Many people start Salsa because they want to be more active.
In this article I’m going to explore whether salsa dancing can completely replace the gym, and if it can cover all the bases for someone who’s looking to reach a decent level of fitness.
So if this is you, and you’ve either found the gym boring or difficult to stick with over the long term, read on.
What Should a Beginner Expect?
The first thing to realise is that Salsa classes are not specifically designed for fitness goals. This means that, unlike a typical well-constructed gym programme or exercise class, you’re not going to be getting a workout for the entire body.
A typical Salsa class or private lesson is designed to actually teach you the steps and moves so you can get on the dance floor and enjoy yourself.
For that reason it’s very likely that you’ll find your first few beginner classes are very low energy. Realistically you won’t be burning a huge amount of calories. This won’t matter if you are ordinarily very sedentary as you will still likely be doing enough to experience some cardiovascular benefits.
You’ll probably be stopping and starting a lot and repeating the same steps many, many times, however.
The repetitive nature of a beginner salsa class in the early stages means that your legs will be doing most of the work, particularly the calves and front thighs. You might even find you have quite a bit of tightness in the calves after the class and maybe the following day.
What Changes After 3-4 Weeks?
After the first few weeks you’ll find that you’re developing more of a repertoire. You’ll be learning a bigger variety of steps and partner work moves, and you may even be at the point where you’re starting to try a little bit of freestyle social dancing.
You may be finding that you’re not able to dance for very long yet, but your muscles will be getting used to the movements and your stamina will gradually be improving.
What changes as you gain more experience?
After a few months as your confidence grows you’ll find that you’re spending more and more time on the dance floor actually dancing and at this point you’ll be burning the amount of calories which can realistically lead to significant changes.
You now have a chance of actually seeing some visible improvements to your body shape and muscle tone.
The Thing No One Tells You
There’s one important thing that you need to be aware of, and that’s the fact that at some point you’ll probably start to plateau. Your fitness results and the progress you make in your salsa will both start to slow down.
It’s natural to be a little concerned when this happens, and feel a bit frustrated.
This is where dancers start to wonder what they really need to do to keep the results coming and to continue progressing with their dance and fitness goals.
The truth is that the limits in your salsa technique exactly reflect the limits in your body’s current physical capabilities.
Things like balance, speed of footwork, ability to spin, and the ability to dance without feeling dizzy all depend on things like your core strength, your foot and ankle strength, and the strength of the muscles in the hips. Your leading and following ability is often dictated by how well you are able to use your upper back muscles and hold the correct amount of tone in your arms.
In other words the strength, the core stability, the flexibility, and the mobility that you have or don’t have are what will enable or inhibit better salsa technique.
So it follows that if you want to improve your salsa technique then you need to start strengthening your muscles in a way which will help your dancing.
Often this doesn’t really happen through typical gym-style programmes because the muscles are used differently when we dance.
This is something that I often cover with my clients when they reach that plateau stage in their journey. The good news is that the routines I give them not only address the ceiling that they’re trying to break through in their dance technique, but also give them many of the more aesthetic body shape goals that they’ve been looking for all along.
So if you’re looking for an exercise modality that can replace the gym, and salsa sounds like it might be for you, then you can get started by booking a Discovery Session.