Dance, Health, and Fitness Essay

Among a discourse community of trained dancers, one expects to find individuals who are healthy and active athletes. Aside from technique and movement, health and cardio are underlying factors that play a huge role in a dancer’s career. Many dancers take on a healthy diet in order to maintain their body weight. Something that has been looked down upon in the trained dancers’ community is what it

I have been dancing since the age of two. When asked about my career aspirations, there is no hesitation before saying “I want to be a dancer.” Being a dancer means putting all other distractions aside, and focusing on my craft. Currently, I dedicate over forty hours a week to dance, which is a schedule that requires sacrifice. When I am dancing, the rest of the world fades away, slipping out of my mind with relaxed importance. For that moment in time, I am completely free, wholly focused on my goals, letting me know dance is what I’m meant to do. With this realization comes a responsibility to myself and the work I have put into improving my craft thus far, and I know I must seek out the best opportunities for growth and continued learning.

They really just eat, sleep, study, and dance. They have an average of 7 hours of dance a day and, if they are in college, only get about 5-6 hours of sleep depending on their minors and majors. Their schedule is this way for a reason. Dancers that professionally do this or have it as a major, need to keep their muscles used to doing everything that they do. Try to think of it as playing music. If you learn a piece of music and then don’t play it for a week, the chances are, you probably forgot it. That’s why it is important to have dance classes every day. Dancers also have their schedule this way because of their performances. Most dancers usually have about 1 performance a week, which means that every day they need to buckle down and work. All dancers, for a performance, need to learn their dances, get fitted for their costumes, rehearse the dances, and have stage rehearsals at the place that they will be performing at. This happens usually all in one week. This doesn’t even include their other college classes that they may take. Now as I had said in the beginning when people see dancers dance, it looks effortless to them. This is only because dancers WANT to make it look effortless. That is their job. The dancers want to make it look graceful and beautiful, and that doesn 't come with making weird faces or having it look like they are working really hard. From this, some people

Many people consider activities such as, football, baseball, volleyball, and track to be a sport. The qualities that tend to make these activities considered sports are, running, tackling, hitting a ball, participating in relays, and so much more. Not mentioned in this list of sports is dance. People tend to believe that dance is nothing more than moving your body to some music, it is also very mentally engaging as well as being a physically demanding activity. The question that many might ask: Why is dance not classified as a sport? Dancers that compete in competitive situations do not get off as easily as people may think. These dancers require countless hours of exercising, training, and stretching, just as much, if not more, than other sports. To perfect the art of dancing comes with years of training and dedication. With this explanation of the art of dancing, it can be concluded that dance is in fact a sport.

Dance demands the same physical skills that are required in other sports. Flexibility, strength, and endurance are key characteristics that most dancers need to posses. As with other “athletes,” most dancers are not born with these abilities but must establish them through practice and repetitive training. Similar to traditional sports practices, dance rehearsals are extensive and require diligence, dedication, and patience from the dancers as they will have to repeat exercises and stretches to perfect their technique and stay on

c) Balance is a vital part of dance. Dancers must have strong core muscles. Men need strong shoulders for lifts, since they must not only support their own body weight but also their partner's. “Dancers are some of the toughest athletes in the world,” claims Dr. McNitt-Gray.

What do you think makes people better at the activity that they are doing such as constantly improving their agility and strength? Dance should be considered a sport. First, dancers put in as much stamina and sweat that football players do. Also, you are still competing against other companies for the win so it is still competitive. Lastly, it helps your agility as well as any other sport and gets you in good shape, again, like any other sport. Here is some proof.

fats. This diet also proves problematic in that most foods advertised as ‘low fat’ are often very

When using this definition of what a sport is, there is no doubt that dance fills these requirements. The first requirement is that it uses physical exertion and dance is extremely physically demanding. The amount of athleticism required to perform many of the dance moves is astounding. According to an article on aarp.com “a workout that involves jumping and turning repeatedly for over ten minutes creates a workout similar to running a mile” (qtd in Rice 1). Most dancers don’t just dance for ten minutes: Paige Abrams states, “Teams practice for more than twenty hours a week” (2) and Aubree James says, “Many competitive dancers practice for five hours a day to perfect their technique, while some rep hockey teams [only] practice five hours a week” (2). In addition to the actual dancing at practices, dance requires a lot of additional conditioning. Lauren Allaire said, “We condition every rehearsal, which includes a six minute plank, three hundred sit ups, fifty burpees, we run laps, and a lot more” (qtd in Abrams 2) In my own experience, just conditioning in class still isn’t enough to keep a dancers body as strong or as flexible as it needs to be. Staying in shape requires stretching and working out every night.

Ballet requires a lot of fitness. Dancers also have good endurance and have to do conditioning just like other sports. Some of the boys in our dance studio use ballet for agility to help them with other sports

Understanding how the muscles inside your body move and the mechanics of how your body moves is incredibly important in dance. If you understand how something needs to move to create a certain you are sure to recreate that shape with the same precision every time. I also find the human body fascinating. How we as dancers come across injuries and how we should go about mending them. Dance is so powerful that understanding the mechanics of the body greatly assists how you move. I have an anatomy coloring book that I use frequently to find how muscles connect and how to make something move. I would love it if one day I became a special physical therapist/ kinesiologist for dancers and helped them understand how they

Injuries also have a great impact on the ending of dancers' careers. Also, 22% of former dancers and 41% of current dancers said that their careers ended because they got to the age where their bodies could not handle dance anymore (1). Dancers put their bodies through multiple painful obstacles and placements that most people would not even dream of doing. One example of painful things dancers do is dance in pointe shoes, a shoe that is made out of layers of fabric with a wooden box on the end of the shoe that a dancer stands on top of on her toe (“The Ballet Blog” 1). Not knowing when their careers will end, dancers should spend all the time they can within the 15 years to find a job and focusing on their dancing without having to worry about school work or getting a college degree that is not going to benefit their career. Dancers can make money and find a job without going to college, but they need time to do so.

Also it is important on where the fat is carried on the body that contribe to health problems. Belly fat for example is stored deep below the skin, causing it to be surrounded by the organs and liver. Saturated and trans fats are big ones to try and avoid. These types of fats are known to increase the risk of diseses and high cholesterol. Foods that include Saturated fats tend to be, cuts of meat like beef and pork, chicken but with the skin, whole-fat dairy products, butter, cheese, palm/coconut oil and many more. Trans fat foods include things like, baked goods, margarine, fried foods, potato chips, etc. Knowing the type of "bad fat" to look out for is important, but so is knowing what the "good fats" are. Monounsturated fats are found in olive/canola/sunflower/peanut/sesame oils, Avocados, olives and nuts. There is also Polyunsaturated fats that include, Soybean/corn/safflower oils, walnuts, Seeds such as sunflower, sesame, pumpkin and flaxseeds, fatty fish like salmon and tuna, soymilk and tofu. These types of fats have heath benifits because they are good for the heart and also cholesterol. Fats disgest differently than the other molecules dessuted earlier, because the fat does not dissolve into the the disgestive juices. Bile which is produced by the liver but is stored in the gallbladder, are able to attach to the fat molcules and break it up into smaller particles, but lipase which is a fat-disgesting enzyme can break it down. It gets broke down into fatty acids and chlesterol which are then absorbed through the intestinal wall to the bloodstream. The fat is then stored in the body to be used as energy when it is

Even if you are not the most advanced dancer you still need to try just as hard, maybe even harder. If you put full effort into it, you will be successful, That goes for every sport.

First, dancing is one of my favorites hobbies. For centuries, dance manuals and other writings have lauded the health benefits of dancing, usually as physical exercise. We've