Sunday Leader

Dancing For Health And Pleasure

By Dr Harold Gunatillake
Health Writer

For centuries, western civilisations have lauded benefits of dancing as a physical exercise for burning calories from your body. Recently, a research has shown that dancing provides health benefits, such as stress reduction and increase in serotonin level, and adrenal pump. Dancing also makes you smarter, by stimulating your mind. It helps couples keep their minds active to prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease. It also helps balancing cognitive acuity among the elderly. Your weight bearing long bones seem to get stronger and denser with activities like dancing.

Mental acuity with dancing

A study of senior citizens, 75 and older, was led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, funded by the National Institute on Ageing, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The researchers of the study wanted to see if any physical or cognitive recreational activities influenced mental acuity. They discovered that some activities had a significant beneficial effect. Other activities had none.

They studied cognitive activities such as reading books, writing for pleasure, doing crossword puzzles, playing cards and musical instruments. The physical activities they studied included playing tennis or golf, swimming, cycling, dancing, walking for exercise, and doing housework.

One of the surprises of the study was that almost none of the physical activities appeared to offer any protection against dementia. There can be cardiovascular benefits of course, but the focus of this study was the mind. There was one important exception: the only physical activity to offer protection against dementia was frequent dancing.
Just the way walking burns calories, dancing too burns calories, much more than a slow walk. After all, dancing is a form of rhythmic quick walk to music, and without any effort, you burn more calories than walking by dancing.

Every session of dancing for 20 minutes, you burn 25 calories, and at the end of the ball, you would easily burn 150 calories. To get the best health benefits whilst dancing, drinking a glass or two of water after each session of dancing is beneficial. Drinking wines also makes you thirsty.

Dancing improves your flexibility of skeletal muscles. Dancers must strive to achieve full range of motion for all the major muscle groups. The greater the range of motion, the more muscles can flex and extend. Most forms of dance require dancers to perform moves that require bending and stretching, so dancers naturally become more flexible by simply dancing

Dancing help you to build your muscles, to give more strength. Many styles of dance, including jazz and ballet, require jumping and leaping high into the air. Jumping and leaping require tremendous strength of the major leg muscles. Ballroom dancing builds strength. The muscle mass of a male ballroom dancer develops when he lifts his partner above his head!

Dancing seems to be more common among the senior citizens of most Western countries unlike in Asian countries. There are clubs that organised such events for the seniors in western countries. No wonder, ladies over age 80 groups in most of those countries are still active in their daily routines. Water ballet is another form of sports that old people indulge in and enjoy in club swimming pools with a trainer to guide. Aerobics for the seniors are too organised in most clubs.

In Sri Lanka, seniors- both men and women seem get aged fast with poor cognitive faculties due to lack of outdoor or indoor activities in organised clubs, or among family circles.