The best way I can describe dancing to non-practitioners is that it's like playing a silent, wearable musical instrument that demands attention from your entire body.
It is not like playing a sport, except perhaps if you do it competitively :-)
And it’s really valuable to me as a software engineer - at the very least it forces me out of my chair at 6.30pm 5 days a week to go to the studio, when otherwise I could easily find myself working 12-14 hours days because I am “in the zone” (which is easy for me to do because of the years of martial arts and meditation practice) which for sure would not be good for my health.
It is also a great emotional outlet for me as most of my day I am dealing with machines and logic.
And the best part is that I dance with my other half - we spend a lot of time together, travel together and get all our arguments done on the dance floor and not at home! :)
I definitely recommend dancing, any kind, to anyone and everyone.
That said, professional athletes I've known pay a lot of attention to their specific form when doing actions to minimize energy and maximize power.
It appears to me to be the difference between actively managing how your body moves versus just letting it do what ever to get the action done.
To get that good you need discipline and dance for years (or just be a natural), so don't seem that far fetched to be at a similar difficulty level as sports in this regard.
I'm sure that's not always a net negative, but I can say it hurt my dancing during the few times I've tried it competitively.
Partner dancing - at least leading - is definitely on the higher side :-)
There are several factors. Leaders must endure months where they can do little or nothing, and they have to do it among people who always look great - if they social dance; if they don't, their learning time increases.
Then there's a lot of pressure of performing with and for somebody who's usually of the opposite sex (this applies also to follows).
It takes a lot (internally) before feeling comfortable enough to "simply enjoy".
Playing an instrument or practicing an individual sport doesn't have such pressures.
Video is a brutal but effective teacher for those who are not easily discouraged.
For leaders to build up a good vocabulary of moves requires a lot more than weekly practice though.
And fundamentals as a lead can be learned by dancing with intention.
I've been an amateur dancer for years, and definitely, for what I personally intend for "competent", it takes 2/3 years at least, with multiple times per week of practice, a few workshops every year etc.etc.
There's certainly some people who dance pretty much daily and gets good in less than an year, some people with background in physical activities (sports or arts) who also get good quickly... but they're exceptions.
Snowboarding, downhill skiing, mountain biking, and any martial art. These are from personal experience, I’m sure there are plenty of other examples.
Even weight training, which is an experimental group in this article, when done properly, requires high levels of neuro-muscular coordination and development. I am always weary of studies that evaluate “strength training” because there are so many different approaches with wildly different outcomes. Let’s just say that a max effort squat by an athlete with around two years of proper training emphasizing technique requires a hell of a lot more coordination than busting a move on the dance floor. I’ve been weight training for 15 years and I still feel like I am learning something new every time I get under the bar with the right mindset. The mindset part is key, because if you are just going through the motions then you’re not developing new skills. But I would bet a lot of money that top level strength athletes would say that their form is far from “perfect” and that this the area that affords the biggest opportunity for improvement.
This is the part where I’m going to be brash. Unless you tell me exactly what defines a strength training regimen in your study, I will assume it’s something along the lines of curls and lunges done with tiny dumbbells over a large amount of reps. Especially if your study calls it “repetitive”. There’s nothing repetitive about proper strength training. Every rep that’s done mindfully affords a unique learning opportunity.
Sports simply too complex to categorize in simple terms like “dancing” or “resistance training”. In the context of experimental design, our definitions have to be much more precise.
Having said all that, this is how I interpret this article: “Learning complex motor skills that require high levels of attention is better for the brain than doing 100 curls with 3 lb dumbbells.” And my response to that is “no shit”.
I practice Olympic lifting (total beginner) and I have to concentrate so much during exercises. Take for instance the snatch movement [1] which is my personal favorite and one of the hardest (in my opinion)
Also I find weightlifting very addictive: when you do the movement successfully is very rewarding. When you get it wrong you can't wait to try again next time
So I mean, it's hard to have someone just come in and say: "nope the data is wrong my opinion of this activity I am biased towards as I practice it myself is right", and not be somewhat skeptical. Yes, this is a small preliminary study, maybe the type of strength training was responsible for the failings, etc. But it's still much more substantial then someone's opinion.
Could you suggest a source on this? One that presents this sort of approach to resistance training, ideally for relative newcomers?
> Each session included three different units: endurance training, strength-endurance training and flexibility training. Each unit lasted 20 minutes. The endurance training was performed on bicycle ergometers with the intensity adjusted to the individual training heart frequency. The strength-endurance unit implied training with equipment such as barbells, rubber bands, Redondo balls, gymnastic sticks and fitness balls. We avoided combined arm and leg movements in order to keep coordinative demands low.
So ya, they did try and keep coordinative movement to a minimum by avoiding full body movements. That said, I'm not convinced that that any weightlifting, which can be administered to elderly people, would ever reach the coordinative demand and sensory/cognitive levels that dance does.
Also, something that doesn't improves an elderly's brain plasticity doesn't mean that weight lifting or other more repetitive form of exercise are not beneficial in any other way. Brain plasticity is not the be all and end all of health. I think strength training has an already well established level of other health benefits, brain plasticity might not be one though.
I recently took up dancing to improve my fight game. I went in thinking it would just be a fun/different way of working on footwork, I was quickly amazed how it is very different to most the other sports I've tried.
Someone else mentioned musical instruments on this HN post - I think that might be it. Dancing is a musical instrument where you trade sound for expressivity in your body. So suddenly you've taken a sport and you have layered rhythm and musicality on top of it - and your movements are coupled to your understanding of those.
That's quite deep, I guess at high level boxing you get similar concepts without the music element (ideas of tempo and upsetting people's tempo).
I think my biggest value I took away from dancing was learning a new energy to take to sports. Whatever you do in dancing, it needs to look smooth and soft - that is the name of the game. But there is a stiffness and explosiveness I take to most my sports and learning to apply softness has been valuable. After all most of the greatest all time athletes have an easiness about their techniques which I guess correlates to efficiency.
I think I agree with your overall point on your post - if you sleep on any activity you won't get much value from it, the corollary being that if you go deep on something you will find lots of value in it. I guess my specific reply to you was "don't sleep on dancing"
I personally support this theory; ultimately, in a very basic form, both dance and sport are grounded on physical coordination.
Or if you're into hi-tech trance or frenchcore ;)
Some people cant see their own bias I guess. :)
Not sure why you jumped to the conclusion that someone saying "X is not like playing a sport" is a claim that "sports are trivially easy compared to X". I don't think the parent comment was claiming that at all, just that they're different, namely that dance is not inherently competitive.
As someone who plays basketball and tennis, it takes a lot of focus to pay attention to my whole body for an entire practice session (vs. just a single part that I'm trying to improve). Most of the time, if I don't explicitly try to pay attention, I just use muscle memory and try to get into "the zone".
In tennis for example, I only need to pay maximal attention when learning a stroke (although of course it's beneficial to pay attention to every body part when just regularly playing - it's not necessary, and certainly something that a lot of recreational players don't do). Whereas with dance, it's required that you pay attention to your entire body for the entire practice session to memorize a choreography.
I think that's the difference that's important for this paper. If my elderly dad were to play basketball, he might rely on muscle memory. Whereas, if his nursing home taught dance classes, he would definitively have to pay attention to all of his body parts.
it == dancing && it != sport
dancing.entails(entire_body)
sport.entails(entire_body)
I want you to read this entire sentence, including the part after "except". I want you to tell me what you think that last clause means.
> It is not like playing a sport, except perhaps if you do it competitively
Do you think there is perhaps the slightest chance that they did not intend to say that "playing a sport does not require control of your entire body"?
Is there even a tiny possibility that they said that dancing non-competitively is not like playing a sport, perhaps because they are including competition in the definition of sport?
> Some people cant see their own bias I guess. :)
Agreed.