Do you dance? If you had the pleasure of dancing in the great ballrooms and halls or you enjoyed the thrill of the swing years you know that dancing is life giving exercise. Did you know that it's also brain fitness? The spontaneity, focus, and attention needed to dance is wonderful mental exercise. If that isn't enough to interest you in dancing more often research also suggests that dance improves healing and helps to delay aging.
"Dancing improves brain function on a variety of levels," writes Christopher Bergland, in Psychology Today. "When we dance we're usually negotiating multiple factors: rapid body movement, changing physical space, the cues of a partner, rhythm/body coordination, and touch." Challenging dances, such as West Coast Swing, require spontaneous decision making and cultivate our ability to quickly interpret subtle cues that set up each movement. Scottish Country Dancing can be exhilarating involving rapid hopping, skipping, and springing steps that require good balance. Waltzing teaches movement fluidity and balance. Hip Hop can be physically demanding but it also teaches our brains to cue the body to move in radically new ways. New, interesting, demanding, and fun---that's a recipe for healthy brain candy and a fit life!
Dancing is one of the best things Joan Wright, of Netsational Seniors, never imagined she'd do after age 60, as she tells the Today show. Netsational Seniors is a 60+ Brooklyn Nets half time performance group featured in the movie Gotta Dance. Science agrees---we gotta' dance more. From Scottish country dancing to Belly dancing-- studies are showing a wide range of benefits to our health. Some forms of dance give us reason to believe they may even delay aging. Why? Because dance has the power to: ease depression, lower stress, improve cardiovascular function, build muscular endurance, combat dizziness, increase joint mobility, improve balance, and exercise our mind. A well respected study from the New England Journal of Medicine found that dancing led reading, bicycling, swimming, and solving crossword puzzles in apparently lowering incidence of dementia and maintaining physical and cognitive ability. Dancing is one of the best investments we can make in our years ahead!
Most dances stand above other forms of exercise as a foundation for healthy aging and wellness because they unify three main foundations of youthful living: social engagement, physical exercise, and mental stimulation. Dances that integrate all three components by including partnering or group dancing and which regularly challenge our bodies and minds give greatest benefit. Scottish dance, so far, is the only form studied and shown to combat degenerative aging. This document from the Royal Scottish Dance Society, cites scientifically grounded reasons why Scottish Dance seems to promote longevity and health in later years.
"If you can walk you can dance," a local dance teacher explained to me. Gentle dancing is safe for most everyone even people who struggle with Arthritis, Dementia, Cancer, early stage Parkinson's, or just a lack of confidence. Not only is dancing accessible with these conditions but dancing helps. A recent study found that dance triggered a range of improvements in Parkinson's patients. Based on that research a Syracuse professor and Brooklyn teacher for the Mark Morris Dance Group have established 2 day workshops to demonstrate how dance therapy can and is easing the symptoms of Parkinson's. Mary Jo DiLonardo shows how dance is managing arthritis symptoms at Arthritis Today. She quotes Stefany Haaz, with the Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center as saying, “There are a lot of benefits to staying active in an engaging mind/body way, especially for people with arthritis." The powerful benefits of dance spawned the profession of DMT, Dance Movement Therapy, which is integrated in some nursing homes, psychiatric centers, and clinical rehabilitation settings. "Dance therapy provides aerobic exercise with its cardiovascular and metabolic benefits and can help with range of motion/flexibility and balance," Ted Gansler, director of medical content for the American Cancer Society notes in the ibtimes. If you can walk you can dance. If you can dance you can significantly improve your physical and mental health.
The spontaneity, focus, and attention needed to dance exercises our minds and promotes healing. Dance offers so many integrative benefits that it's hard to resist its temptation and important to consider bringing it into your wellness plan or healing program. Most remarkably, dance quite possibly helps us prevent dementia and delay the degenerative effects of aging. So, Allemande left or Pas-de-basque but find your way to a dance floor for better health and a longer happier life.
