Dance Classes for Joy and Coordination: A Complete Guide to Moving Your Body with Pleasure

Why the Dance Does So Much Good to the Mind and to the Body

There exists a moment, in the life of every person, in which the body asks to move not for obligation, but for pure pleasure. The dance answers to this necessity in a way that few other activities can do. It is not a question of becoming a ballerina or of learning complicated figures for showing to somebody. It is a question of giving to yourself the possibility to feel the rhythm, to occupy the space with your own body, to reconnect the mind with the limbs in a dialogue that is ancient as the humanity itself.

In fact, when one enters in a dance classroom, something changes immediately in the quality of attention. The thoughts of the office, the list of the things to do, the worries of the day — all of this remains outside the door. The brain is occupied with listening the music, with counting the steps, with feeling the weight that passes from one foot to the other. And in this occupation, there is a rest profound.

I have observed this in persons of every age: the lady of sixty-two years who, after three months of a course of ballroom dance, says to feel “more present” in her own life; the young man who discovers, through the salsa, that his coordination was not absent — it was simply sleeping.

Which Type of Dance to Choose According to Your Necessities

A question that arrives often is: “But which dance is the right one for me?” The honest answer is that the right dance is the one that makes you desire to return the week after. That said, it is useful to understand the differences, because every style works on aspects a little different.

It is not necessary to choose for the entire life. One can begin with a style and, after six months, feel the curiosity to try another. The important thing is to begin.

How the Coordination Improves, Step After Step

The coordination is not a gift that one receives at the birth and that remains fixed. This is a thing that I have seen confirmed in years of observation in the classrooms: the coordination is a capacity that grows with the practice, exactly as a muscle grows with the exercise.

What happens, in concrete terms?

• The first weeks: the brain is occupied with memorizing the single steps. One looks at the feet, one loses the count, one feels a little clumsy. This is normal. This is the phase in which the most persons abandon, and it is a pity, because it is the phase that passes more quickly.
• The second month: the sequences begin to become automatic. The attention is freed and can move toward the musicality, toward the expression, toward the partner. The body starts to anticipate the movement instead of chasing it.
• From the third month forward: the coordination becomes a thing that one “feels” and not only a thing that one “thinks.” The steps in the daily life — to descend the stairs, to catch an object that falls, to walk on an uneven terrain — result more fluid and secure.

The mechanism is this: the dance asks to the brain to manage simultaneously the rhythm, the space, the weight of the body, and often the relation with another person. It is a training complete for the neural connections, and it does not require that one is young. The plasticity of the brain responds at every age, also if with different rhythms.

The Joy That Arrives from the Movement: What Tells Us the Experience

I use the word “joy” and not “happiness,” because it is a thing more precise. The joy of the dance is physical, immediate. It arrives when the music enters in the chest, when a turn comes well for the first time, when one laughs with the partner for a step gone wrong.

From the point of view of the body, the movement rhythmic and continuous favors the production of those substances — the endorphins, the serotonin — that regulate the tone of the humor. But it is not only chemistry. It is also the pleasure of being in a group without competition, of sharing a learning, of feeling oneself part of something that is bigger than the single person.

Many persons tell me that, after the lesson, they sleep better. That the shoulders are less tight. That the mind feels “cleaned.” These are not small things. These are the effects real of a practice done with constancy.

Practical Advice to Begin Without Fear

If you are reading these lines and you are thinking “I would like, but I am not capable,” I ask you to consider these practical indications:

• Choose a course for beginners, and do not be ashamed of this. Every school serious has a level zero. You will not be the only one to not know the steps.
• Wear comfortable shoes. It is not necessary to buy the specific shoes at the beginning. A pair with a sole that is smooth and that does not grip the floor is sufficient for the first lessons.
• Arrive ten minutes before. This permits to the body to acclimatize to the room, to the music, to the presence of the others. The anxiety diminishes when one does not enter in the last moment.
• Give yourself four lessons before judging. The first lesson is always strange. The fourth is already another thing.
• Hydrate yourself well before and after, and do not arrive with the stomach completely full.

The Attention to the Circulation During the Physical Activity

There is an aspect of the dance that often is not considered enough: the work that the heart and the vessels do during the movement. The dance is an activity aerobic moderate, and this is a good thing for the circulation. The blood arrives with more force to the legs, the capillaries are stimulated, the return of the blood toward the heart is favored by the rhythmic contraction of the muscles of the calves.

That said, it is wise to take care of the vascular system also outside the classroom, above all if one has passed the fifty years or if one spends many hours seated during the day. In this sense, some persons find useful to associate to the movement a support from the inside. I have heard, for example, some dance teachers speak of Cardiobalance as a complement that they suggest to their students more mature, a supplement thought for the well-being of the vessels and of the circulation. For who desires to understand better of what it is made and how it is composed, the information is available on Cardiobalance.biz. It is not a question of substituting the movement with a pill — this would be absurd — but of considering the health of the circulation as a whole, in which the dance, the alimentation, the rest, and eventually a support targeted work together.

The important thing is to listen to the own body: if after the lesson you feel the ankles swollen or the legs heavy, it is the signal to elevate the limbs, to make a gentle stretching, and to speak with your own doctor if the sensation persists.

A Final Thought

The dance is not a performance. It is a conversation between you and the music, between you and your own body, between you and the persons who share the room. There are no spectators, there is no judgment. There is only the pleasure of moving, of learning something new, of discovering that the coordination is there, inside you, waiting only that somebody turns on the music.

Begin with one lesson. Also only one. And see what happens.

In my experience, what happens is almost always the same: the person arrives tense, a little skeptical, and goes out with the shoulders lowered and a smile that was not there before. And the week after, she returns.

This is the joy. And this, in the end, is the coordination: not only of the feet, but of the whole person with herself.