beginners – Ananke Belly Dance
Components of Fitness for Bellydancers: Flexibility
Check out these beautiful body lines, courtesy of good flexibility
With inactivity and aging our muscles tend to shorten and stiffen, in other words we lose our flexibility. Flexibility is needed for extending muscles through their normal range of motion to create the beautiful hip and torso articulations we use in belly dance. And it isn’t just for dancers, fitness experts now agree that being flexible is extremely important to preventing injuries both during exercise and in our normal day to day motions.
What a flexible belly dancer looks like: She always has good posture and alignment. Isolations of her torso, hips, arms, head, and wrists form complete shapes (like circles instead of ellipses) both small or large at her discretion. She has mobility in her spine to bend backwards or forwards, to twist or rotate.
You should work on your flexibility if you:
Experience stiffness or tension in your muscles including hips, neck, wrists, arms, and shoulders while dancing (not your joints, that’s something else!)
Have trouble twisting or rotating one section of the body (like your torso) separately and away from another (like your hips)
Intend to perform backbends
Want to improve the range of motion of isolations
Want to improve your body lines, your ability to extend hands, arms, torso, or legs to form beautiful poses
Remember that when stretching aim for tension in the working muscle, not pain! Deepen your stretch slowly and with control while breathing. Never bounce or rock in the stretch. It takes 30 seconds of holding a stretch for the muscle to begin to relax and lengthen, so try to be in the position for at least a minute.
1.) Your instructor has shown you what good posture is supposed to look like, but it feels really awkward for you to try and hold that alignment. You tend to slump back to what feels normal and comfortable pretty quickly.
Why: You don’t have enough core flexibility to support good posture and alignment. Your muscles are used to being in a contracted state and have therefore shortened, now they really have to stretch to hold good posture.
The Fix: Concentrate on good posture throughout your day, both at work and at home. Supplement your dancing with stretching for the core muscles, especially the upper back, shoulders, and chest.
2.) You’re working on a figure eight or circle for your hips or chest. At one point in the movement you feel a lot of tension, and if you push it too hard pain, in the working muscle. Your circle or eight isn’t completely ‘filled out’ either, because at the same point you pull back inside the trajectory of the shape to prevent tension or pain.
Why: You don’t have enough flexibility in that muscle to execute a full range of motion.
The Fix: Add this circle exercise to your warmup. Perform fifteen circles in each direction for each section of your body starting with your hips, moving through torso, then shoulders, arms, wrists, and finally head. Add extra circles if one direction/side feels more tense. For the movement your working on in the scenario above, find that awkward point in the circle or eight and hold it. Push gently into the stretch aiming for tension not pain, and breath deeply.
Extra-curricular study: The best thing for flexibility is of course Yoga! But any general stretching program will help, too.
Components of Fitness for Bellydancers: Endurance
Shimmies take a lot of muscular and cardiovascular endurance!
In the world of fitness “endurance” can be either muscular or cardiovascular. Muscle endurance is your ability to repeat movements without fatiguing, cardiovascular refers specifically to the strength of your heart. Amping up your endurance means aerobic exercise and lots of repetitive movements… in other words, drills, drills, DRILLS!
What a dancer with good endurance looks like: She can perform moderately strenuous dance moves such as traveling steps and shimmies for at least ten to twenty minutes without tiring. She isn’t always out of breath; most of the time she could talk while dancing if she wanted. She doesn’t run out of shimmy power by the end of class. She maintains good posture and alignment, even when she’s been dancing for awhile.
You should work on your endurance if you:
Notice your arms and posture tend to ‘deflate’ by the end of your practice
Feel out of breath while dancing or practicing drills
Always feel sore the day after a class or a performance
Tend to lose a lot of power to your movements after awhile (your shimmies run out of steam!)
1.) It’s hard to hold your arms up for too long. By the end of class, you look pretty deflated and your arm position might best be described as ‘chicken wings’.
Why: Your chest, shoulder, and arm muscles fatigue pretty fast if they are not regularly trained.
The Fix: Don’t let arm positions and movements take a backseat during your dance practice. Try to always be doing something with your arms, even if it’s just holding them in position. Switching positions, if you can, is better than dropping armwork completely. When your arms get tired take a break, but don’t forget to re-introduce them again a few minutes later. Want to kick up your arm strength even more? Introduce a veil to your practice. You don’t even have to dance with the veil, just holding it will be enough to make arms and shoulders work really hard!
2.) You do an awesome _______ shimmy… for about thirty seconds. Then it’s gone and your body feels kind of like Jell-o when you try to shimmy again.
Why: A shimmy is a very localized, but still very intense, demand on your muscles. They’ll fatigue quickly when you’re just starting to learn a new movement.
The Fix: Try cycling shimmies through several speeds to build muscle endurance. Start with a slow and large movement, refine to slightly smaller and faster, then return to slow and large. When you feel yourself getting tired try slowing down instead of stopping. It’s slightly less demanding for muscles, but they’re still engaged and therefore becoming stronger.
3.) Ten minutes or more or non-stop dancing to the music is certain to leave you out of breath.
Why: Your cardiovascular fitness, the ability of your heart to pump oxygen to your muscles, could be improved.
The Fix: You need aerobic exercise! Try to practice at least two or three times a week. Make a playlist of your favorite songs, ones that really get you pumped up, and dance without stopping for at least ten minutes. Incorporate moderately strenuous shimmies and traveling steps as often as you can.
Extra-curricular study: Aerobic exercise featuring repetitive movements is perfect for working on your endurance. Other forms of dance, such as Bollywood, can be really fun additions to your routine. My favorites? Walking/hiking and step aerobics!
Components of Fitness for Bellydancers: Strength
This modified side plank requires lots of core strength
Technically speaking, strength is the capacity of a muscle to exert force against resistance. In belly dance we don’t hold weights (although I have a pair of zills the size of tea cup saucers that might count); the ‘resistance’ is often gravity or even the weight of our own bodies. Belly dance is therefore only light strength training, but having strength is important for maintaining good posture and for clean isolations.
What a strong belly dancer looks like: She always has good posture and alignment. Her isolations are clearly defined and she can perform them equally well slowly or quickly. Her core muscles can support movements with a large range of motion. She can easily transition from standing to floorwork.
You should work on your strength if you:
Experience back pain during or after dancing
Want to be able to perform more advanced floorwork technique
Intend to perform back bends, especially transitioning to floorwork dropping through a back bend
Want to improve the precision and range of motion of isolations
1.) Your body seems to just deflate by the end of class. Your instructor is constantly reminding you to keep you chest lifted and your shoulders back. You experience lower back pain often while dancing, or perhaps even the next day.
Why: You don’t have enough core strength to support good posture and alignment, and to compensate other muscles are stepping in to do the work where they shouldn’t.
The Fix: Concentrate on good posture throughout your day, both at work and at home. Supplement your dancing with light weight training, yoga, pilates, or other core strength fitness routines (see below).
2.) You’d like to achieve greater extension with your torso movements (slides, circles, camels, back bends), but when you try to make your movements larger you feel off balance. Or, you can extend much further on one side than on the other.
Why: You don’t have enough core strength to support the movement (on either or both sides).
The Fix: Practice extending the movement to the point where you feel tension in the opposing muscle groups. Make sure you’ve maintained good posture and alignment. Hold in the extended position for ten seconds or until the muscle fatigues. Take a break and repeat.
3.) You’re working on an isolation that’s difficult for you. You vaguely feel like you can connect to the right muscle, but it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere when you ask it to move. It feels weak and heavy, like there’s an invisible wall preventing you from moving it.
Why: The muscle group you are trying to move is not strong enough to carry the weight you’ve asked it to carry (or you’re still having trouble connecting your brain to the right muscle, a coordination issue).
The Fix: The one’s the hardest to deal with, but as always practice can help. Visualize the muscle you’re trying to move, imagine it working. You might be able to place your hand on that muscle group to feel it when it contracts and releases. You might also try “isometric” (squeeze and release) contractions to help locate and strengthen.
Extra-curricular study: My favorite fitness programs to better my posture and and rev up my floorwork are yoga and TRX suspension training. Light weight lifting, core and abdominal exercises, and Pilates will work, too.
Components of Fitness for Bellydancers: Introduction
1 Comment on Components of Fitness for Bellydancers: Introduction	
A physically fit person can do more than just lift weights. There are actually several components of fitness including strength, endurance, flexibility, coordination, and balance. The good news is that belly dance (at least in some small ways) can be used to target them all!
Why should you care? So this is actually important! Not convinced? Okay, think of a move that you find difficult to execute. Maybe it’s a shimmy that you just can’t keep going (endurance). Maybe you have trouble getting your torso or hip movements to go where you want them (strength or flexibility). See where I’m going with this? In fact, often when we think we understand how to do a movement but our body just doesn’t seem to want to follow, it’s because we’re missing some component in our fitness.
What does this mean? Well, it means if you understand this process you can practice more effectively using techniques to target that component of fitness. Essentially, you can change the way you dance to rev up your strength, to be more flexible, etc.
A small disclaimer: There are often lots of reasons why we can’t successfully execute all the movements we’d like. This includes previous injuries, failure to locate the proper muscles, misunderstanding how to produce the movement, psychological resistance… the list goes on. I’m not presenting this as the silver bullet to all of your belly dance movement woes, but I have seen this theory work wonders when applied to my students. It can’t hurt to try!
Each component has it’s own page with an explanation of how to use it in your study of the dance: