The benefits of dance fitness flow into all areas of our life from boosting confidence to enhanced cognitive skills. When you choose dance fitness as your workout, you are guaranteed to receive additional mental health benefits that other workouts may not deliver.
Working those brain cells
Brain health has become more and more relevant in recent years. Several studies have shown that dance can significantly improve your brain health by challenging your brain on many different levels.
Copying the movements that we see quickly, staying in sync with the rhythm of the music and remembering movement patterns challenges our brain to form new neural passageways.
The deeper brain challenge in dance fitness is the repeated practice of the same choreography over the course of several classes, enabling us to commit the routine to memory without much conscious effort.
Simultaneously adding more complexity to the movements and making slight changes from one class to the next, will still keep the approach fresh for your brain and create new connections between brain cells.
Rocking it with more ease and grace
Coordination and balance go hand in hand. When your coordination skills increase, your ability to balance does too. Through dance fitness, you can significantly improve your ability to use all parts of the body in unison in a smooth and graceful way.
Repetition and practice are the magic words when it comes to improving coordination and balance. Whilst following along in a dance fitness class, you hone all your cognitive skills as you are copying your Instructor’s moves.
And with every class you take, the ability to quickly translate the moves improves, as well as your sense of balance.
Balance and coordination are physical abilities, but when it comes to mental health, they play a huge part as well. Feeling more stable, grounded and in control of your movements has a direct influence on how good you feel in your own skin.
Dancing is moving meditation
Meditation in its traditional form of sitting down and being still, doesn't necessarily work for everyone. But you can achieve the positive after-effect of meditation through dancing as well. The first step in meditation is to stop your mind from wandering and bringing your focus on the present moment.
When attending a dance fitness class you soon realise that there is not much brain capacity left to think of anything else but the moves and the music. Creating a one-point focus, you allow your mind to be engaged with one thing only, letting all your other stresses fall away.
It takes some practice to be able to let go and get lost in the music and the movements. On a mental health level, letting go and bringing your focus into the present moment can be an amazing stress buster.
Holding onto perfection too much in life can have a detrimental effect on your mental health. The practice of letting go of perfection in a dance fitness class can have a positive influence on your daily life, as well as your mental health, by reminding you that moving forward is sometimes more important than perfection.
Posture, confidence and expression power
Posture, confidence and expression are closely related to each other when it comes to dancing, as well as in life. With good posture comes confidence and an enhanced ability to express and communicate your thoughts and feelings well to others.
Think of the dance floor as a testing ground to express yourself. The music has a stimulating effect to inspire and motivate us. Maintaining our upright posture whilst our legs are in a twist...this can be very useful, not only on the dance floor, but also dealing with things in everyday life.
Side effects may include madly falling in love with your workout
We can fall in love with dancing over and over again. There is so much variety out there. Dance fitness always has something new to offer to keep us coming back for more.
When you love your workout, you will happily come back for more, again and again and in turn stay happy, healthy and brain fit.
If you caught the dancing bug come join me at The Rec Club for a fun dance fitness class. Visit CordiPower.com to book your spot or email me to arrange a free trial class.
Can’t wait to dance with you soon!
Cordula Neckermann is a yoga and dance teacher. Visit www.cordipower.com to book or email cordula@freckle-fish.com
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