draft
I started dancing when I was 4 years old and was training pre-professionally until I graduated high school. I danced on various dance teams in college, and am now about 1.5 years out of college having danced the least in my life. I was able to very viscerally experience the degradation of my physical fitness over these past few years despite being relatively active elsewhere, weight-lifting and running. While there are many factors contributing to this, aging and working a sedentary desk job being only a few, I can’t help but also believe that the fading of dance from my life is also a non-negligible component.
The primary changes I’ve noticed in my body since migrating from dancing to weight-lifting and running have been:
- Loss of mobility
- Loss of coordination
- Loss of “micro-muscle” strength
The first thing I’d like to clarify is that I am by no means attempting to bash on weight-lifting and running. They are great forms of exercise, and necessary components to what I believe to be an ideal fitness stack. What is my ideal fitness stack you may ask? Allow me to illustrate.
Physical fitness can be broken down into a few components:
- Strength
- Mobility
- Cardiovascular Fitness (both endurance and sprints)
- Coordination
There’s good reason why we need all 4 categories of physical fitness to be healthy. Let’s think about this from the injury prevention perspective. You’ve just tripped and you’re moments from spraining your ankle. What could happen now? As you’re falling, your ankle is assuming an extremely extended position as it rolls over. It’s vital that you not only have strength OR mobility, but that you have both - as in, the ability to apply force in extended positions. This is where you’d be able to soften the impact of the fall through muscular support rather than completely collapsing under your body weight. And, of course, having better coordination would have prevented the trip in the first place ;)
Cardiovascular health is a separate thing. Besides likely making you more resilient to exhaustion that would cause such incidents, cardio is important for overall heart health and your ability to execute daily to strenuous activities.
All of these components must exist in order to be physically fit and to promote longevity. The issue it seems, is that the routine I shifted to, and what anecdotally appears to be pretty common amongst my friends, covers an incomplete surface area of the essential fitness components.
Weight-lifting very obviously covers strength and running covers cardiovascular fitness. This is not to say they don’t also contribute to the other categories, but the proportion of emphasis is most certainly skewed. What was clearly missing from my routine was something that contributed to my mobility and coordination. And it was evident in the way I felt. Something about growing up as a dancer makes you acutely aware of your body, so every degradation was glarily obvious to me. My hip and shoulders are so much tighter. It feels like I have to pull against my body to sit or stand up straight. I’m far more clumsy now - my arms and legs feeling 10lbs heavier than they once did.
Obviously, I’m biased in feeling like dance is the best antidote to covering these last few categories of fitness. But if you’re not yet convinced, here are some enumerated reasons why you should dance:
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Most people are woefully unattuned to their physicality. In the way talking or writing allows you to become more familiar with expressing your mind, dancing allows you to become more familiar with expressing your body
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Dance, more than many other forms of movement, requires you to operate at the bounds of your mobility and in non-linear movement patterns
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Social dancing, dance classes, or dance teams are a great way to meet new people
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Dance is an effective source of cardio for both endurance (ex. learning a routine) and sprinting (ex. performing a routine)
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It’s fun!
It’s a form of exercise that requires little to no upfront cost to start, but covers many of the “axes of fitness”. If anything, it might cover cardio enough to make running less important (but of course, no one is ever telling you to exercise less). The only area where I think dance needs intentional supplementation is strength training. While there’s certainly strenghth involved in dance, it’s limited to body weight and applied force/gravity. Weight-lifting is still the best way to push your strength and build real muscle, which is especially important for longevity given that as we age our muscle mass and ability to build it decrease exponentially.
Most important for me, though, is that I love dancing. It’s not just exercise to “meet my fitness quota of the day” - I’m in it for the love of the game. This is subjective, of course, and hugely colored by my history and affinity with dance.
If dance is not your cup of tea, that’s completely okay. What we’re looking for are activities that cover the bases of fitness while feeling genuinely fun. Some good alternatives to dance would be:
- Pilates
- Yoga
- Gymnastics
- Figure skating
- Good ‘ol stretching
But… if you haven’t tried dancing yet, you should definitely try at least once. If you’re in SF, check out City Dance for some beginner friendly classes. The community and culture there is truly the most welcoming and encouraging you’ll find around.
Fitness is all about finding what works for you and building a lifestyle around it. I’m still working on building that for myself, but it’s pretty clear that dance will be a part of it. I’m getting back into dance classes now, and I’m feeling amazing, which is really what inspired me to write this article. I’m also looking to join a dance team next season, so if you know of any good ones in SF, please reach out and let me know!