Benefits of Ballroom Dance
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007This article is reprinted from The Duke Diet & Fitness Center web site:
For decades, the United States has led the world in understanding and promoting the benefits of physical activity. In the 1950s, a national campaign encouraged young Americans to be physically active. In the 1970s, we learned about the cardiovascular benefits of vigorous activity. And in the past two decades, we found out that moderate-intensity activities such as walking, gardening and dancing could reap health benefits as well. Still, until recently, the prevailing philosophy was that vigorous exercise was required to make a difference. And that left a lot of people discouraged, unmotivated and frankly – inactive. Sixty percent of Americans, in fact, are not regularly active, and 25 percent aren’t active at all.
The key finding of the Surgeon General’s report is that people of all ages can improve the quality of their lives through a lifelong practice of moderate physical activity. You don’t have to be training for the Boston Marathon to derive real health benefits from physical activity.”
“The Surgeon General’s report provides a synopsis of all the research on physical activity and health that has been done to date,” explains Michael Scholtz, MS, exercise physiologist at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center (DFC). “As opposed to past recommendations, which were geared toward athletes and then applied to the average person, this report focuses on prevention and health for the average person.”“The most important finding is that even moderate amounts of activity can improve your health and your risk for diseases like premature heart disease, arthritis, hypertension and cancer,” says Duke Center for Living Fitness Manager Jami Norris, MS. “There are additional benefits to doing more, but there are huge health benefits to going from doing nothing to doing a little bit. It’s getting away from that “no pain, no gain” mentality.”