Boogying the night away produces meaningful improvements in one’s body mass and waist circumference in people who are overweight or obese, a new study found.
Dancing was also seen to improve blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, physical fitness, cognitive disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, and mental health—in other words, all the root causes of the non-communicable diseases that kill most people in the West.
The researchers believed that dance would be a more ideal form of exercise because it is sustainable—it’s a sociable, entertaining way of exercising that participants will enjoy, rather than a drudgery they have to push themselves through.
“Dance is effective on fat loss in people overweight and obese and has a significant improvement on body composition and morphology,” said Zhang Yaya, a Ph.D. student at Hunan University, China. “As a form of physical activity that integrates exercise, entertainment, and sociality, dance possesses innate advantages in fostering motivation for exercise.”
To get their results, published in the journal PLoS ONE, the team studied data from 646 participants who were overweight and obese across ten different studies.
They found that dance is very effective for improving body composition and showed that more creative dance types had the most pronounced body composition improvement when compared with traditional dance.
Improvements were also found in overweight children and patients with Parkinson’s disease.
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Although similar fat loss was seen in aerobic exercise, resistance training, and high-intensity interval training, dance had the additional advantage of reducing fat percentage because of the full-body range of motions that are also less fatiguing, the authors wrote.
Best of all, it is much easier to sustain than other forms of exercise.
The team notes that more research is needed on the topic, but they can confidently conclude that dance is super effective for weight loss.
GRAB Your Friends That Need To Shed A Few And Head Down To The Discoteca…