If you are a dancer you probably know this situation. When you get asked for the kind of sport you practice and you answer dancing, the answer is almost always the same: dancing is not a kind of sport! Answers like this one make dancers lose their temper!
However, dancing is definitely a kind of sport and it demands different physical skills. To be able to dance properly you need a lot of body conditioning, for which you have to train several years. This conditioning is needed to carry out fast and clean movements, which are necessary for dancing. It depends on the type of dancing but in general you mostly need your legs and stomach muscles while dancing. So dancers concentrate on building up these muscles.
Personally, I used to dance ballet for nine years and I’ve been dancing Hip-Hop for about five years now. In ballet I needed a lot of balance and flexibility. Furthermore, when I started to dance with pointe shoes I had to train my feet. In general toe dancing is really exhausting and it destroys your feet. So after a few years I decided to stop dancing ballet.
In Hip-Hop I mostly need my legs and stomach muscles, as mentioned before. Of course I also train other body parts but I focus on my legs and stomach. I really enjoy dancing Hip-Hop because it’s a good way to offset stress from school. My personal highlight was a workshop by Alex Schoendorf, which I attended. She’s a professional dancer from Los Angeles and even features in the music video “Swish Swish” by Katy Perry. The workshop was a great experience and I could profit a lot from it.
To conclude, I can claim that dancing is definitely a kind of sport and I can really recommend trying it once.
Laura Epis, Thurgau, Switzerland
