Dance Your Way To An Amazing Six Pack
All dance, whether it’s ballet, ballroom or line dancing, place a demand on the ab muscles. Dancing requires you to draw upon all of your core muscles to maintain perfect posture and alignment, and many moves require you to draw power from your core to execute spins, kicks and shuffles. Some dances engage your abs even further by including moves that involve the hips, especially twisting, pivoting and high kicks.
Ballet
The key to ballet is perfect posture, which is achieved by keeping your abs drawn up and in. Moves like grande battement, which involves raising the leg as high as possible in a controlled manner, require a powerful contraction of the ab muscles to achieve maximum height. Jumps and lifts are initiated by lifting the abs from the diaphragm, allowing the rest of the body to follow. Ballet will not give you a six-pack, because the deep transverse abdominals are the most called upon to power the moves. Instead, you’ll find that your abs are tighter and smoother, as if you were wearing a girdle.
Belly Dancing
Belly dancing engages the abs directly, both the deep and surface muscles. Belly dancing is based upon the concept of isolation, which means you move a certain part of your body while keeping other parts still. You engage your six-pack muscles during hip drops and shimmies, where the small muscle contractions create the action of the move. During moves like the camel and hip circles, you use your deep abdominals to produce a smoother, more undulating motion. It is the strengthening of both sets of ab muscles that enables expert belly dancers to flip a quarter down their midsection using only the contraction of their abs. Belly dancing can also involve a rapid pace that provides a cardio workout, so you may burn the fat that covers your ab muscles as well.
Latin Dance
Latin dance is a widely varied field. From salsa to tango, it draws upon your ab muscles in many ways. The hip-twisting movements of salsa place tremendous demand on your obliques, leading to an eventual narrowing of your waist. Even the more elegant dances like the tango force you to use your deep abs to maintain the upright posture, provide the force behind kicks, and raise your body from a dip. Most Latin dances are done at a tempo that will quickly elevate your heart rate and provide an effective cardio workout as well. The fact that these dances are done with a partner adds a social aspect that many people enjoy.
Hip Hop
Hip-hop dance provides a strenuous cardio workout because it is performed at a very rapid tempo to modern pop music. A beginner’s hip-hop class will focus on rhythm and posturing, calling upon your surface abs to initiate rolls and bends. An advanced class will look much different as acrobatics and leaps are added, placing an even greater demand on the abs. Hip-hop dance involves rapid position-changes and abrupt stops, in which you use deep abdominals for stability and control. Some advanced moves even require a 360-degree rotation of either the upper or lower half of the body, allowing the other half to rotate only at the 180-degree point. No matter what your level, hip hop works your abs from every angle.
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