The Rhythm of Joy: Exploring The Benefits of Dancing for The Body

Dancing is more than just doing turns, leaps, and splits. It has been around for centurie and is practiced over all seven continents. There is more than one style of dance, for example, ballet, hip-hop, lyrical, contemporary, tap, and etc. These are all examples of different dance styles. Since dance has been around for such a long time, there are professionals in each field or style of dance. Essentially dance benefits the body by maintaining weight, increasing flexibility, improving skills such as agility, and learning to relieve stress and express emotion.

Overview of the Benefits of Dancing

Dance is one of the several ways to keep your body active and warm. By staying active, this boosts up the heart rate of one and is a good way to keep up with cardio. Not only does cardio have to do with keeping in shape, but it burns tons of calories a day. “​Dancing away the pounds may seem hard to believe, but high intensity dance classes are actually an awesome way to burn calories and tone your muscles.” Furthermore, dancing will definitely keep someone in shape and also add muscles to themselves. Dance is a very natural way to keep in shape and traditionally will help to grow and strengthen bones and muscles.

Flexibility is definitely something that is nice to have. There are several ways to help improve and increase flexibility, mainly through stretching and focusing on the muscles that are being stretched. “​Stretching before and after dancing is very important to getting the most out of your movements and avoiding injury. As you continue dancing you will be stretching more consistently  and will notice how each stretch will become easier to complete. As the stretches become easier, you will be able to go farther into each stretch, creating longer lines as you permanently lengthen your muscles and become more and more flexible.” 

Just like any other profession, dance has requirements that have to be met and skills that have to be mastered. Depending on the amount of experience a dancer has or the level a dancer is at, it may come easily or may be a bit more of a challenge. Skills such as: agility, memory, emotional development, social interaction, etc. These are all examples of basic skills that are used in the dance world. “​Practice makes perfect. Sometimes it may be hard to master the technique of a routine. However, with persistence and patience, children can learn to overcome a challenge with focus and hard work. With self-discipline, dance teaches you to control the energy in your body through technique training.”

Relieving stress and expressing emotions through dance is definitely something that is overlooked in the dance world. Dance can be a stress reliever by just letting an individual dance and it is relieving of worries or any other struggles affecting the dancer at the time. Expressing emotion is also a type of pain reliever. However, it is often overlooked how much expressing emotion through dance can extract an even deeper meaning of the routine. Therefore, if there is a lot of anger or sadness built up, dance is a resolution to that problem. “​Dance is an outlet for emotional expression, stress reduction and creativity that benefits youth during stressful situations by channeling their energy positively and helping them bond with peers.”

Conclusion

Overall, dance is an absolute factor to keep one in good health. Not only is it something fun to do, but in the end it brings several benefits that come along with it. To sum it up, dance benefits the body by maintaining weight and exercise, increasing flexibility, improving dance skills, and learning to relieve stress and express emotion. Moreover, the four reasons listed are just a few of the many others reasons as to how dance is beneficial to the body. Conclusively, dance is something that should be encouraged because it brings many benefits and positiveoutcomes.

Works Cited

• Healey, Lauren. “Dancing Boosts Health, Relieves Stress.” ​The Standard​, 15 Feb. 2011, www.the-standard.org/life/dancing-boosts-health-relieves-stress/article_63b27627-c2cc-59cd-832c-14c8a2319487.html​.
• “Dance Improves Both Physical Fitness and Social Skills.” ​TheSpec.com​, 19 Sept. 2015, www.thespec.com/shopping-story/5833911-dance-improves-both-physical-fitness-and-social-skills/​.
• “9 Benefits You Can Experience Once You Start Dancing.” ​Fred Astaire​, 15 May 2019, www.fredastaire.com/blog/9-benefits-of-dancing/​.
• “Can Dancing Help Me Lose Weight?” ​Banana Skirt​, 1 Aug. 2018