If your regular exercise routine is repetitive and boring, you may want to consider learning how to dance. Dance is a challenging form of exercise that requires coordination, full-body movements, stamina, flexibility and agility for extended periods of time. Solo dances like tap and jazz and partner dances like the waltz and swing require cardiovascular fitness and endurance for athletes and nonathletes alike.
Definition of Cardiovascular Endurance
Cardiovascular fitness is the efficiency of the heart, lungs and vascular system in delivering oxygen to the working muscles to sustain prolonged physical work. Aerobic exercise elevates your heart rate to between 60 and 85 percent of your maximum heart rate for at least 20 minutes. Activities like dance can help promote cardiovascular health and endurance because they involve the constant movement of major muscle groups over an extended period of time. You can increase your endurance by upping the intensity and the duration of your exercise.
Dance Step Ideas
Salsa has a six-count basic step that involves forward and backward stepping, significant hip swinging and abdominal muscle movement. Salsa is both a social and individual dance that goes in time to fast-tempo and slow-tempo Latin music. Emphatic hip swinging incorporates more muscles and increases heart rate. Charleston is an eight-count movement that incorporates leg kicks, big arm movements and core muscle control. Charleston is typically danced to fast tempo jazz and ragtime music and can be done with a partner or solo. Variations in the Charleston can provide an added challenge. Tap involves a number of rhythmic combinations of the feet and legs. Practice combinations of repetitive moves like the shuffle ball change, alternating the feet. Continue to increase the tempo for 10 to 15 minutes for added cardiovascular endurance.
Variables
Movement is only one factor that will influence your cardiovascular fitness. You can gain greater health benefits by doing dance movements to faster tempos. If you want to practice variations of the salsa, for example, choose songs that have faster beats.
You can also get your heart pumping faster by incorporating your whole body as opposed to the legs alone. When practicing the Charleston, swing your arms and kick your legs in an exaggerated motion. This incorporates more muscle movements, thus increasing your heart rate and cardio endurance.
Dance Steps and Aerobics
Many fitness centers and gyms offer aerobics classes, wherein a class instructor choreographs sequences of dance movements to uptempo music. According to allspiritfitness.com, many aerobics classes incorporate variations of dance steps like the grapevine, knee lifts, mambo, jazz square, chausses, and the cha-cha. You can perform these moves and increase the intensity or the exaggeration of the movement, or do the movement in double-time if the music and the tempo permit in order to develop cardiovascular endurance.
Considerations
If you are starting a new exercise program or are a novice to certain dance styles, it is important to understand and master the basics before advancing to more complicated movements. Properly performing movements can reduce your risk of injury and help you gain the maximum health benefits from the exercise.
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