us grow, make us laugh and support us as we learn.

8. Culturally Diverse. Dancing has no cultural barriers. People from all parts of the world, with different ideologies, meet on the dance floor. Cultural interaction improves our health by expanding our mind and sharing our spirit!

9. Groomed to perfection. Dancing is not only fun and romantic, but it helps promote good grooming because everybody wants to look his or her best while they dance. Good grooming keeps us healthy by keeping us high on hygiene.

10. A Happy Self. Dance elevates our mood by raising our endorphin levels. This is what allows us to heal stress and depression - two of our immune system's biggest enemies! It helps us establish our self-confidence and self-discipline. It improves the harmony between our mind and body, giving us a sense of well-being.

Build a strong self-image and be proud of the wonderful dancer that you are. Maintain a healthy image of yourself because any idea that you flush into your mind will become a part of you. You are in control of your mind, body and emotions, so never let failure bring you down or distract you from reaching your goals. Eliminate any negative thoughts that are taking up too much of your mental space. Feed your mind with positive, uplifting, and inspiring thoughts about yourself on a daily basis. Be the dancer that you are proud of being! Stay true to yourself and your potential. Enjoy your dancing for all that it is worth!