Dance Your Way to a Healthier Lifestyle

The pursuit of a healthier lifestyle is always an admirable one. The problem is that the motivation to keep chasing that healthier lifestyle doesn’t always last long enough. For many of us, it’s a similar story. Life gets busy, schedules fill up and before you know it, all those good intentions you had to head to the gym or go for a run are out the window.

Creating a healthier overall lifestyle for yourself can feel like a demand to fit a bunch of inflexible exercise tasks into a schedule that’s already jam-packed. We find something that works for a week before it becomes too stringent or dull to continue. That early morning exercise class sounds like a good idea until you find yourself contemplating late at night how sleep is much more appealing than the treadmill.

All these feelings and experiences are entirely human and normal! It’s in our nature to fall out of love with tasks that feel mundane or overwhelming quickly. But not all is lost on this front. The good news is that dancing your way to a healthier lifestyle might be the ticket to changing your mindset entirely. Here’s why.

Dance is Versatile

You do not have to be a great dancer to reap the many health benefits of a daily dance session. Whether this happens in a formal classroom or in your living room, what you can gain from even a little bit of dance a day is exceptionally positive.

One of the reasons that dance is so effective as a health strategy is that it’s endlessly versatile. There are as many dance styles out there as there are music types. This gives dancers options to pick and choose the moves to fit their mood.

Ultimately, dance keeps exercise from getting boring and makes it easy to customize your healthy exercise choice to fit your day and style. Hip hop, jazz, salsa, Irish stepping? It’s all readily available to be enjoyed and easy to switch up! When you eliminate the mundane from your daily exercise, you’ll find you look forward to the pursuit of a healthier lifestyle.

It Boosts Your Mood

For many people, dance is an artistic expression of emotion. At its most basic, dance is also physical exercise that releases endorphins. This means a big mood boost for you! While a dancer is enjoying finding new ways to move and express themselves, the brain is simultaneously recognizing the positive physical effects and rewarding them for it. As those endorphins react with brain receptors, dancing can begin to make us feel confident and strong. What could be more motivating to continue dancing than that?

Dancing Can Help You Reach That Goal Weight

Getting out on the dance floor is designed to be fun. It’s also a healthy activity that can lead to effective weight loss over time. Dance is an aerobic exercise that gets the heart pumping and blood moving in a short amount of time. It requires the use of nearly every muscle in the body which in turn, is a great way to burn calories. According to a Harvard Medical School study, approximately 30-minutes of high-energy dance can burn anywhere from 90 to over 250 calories!

It’s Exercise That Connects Us to Others

Dance is a form of exercise that’s been shown to come with some significant physical benefits in terms of muscle tone, bone health, and heart health, too. It provides a path to improved flexibility and boosts your mood along the way.

But beyond the physical benefits, dance is an exercise that’s easy to keep up with because it also connects us to others who enjoy dancing as well. Taking an in-person dance class is a great way to meet others who are looking to stay healthy in an enjoyable way while learning new skills. It’s a shared experience that eliminates the competition and instead, puts the focus on the fun of paired learning. That type of energy and connection is priceless when it comes to maintaining motivation to keep on a healthy track.

Turn Up the Music and Dance Your Way to Health

When you feel that motivation for exercise is diminishing, turning up the volume is a good place to start. Dance is a simple way to put the fun back into your workout and make the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle an enjoyable one!

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