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  • Writer's pictureLuAnn Hooper

There Are Many Types Of Dances To Explore

Let’s look at some of the more known types. Tap Dancing is a full-body workout! While the legs do the bulk of the workout, in many steps the arms are lifted above the shoulders, which strengthens and tones those muscles. This combination of arms and legs moving together elevates the heart rate, creating a good cardiovascular workout. An hour of tap dancing is thought to burn anywhere between 200 and 600 calories depending on your pace, the step sequence and the effort used in the hour of practice. Tap Dancing improves balance and Posture, a key factor in dancing is balance. It is imperative to have good balance as you move from one foot to another. Tap dancing also exercises the mind combining the rhythm and memorization of the steps, which keeps your mind focused, therefore improving your mental health, as well as adding grace as you move across the dance floor. Tap dancing boosts cardiovascular performance, tone leg muscles, reduces high blood pressure, and burn fat.

Looking at Benefits of Ballet Dancing, you needn’t look beyond the physiques of professional ballet dancers to realize that this dance is a fantastic physical training, as it engages the entire body from head to toe, working different muscle groups. Ballet will help you get your posture on point as well to correct every day posture, and balance coordination with awareness leathing of the spine and squaring of the hips. Let’s look at the health benefits of jazz dance. This is a classification shared by a broad range of dance styles. Before the 1950’s, a new genre of jazz dance/modern jazz dance emerged, with roots in Caribbean traditional dance.

Every individual style of jazz dance has roots traceable to one of these two distinct origins. Jazz was a big hit in the early 1950” and it is still a well-loved style of dance all over the world. Moves used in jazz dance include “jazz hands, kicks leaps, sideways shuffling, rolled shoulders, and turned knees”. The first benefit of jazz dance is that it provides ab incredible cardo workout, the second, benefit is that it challenges your body physically. All of that cardio exercise is really going to push the limits of how much stamina you have and ultimately your ability to do longer and more intense sequences will improve. Third benefit of jazz dance is that it pushes the boundaries of muscle memory. Your brain will also have to really challenge itself to preform each minute movement the dancing requires for each sequence. This type of dance is a great way to relieve stress and focus and will release good endorphins.

Last for this article, but far from the least of the many types practiced and health beneficial forms of dancing, is Lyrical dance. This form of dance can help you learn better, improve your memory, decrease fatigue, and ease depression. Enthusiasts often describe lyrical dance as a combination of jazz and ballet, as dancers move fluidly and emotivity to a carefully selected piece of music.

Today, lyrical style dance is a well destabilized genre of modern or contemporary dance. The dancer is trying to convey their emotions a song stirs in them into movement. This requires precise yet fluid move movements of the body, but the dancers’ emotions should also clearly show in their facial expressions. (Lets get out there and Move to the Grove!!)

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