One of my favourite things about ballroom dancing is that the better you understand it, the easier and more effortless it gets. And since effort - or at least uncontrolled, forced effort - can be damaging to our bodies, there's some serious health pluses as well.
I've talked a lot about keeping ourselves healthy, but not yet about how dancing BETTER means dancing LONGER into life. Let's explore how to improve our dancing and our body health - at the same time.
Transcript:
Hi guys my name is Ian Crewe. I'm an instructor the Joy of Dance Center in Toronto, Ontario, and the creator of Social Ballroom Dance: Where you can learn your dance at your place on your schedule.
What allows us to move effectively, in a way that's low-impact for our body, while still following correct dance technique? A lot of it comes down to moving efficiently: Getting the best results with the least amount of effort.
When you think about your favourite dancers, what are some words that you'd use to describe them? Likely you'll come up with things like "effortless", "elegant" and "powerful" - in other words, they make what they do look easy.
By comparison, beginner dancers are going to look more forced and stiff in their movements. If you're one of these dancers yourself, you might notice that the bigger, more obvious movements are easier, but the movements that require more fine muscle control; not so much.
These little muscles are very important in preventing you from overextending and perhaps hurting yourself, so strengthen these muscles by dancing through your patterns more slowly, while keeping an eye on any places where you're tempted to rush through or lose your balance.
It's very easy to get impatient with this process, so I encourage you to dance a practice with an instructor or another dancer nearby.
Know your technique: Most good ballroom dance technique is just healthy dancing - it's following the natural movements of your body. Here's four examples of good technique or good things to be aware of when you're dancing.
First of all you want to always move from your core. Your core, if you don't know, is generally defined as like a fist-sized area that's nestled just under your solar plexus, around your navel area.
When we move from here, it keeps us balanced and in control so that our muscles are not straining to hold us up. Our bones and joints keep us where we need to be, and our muscles are free to make the rest of our dancing look that much better.
Focus on rolling through your movements: I like to say "if we stop moving we stop dancing." So even if it's a staccato style dance like say a tango, (CORRECTION: Tango does sometimes stop) we're really just slowing down and then we speed up.
We never want to move and stop; move and stop. It's going to take you more energy to have to constantly stop and start yourself, so we want to have that fluidity.
Focus on good partner connection. Yes, the leader goes first and yes, the follower goes just afterwards, but through that pressure, through our contact points, we are constantly letting each other know what we're doing.
And this allows us to move more as one: We have less "bumper cars" on the dance floor, and again it's much less strain on your muscles.
Finally, be aware that certain movements are always going to be a little easier for you, and certain movements are going to be a little bit harder, compared to somebody else with a different body type.
For example, I am going to have more difficulty dancing salsa because of how tall I am; how long my legs are, than somebody who's a little bit shorter, because I just have more to move - it's harder for me to keep up with the speed of some of the more advanced movements.
If I try to be like somebody else with shorter legs and shorter arms, I'm more likely to just end up frustrating myself, and I might even run the risk of hurting myself.
On the other hand, I can make tango look better because I have longer limbs that can create nice lines, so I can I can make nicer shapes while I'm dancing something like tango.
So just make peace of this awareness that - you know, this doesn't mean that you can only dance the styles that show off these things the best, but just be aware that there are going to be certain dance styles or certain moves that will give you a little bit more of a challenge, and that is okay.
Be aware that when you're dancing on floors that are harder and don't "give" as much, like concrete, you're going to want to dance lower impact moves, especially if you're doing something like East Coast Swing or jive.
By comparison, when you're dancing on a proper ballroom floor - which is usually a sprung hardwood floor - you can get away with your full complement of dance moves.
But if you try and push it on a harder floor you run the risk of injuring your ankles, your knees, your hips - it can be very bad for your body in the long run, so just take it easy there.
These are the main things that you need to be able to dance efficiently, and to and be able to enjoy dancing for your whole life.
I hope you found this helpful - if you have any questions or comments, as always you can message me on my Facebook fan page: Ballroom Dancers Anonymous, or you can email me at ian@socialballroom.dance, again that's ian@socialballroom.dance.
I know that I said last week that this would be our final topic on this theme, but I've decided to add one more. It's one I feel is very important, about how we can take good care of ourselves and maximize our recovery if we do end up injuring ourselves.
Because injuries are at least somewhat inevitable if you're going to dance for any period of time, but as long as you take care of yourself, you can keep that injury just a short-term blip, and you can be back on the dance floor in a way that has you healthy - maybe even healthier than you were before you got injured.
So I look forward to talking with you about that next week, and until then, happy dancing!