There are enough different types of ballroom dancing to suit every personality
Body benefits
“Ballroom gives you a great all-over cardio workout, where you use your own body weight, similar to what you’d get from an intensive Pilates class,” Chris Dempsey, manager of Arthur Murray Dance School in Sydney, says. “You spend a lot of time bending low and using your legs to push up onto your toes. So it’s an especially good workout for legs and buttocks.”
The proof
Dr Joe Verghese, a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, conducted a study on 469 men and women. Over five years he studied ways of staying active to reduce the risk of dementia and found ballroom dancing to be the most effective physical activity. The main reasons Verghese gave were that the “requirements of ballroom dancing, such as remembering the steps, moving in precise time to the music and adapting to the movements of one’s partner are mentally demanding exercises”.