As a lifelong dancer who discovered yoga during graduate school, I have first-hand experience with the benefits of a consistent yoga practice for dancers. Yoga has helped me out in innumerable ways and I think has so much to offer everyone, but dancers in particular. If you are a dancer, or have been one in your life, here are some of the benefits of adding yoga into your routine…
Increased body awareness
Yoga is a forum through which to learn proper alignment in our bodies. It allows for more time to work on the specific subtleties of alignment and helps dancers to explore the optimal ways in which to move their bodies to help prevent injury and speed up recovery time. These optimal ways of moving can be translated directly into how you dance and move throughout your life as a dancer.
Increased strength and flexibility
Yoga can teach dancers the most effective ways to strengthen and stretch their bodies safely. Although yoga is often seen as primarily a stretching modality of movement, it can provide, when taught properly, equal opportunity to both strengthen and stretch. Our bodies are more supple and less prone to injury when we have a balance of strength and stretch. In my experience, yoga has allowed me to become the most flexible I’ve been in my life, even with many many prior years of stretching as a dancer, while also helping to make me the strongest I’ve ever been.
Linking movement to breath
Because movement in yoga is often matched to the flow of the breath, dancers have ample opportunity to explore and optimize their relationship between movement and breath. Dancers are very good at matching their movements to the rhythm of the music, but their movements become even more powerful and expressive when they are also linked with the flow of their own breath. Exploring the deeper connection between movement and breath, movement and rhythm, and rhythm and breath can really enhance the quality of your dancing.
Learn to love your body
Yoga teaches us to treat our body with loving kindness and care. It teaches us that our body is a gift rather than a problem. In the competitive world that is dance, it can be easy to see our bodies as lacking and with continual room for improvement. Yoga helps us to at least begin to see our bodies as something to be appreciated just the way they are.
Stress reduction strategies
Through simple awareness exercises, breathing exercises, and much more, yoga provides a way for dancers to be more in tune with and better able to cope with and move past daily stresses. Yoga asks us to tune into the simplicity of life in its focus on the mind-body connection. When we are present in our breath and in our bodies, the stresses of the world can slide off of our shoulders more easily.
