Dance is extremely beneficial for many aspects of your life and research supports this! Ballet, Hip Hop, Acro etc. are all very different styles and it has been proven multiple times that each of these styles and more have their own individual advantages.

Dance has always been a part of human life and no matter the style, it is extremely beneficial for us.

Dance is a weight-bearing form of exercise which strengthens muscles and promotes healthy bones. As it uses the full range of muscles and a great deal of cognitive functioning, it is important in coordination and concentration.

Ballet, Hip Hop, Acro etc. are all very different styles, and although dance as a whole has been proven to have many advantages, every dance style also has their own individual advantages.

Some general benefits of dance include:

Better Brain Health - Taking the time to remember steps and the changing movements of a dance is a great way to challenge your brain, no matter your age. You may have never considered it but dance is actually a great tool in improving your memory and brain functionality.
Improved Flexibility - This one may seem more obvious, but dance is one of the main sports that increases your flexibility and reduces stiffness in your muscles. Dance class also ensures we learn the correct techniques when it comes to stretching so we can prevent injury.
Increased Energy - It is said that a weekly dance class can improve one's physical performance and increase energy levels. It is also such a great source of exercise and can perfectly break up your day from all the crazy tasks and events you have.
Better Coordination Strength & Balance - Dancing requires lots of contrasting movements (for example, slow and controlled to fast and snappy, or full body to isolated body parts) and good posture, which can help you gain better control of your body. Styles such as ballet and jazz can significantly improve our balance and calf strength (especially pointe).
Improved Social & Emotional Health - A dance class is a great way to make new friends and branch out socially! Having positive relationships is a major contributing factor to better mental health – it can increase feelings of happiness and reduce stress. Talking about minimising stress, there are hormones in our body called endorphins that are released during exercise. These hormones reduce stress and improve our emotional well-being.

HIP HOP

Hip Hop is a range of street dance styles primarily performed to hip hop music or that have evolved as part of hip hop culture. It involves being in tune with the music and its beats. Hip Hop is all about upbeat movements and this is known to be less technical to ballet but still requires alot of skill!

Hip hop is fantastic in improving Cardiovascular Health. It is a great aerobic exercise that increases your heart rate, helps you release endorphins, and eliminates waste from your system. Although all dance styles are a form of cardio, Hip Hop requires a lot of energy and powerful movements that really gets you moving!

Alongside this, Hip Hop is actually known for boosting self confidence. Hip Hop music and the approach to dancing to such songs involves a level of confidence as it naturally encourages self expression and improvisation. It is a style that is very open to adding individual differences and various combinations to choreography, thus dancers build on their creativity skills. Additionally, through venturing outside their comfort zones, dancers build on their sense of ability to perform and ultimately their self confidence.

BALLET

Improves Posture - Spending hours in classrooms or at work sitting in front of screens at a desk can create bad postural habits with long-term effects. Ballet can address that by helping achieve postural alignment. Ballet classes can help to develop correct everyday posture, improving balance and coordination, and increasing awareness of the way you might be standing, sitting or walking in your daily life.
Builds Muscle And Agility - Believe it or not, part of the Pilates and some endurance training took their inspiration from ballet technique! Pliés, Sautés, Pirouettes etc will all use your own body weight to strengthen your core and lower body. Ballet also requires you to breath with coordination throughout your dance sequence increasing your cardiovascular strength, making Ballet the complete perfect training to improve motor skills! Pliés = squatting, Sautés = jumps, Pirouettes = spins
Can improve your other styles - Ballet, as we mentioned above, is a great way to improve your technique and flexibility, which can be very beneficial for your other dance classes, like jazz and contemporary. If you don’t do ballet already and want to improve your technique or work toward harder skills, we strongly recommend it and we can assure you that you’ll see great improvement in all of your dancing.

TAP

Tap dancing can be described as the movement of the body in a rhythmic, expressive and energetic way. It is characterised by using the shoes, which metal ‘taps’ placed at the soul and heel of the shoe, to strike the floor to make a sound.

Tap can typically be performed to a very wide variety of songs, which is what is so great about it! It is so versatile in the fact that you can make it jazzy and energetic, slower like a cabaret, fast and hip hop like and so much more!

An important aspect in tap is the musicality involved! It forces us to focus on each beat as our feet are basically an additional instrument to the music you are dancing along to. Additionally, tap doesn’t have to accompany music but rather you could tap ‘accapella’ style, where your tap shoes are the only aspect involved in making the sounds.

Like the other dance styles, tap is a great way to improve your health and wellbeing. It can do this by increasing cardiovascular fitness, decreasing blood pressure and it can even tone and strengthen your lower legs, which is so important for all of your dancing.

PILATES

You may not know much about or even ever heard of pilates. Pilates is by definition, is a form of exercise that involves a system of repetitive exercises performed on a yoga mat or other equipment to promote strength, stability, and flexibility. Pilates exercises develop the body through muscular effort that focuses heavily on our core. The technique encourages awareness of the body and supports everyday movements. It is very popular amongst the dance community as it builds your core strength and thus helps us focus on technique when dancing to avoid injury.

Here at AT Dance we offer Dance Pilates every month, and Beginner and Intermediate classes which run weekly! We always encourage as many of our students to participate in these sessions as it is a great way to try something new, and build on your strength and stability, which can then further improve your dancing.

Moral of today's blog is to get dancing! It’s proven to have so many benefits and improve our everyday lives. Dance is a fantastic outlet for our physical, mental and social health so make sure to get involved in classes and encourage those in your lives to experience these benefits for themselves.

As Meghan Trainer sings, “I feel better when I’m dancing”! So..

LET’S GET DANCING

Benefits of dance classes