Hi everyone! I hope you are well?
Happy New Year to you all! We are so happy to be back after Christmas break, seeing all of your lovely faces at our online live classes brings us so much joy! We had an amazing first week back, welcoming lots of new ladies who have tried ‘On Broadway’® Dance Fitness for the first time.
It’s a great feeling to be able to continue to dance with you all during these times of social distancing, and to continue to spread the joy of dance with you all!
Who else feels happy when they dance?? I know that I sure do! There are so many benefits to dancing. It’s not just a brilliant form of exercise for our physical health, it is also hugely beneficial for our mental health too!
5 amazing things that happen to your mind and body when you dance!
1. Improved mental health
If you have danced before, you likely relate when I say that dancing is very much a therapy. It is one of life’s most wonderful forms of escapism. When you are dancing your body is fully in that moment, focused on the music and the steps! It gives you that all important ‘you time’ to be unapologetically free of any negative thoughts.
Dance has been shown, in many scientific studies, to improve a person’s mood and overall wellbeing!
So… what actually happens to your mind when you are dancing?
One of the best things to happen to our mind when we dance is the release of ‘feel good’ endorphins. These work to reduce, or prevent, the effects of anxiety and depression.
One more benefit of dance on our mental wellbeing is that it helps reduce the levels of cortisol (stress hormone) in the body! Yes please!
2. Improved memory
When you exercise, the chemicals in your brain that encourage nerve cells to grow increase. Since dancing requires you to remember various steps in various sequences, your brain power is boosted!
When you dance, your brain is using multiple brain functions at once. You’re focussing on your kinaesthetic awareness, musicality and emotional connections among others. Using all of these at once, as you do when dancing, not only improves your memory, but it can also increase your neural activity significantly enough to highly reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
In fact, a study led by Albert Einstein College of Medicine showed that dancing frequently results in a 76% reduced risk of dementia! How amazing is that?
3. Confidence booster
When you start something new, such as a dance class for the first time, you can feel out of your comfort zone. However, as you continue to dance, you will see how second nature it will start to feel and how your confidence will grow and grow!
We are all born to dance! Have you ever noticed how your foot starts involuntarily tapping when you hear music we like? We all have an inner dancer eager to get out, we just have to be brave and unleash it. And when you do, it is the best feeling ever! Naturally, the more you let go and dance your heart out, the more your confidence will increase in day-to-day life too!
4. Improved Cardiovascular strength
Dancing makes for a great cardio workout! Your heart rate gets challenged when you are moving your body in the way that you do when you are dancing, even more so when arms are involved (as I like to call it… ‘arm-ography’)!
The NHS recommend that you do at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity a week or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity a week. What better way to reach that weekly quota than by dancing your heart out? (no pun intended)
At ‘On Broadway’® Dance Fitness you have unlimited access to online classes each week, meaning you could do TEN one hour classes per week. Phew! That sure would smash the above target!
5. Improved balance and strength
One of the reasons dance is such a great form of physical fitness is because it incorporates movements on all planes of motion and from all directions.
“Movements that we typically do in our daily life, like walking, taking the stairs, and common workouts like treadmills and cycling, occur in the sagittal plane, but dance works your body from all planes, including lateral and rotational, which turns on and conditions all muscles, meaning no muscle is left behind,” – Jonathan Tylicki (professional dancer).
This type of movement not only increases your overall strength, it also improves your ability to balance. This improvement of strength and balance combined is hugely beneficial when it comes to injury prevention!
So, with all of these amazing benefits to dance, how can we possibly resist?
What are you waiting for?! Let’s turn the news off, turn the music up and ‘dance like no one is watching’!
Have a great week!
