I have to admit that I never liked to dance. I’ve always felt self-conscious about how I danced. Maybe it was because I never learned how to dance, or maybe because when I was younger I was usually about 10-15 pounds overweight.
New research might be shedding some light on why I felt so self-conscious. It is widely understood that animals naturally use some kind of courting ritual that involves some kind of movement or “dance” – the source of the phrase “strutting your stuff”. Until recently, it was not clearly understood what was at work between humans on the dance floor.
Researchers at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom have devised a way to link the quality of a man’s dance moves to the quality of that man’s health as perceived by women. What they did was ask young men who where not professional dancers to dance to a simple drum beat while they recorded their movements and digitized them onto a uniform “avitar” and played them back to female viewers who rated their attraction to the person based on their movements. View a video of some of the dancers here.
Conventional wisdom has usually been that the key to good dancing was related to what the dancer did with their hands and legs. But the results pointed to a different factor. What was important to women was what the dancer did with their torso, neck and head – areas correlating to core body strength. Movements in these body parts also needed to demonstrate variability is speed and scale of motion, indicative of flexibility and creativity.
Bad dance moves were those that were repetitive and twitchy – the kind of dancing that I always felt I was best at!
Other research from Rutgers University correlates the attractiveness of a dancer with the symmetry of their body and movements. The thinking is that a more symmetrical body will be in better health, be better able to perform physical feats that include defense and hunting success.
Meanwhile, back on the dance floor, does any of this subjective observation relate to actual fitness? The researchers at Northumbria also drew blood samples from each of their male dancers. They found that the men who were ranked as better dancers also scored higher on the biochemical factors indicating quality of health.
As for me, what I do know is that when I dropped the extra weight and improved my general fitness, I certainly felt more confident out on the dance floor, even though my family still considers me a bad dancer.
- Paul Kulpinski, LMT
Sources:
BBC: Good Dancing May Be a Sign of Male Health, Scientists Say
