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From burning calories to socializing with friends, dancing offers these health benefits:
Calories - Dancing can burn as many calories as walking, swimming or riding a bicycle. During a half hour of sustained dancing you can burn between 200 and 400 calories. One factor that determines how many calories you'll expend is distance. In one study, researchers attached pedometers to square dancers and found each person covered nearly five miles in a single evening.
Cardiovascular conditioning - Regular exercise can lead to a slower heart rate, lower blood pressure and an improved cholesterol profile (see Medical Essay, June 1991). Experts typically recommend 30 to 40 minutes of continuous activity three to four times a week. Dancing may not provide all the conditioning you need, but it can help. The degree of cardiovascular conditioning depends on how vigorously you dance, how long you dance continuously and how regularly you do it.
Strong bones - The side-to-side movements of many dances strengthen your weight bearing bones (tibia, fibula and femur) and can help prevent or slow loss of bone mass (osteoporosis).
Rehabilitation - If you're recovering from heart or knee surgery, movement may be part of your rehabilitation. Dancing is a positive alternative to aerobic dance or jogging.
Sociability - Dancing contains a social component that solitary fitness endeavors don't. It gives you an opportunity to develop strong social ties which contribute to self-esteem and a positive outlook (see Mayo Clinic Health Letter, February 1992)
Tomorrow night when you consider settling down for a little television, turn on the music instead. After a few spins around the living room, you'll have so much fun you may forget you're exercising.
Health benefits and risks to dancing depend on how much oomph you put into it. Different types of dance require varying amount of energy.
If you have heart disease or other medical concerns, check with your doctor before taking up dance as a new activity. Then follow these steps:
Warm up - Before starting to dance, spend a few minutes stretching. Practice a few dance steps to prepare your muscles for activity.
Ease into the pace - Begin with slower, less demanding rhythms and build up to faster tempos. Easing into activities lessens the chance of pulling or straining a muscle.
Know your limits - Take breaks from dancing if you feel undue fatigue or shortness of breath. If necessary, sit out the next number.
What The Health Experts Are Saying...
"At least 30 minutes of regular, moderate-intensity physical activity on most days reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and breast cancer."
- World Health Organization, 2004
"What can improve your mood, help relieve insomnia, and lower your risk for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and colon cancer? The answer is regular exercise. It may seem too good to be true, but it's not. Hundreds of studies conducted over the past 50 years demonstrate that exercise helps you feel better and live longer."
- Report: "Exercise: A Program You Can Live With",
Harvard Medical School
"More than 60% of adults don't get the recommended amount of regular physical activity. Worse yet, 25% of all adults are not active at all! Nearly 50% of young people aged 12-21 are not vigorously active on a regular basis. Only 19 % of all high school students are physically active for 20 minutes or more in physical education classes every day during the school week."
- MyFit.ca
"Study after study has pointed to the cancer-beating power of exercise. Now research from Norway has found that even a tiny dose of exercise has big benefits. A study of 29,110 men published last year in the International Journal of Cancer shows that men who exercised just once a week had a 30 percent lower risk of metastatic prostate cancer than did men who didn't work out at all. Increasing the frequency, duration, and intensity of the exercise correlated with a further, gradual reduction in risk."
- Men's Health.com, October 2007
So many reasons why " You should be dancin'..Yeah!!!"
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