Which extracurricular activity should you pick…Dance.

Dance is where you can lose yourself and find yourself at the same time. Choose dance. Hands down, every time. Whether it’s for yourself or for your kids, choose dance as an extracurricular activity.

Dancer credit: Providance Performing Arts centers’ Avery Cecil dancing at Hall of Fame Lonestar Showdown

At Providance Performing Arts Center in Royse City, a suburb in North East Dallas, you’re bound to watch some amazing displays of confidence, teamwork, and peer support. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. Providance dance studio offers kids hip hop classes, ballet dance classes, tap dance lessons, toddler dance classes, as well as adult dance classes, pilates and more!

Dance is a journey of self discovery and of becoming. It’s a culture rich activity that can have huge benefits. Movement is important for our well-being. The physical, mental, and emotional health benefits of dancing are endless. One might even say: dance is good for the mind, body, and soul.

Dancer credit: Providance Performing Arts centers’ Harlee Ramos dancing at Energy National Dance Competition

3 Benefits of Dance

There are way more benefits of dance than just 3, but in this blog we will focus on the health, mental, and emotional benefits that dance has to offer and why dance as an extracurricular activity is a great option for adults and kids.

Dance is a fun, expressive way to be physically more active. Physical activity and fitness helps protect our health. It’s important to our whole health that we are not sedentary. Finding a physical activity to get or stay healthy doesn’t have to be hard or unpleasant.

Health Benefits

• Improved condition of your heart and lungs: Dance helps to make your heart beat faster which makes it stronger, improving your cardiovascular health. Dance reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke and lowers your cholesterol levels.

• Increased endurance and motor fitness: Dancing regularly can help you build up endurance allowing you to work harder for longer. There are a lot of different dance styles and they all involve a wide range of motion and movement making a dancer more nimble pretty quickly.

• Improved muscle tone and strength; dancing strengthens your core and improves your reflexes. Dance increases the body’s stability and improves all of your muscles improving your posture.

Mental Benefits

• Improved mood: Dance helps alleviate mood by creating a chemical reaction in the brain that causes release of endorphins like serotonin and dopamine. Research shows that dance can help improve depressive episodes in both kids and adults and elderly.

• Increased energy and calcium: if you ever feel like you're getting stale and slumping into middle age, dance could be the answer for you. Dance makes your mind feel younger and stay more alert. Dance exercise also allows more calcium to be absorbed into the body’s bones, helping prevent osteoporosis.

• Improves memory: dance is beneficial for kids and adults as it improves learning power and strengthens the networking system inside the body. Dance also sharpens memory and improves brain functioning.

Emotional Benefits

Emotional health can lead to success in all areas of life and is very important to quality of life. When someone is emotionally healthy, they attract others and find the resources they need to accomplish their goals more easily than someone who is not. Left unchecked, long-term emotional stress can lead to a long list of problems. Dance can be a healthy, fun way to cope with stress for both, kids and adults alike.

• Increased empathy is a benefit of dance. Research shows that dancers are more able to interpret the emotions of others. When we express ourselves through dance we become more sensitive to others who are expressing themselves, as well as more aware and connected to our own feelings.

• Improved confidence is one of many things that dancing can improve. Finding and taking dance classes near you, typically means that you are going to have to get used to the idea of dancing around in front of people. Once you get the hang of putting yourself out there, you’ll feel much more capable and up for learning new things.

• Healthy self-expression: dance can be used to express any emotion or mood. Dance is fueled by emotion. It’s a whole process of feeling and moving through that feeling. You can leave a lot, A LOT out there on the dance floor. Sometimes, more than you even knew you were carrying. Learning how to express emotion can carry benefits well beyond the dance floor.

When it comes to picking an extracurricular activity for your kids or for yourself, pick dance and think of Providance Performing Arts Center.