Exercise is important for our bodies for a myriad of reasons. Exercise can help you reduce weight, improve the strength of the muscles, strengthen your joints, lower blood pressure, and so on. However, it might not be feasible for everyone to hit the gym day in and day out for exercise.
What if there was a fun alternative to staying fit? The simple answer is Yes and it is dance. Dance is an exercise that engages your mind and body at the same time. As you learn different steps of choreography, it helps to keep your mind active. Whereas dancing and its related movements aid your heart, joints, muscles, and blood circulation.
Benefits of Dancing:
Dancing brings a lot of benefits to the table. While it is difficult to list all of them, here are the most prominent ones. The ones which should help you jump on the bandwagon of dancing.
- Flexibility:
When you dance you stretch your bodies in a lot of ways that other forms of exercise do usually do not. This results in much better flexibility. And better flexibility is good for your health, as it reduces the chances of injuries or sprains if you fall. It also reduces the recovery time after workouts. Another benefit of becoming flexible is that it helps your joints and relieves some past injury pains as well.
- Aerobic and Anaerobic Exercise:
Dancing targets both aerobic and anaerobic exercises together during a single session. Other forms of exercise might either focus on aerobic exercise or anaerobic exercise. A combination of both is quite good for your body. When you dance, you hit aerobic exercises with jumps, moving or twirling around. And as you focus on balancing or squatting, you hit anaerobic exercise.
- Burn Calories:
If your primary focus is to burn calories, there can be no better way than dancing. It helps you burn away those additional calories while having fun. A dance session that lasts for about half an hour can help you burn as much as 200 to 400 calories. And it is more enjoyable than running for a similar duration on a treadmill or cross-trainer.
- Strengthen your Body:
It might be a bit unrealistic to expect the same level of muscle development as with weight training, but dancing will not disappoint you. When you combine all the steps, it offers you a full-body exercise that strengthens both your lower body and upper body. Should you opt for cha-cha or merengue, they help you develop both your upper and lower body.
- Heart Health and Better Circulation:
Dancing is a good form of cardiovascular exercise which helps in strengthening your heart. At the same time, it also controls your blood sugar levels along with your cholesterol levels. Dancing helps reduce stress, which again helps in lowering blood pressure. Dancing for as much as 20 minutes 3 times a week can improve your heart’s health considerably.
Dancing is one of the best forms of exercise to help you stay fit. The above are some of the major benefits of dancing.
