Flamenco Classes forming now in
East Idaho!!

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2021 FLAMENCO FALL
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Flamenco Dance Promotes
Good Health

As reported 12-1-2007 by Lisa Buckingham
Flamenco for Core Stability
Flamenco is excellent for posture. This is achieved by keeping a long, straight spine, shoulders back, tail bone tucked under and the core-stability muscles around the middle pulled in and up.

Flamenco for Upper-body strength
You have to keep your arms above your head for long periods with flamenco, moving them in graceful twists and sweeps. This quickly develops long, lean muscles in the arms and shoulders.

Flamenco for Beating osteoporosis
Weight-bearing exercise is key in helping to prevent this bone disease. The stamping movements and higher frequency of travelling steps boost preventative benefits, as they increase the load on bones.

Flamenco for Fitness Levels
The fast pace and dynamic, explosive moves of flamenco boost heart rate and stamina, and make it an excellent calorie burner

Flamenco for the Feel-good factor
Flamenco is a highly expressive, passionate, rhythmic dance. The combination of a chance to express emotion and its visible body benefits can seriously boost self-esteem
As reported by Dan Ketchum
What Kind of Workout is Flamenco?
At its core, flamenco dancing – like any type of vigorous dance exercise – gives your body a cardiovascular workout. Put simply, cardio exercise causes both your heart rate and breathing rate to increase, which encourages weight loss and leads to improvements in the circulatory and respiratory system. Each style of dance provides a different type of workout, and the vigorous, lower-body intensive flamenco style is no

Muscles Worked
The signature stamping motions of flamenco gives lower-body muscles such as the calves, hamstrings and thighs a hearty workout. On a secondary level, flamenco works the upper body, as it tasks you with holding your arms above your head and performing sweeping motions with them. To maintain the elegant posture essential to flamenco, you'll need to engage your core muscles as well. While dance exercise won't bulk your muscles up to bodybuilder proportions, it does help tone and define them.

Calories Burned
Compared to other dance styles, flamenco offers a highly rhythmic, vigorous and lively technique. With activity comes calorie burn, and flamenco is no slouch in that department. According to estimates from “Fitness Magazine,” an hour of flamenco dancing burns about 290 calories. Your burn may vary based on your body weight and the intensity of your
workout.

Cardio Benefits
Performed as part of a regular cardiovascular exercise routine, flamenco dancing may prevent heart disease, reduce blood pressure and regulate your body weight. Regular cardio also leads to increased endurance, healthy blood sugar levels, a stronger immune system and even reduced stress and improved sleep patterns, among other benefits.

More Benefits
Because flamenco requires you to keep a straight-backed posture – specifically, an elongated spine with your shoulders held back and hips tucked in – it encourages healthy posture outside the dance floor. Flamenco's footwork puts a load on the bones of the lower-body, increasing bone density and helping stave off conditions such as osteoporosis. The complex footwork of flamenco encourages concentration, and its focus on expressing passionate emotions may even have a therapeutic effect.
What Kind of Workout is Flamenco?


Flamenco Good for Children, Adults & Seniors!

Alive Magazine ~ Written by Carmen Romero, October 2008
Flamenco is an art form that can contribute, in a fun way, to healthy aging. Get the facts about colourful Flamenco culture.

Flamenco–dance, music, and song–is a living art form originating in Southern Spain. Celebrating the amalgamation of people from diverse cultures, creeds, and stages of life, flamenco is an art form that nurtures the mind, body, and soul. One needs merely the courage and the desire to explore.

As a dance artist, teacher, and former therapist, I have gained an appreciation for the many and varied benefits of the flamenco art form. Whether one chooses to dance, play guitar, or sing, flamenco demands a body trained to move, a mind trained to concentrate, and a soul trained to navigate its emotional content.

Triple Treat
Flamenco is expressed through the triple vehicles of dance, music, and song and offers physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits.
Dance A series of repetitive exercises such as footwork drills, arm elevations, and hand- and torso-twisting combine to challenge gross and fine motor skills and muscle memory.

One learns to isolate movement, strengthening each part of the body while refining proprioception, an inner sense of our bodies that informs us to know how, where, and what each part of the body is doing at all times.
Guitar While learning to play flamenco guitar involves mainly fine motor activity, it offers many of the same benefits as flamenco dance. Neuroscience research is beginning to show that the brain can continue to grow throughout life. However, it needs to be challenged to do so. Flamenco is an art form that can contribute, in a fun way, to healthy aging.
Psychologically speaking, cognition refers to the way in which we process information. In flamenco, one must be able to maintain concentration and be able to divide attention to learn and remember movement sequences and chord progressions.

Song
When dancers and musicians progress to a stage where interpretation of the song is required, a whole new set of skills begins to develop and the doorto culture and tradition opens.

Songs originated from poets and dynasties within different regions of Andalusia. One must research, view performances, and listen to the music in order to learn about the culture of flamenco song, and become familiar with the differences in order to interpret them.

Once in motion, dancers always need to know where they are within the song. They must keep track of the tercios (divisible sections of the song) and listen closely to the caida del cante (fall of the song) to know when to “punctuatewith movement.”

Dancers intellectually navigate, organize, and interpret song information. They associate physiological responses that must accompany the reaction to the song. The same holds true for the flamenco guitarist. Furthermore, this needs to become an automatic response so that one’s soul comes into play and colours the physical sights and sounds with emotion.

Triple Discipline
I coach and encourage my students and fellow artists to continually work on many levels of consciousness. One part of the brain is alert to the actual physical environment (the floor, the ability to physically endure the dance, and knowing when to rest or move explosively).

Another part of the brain–memory–needs to keep track of the music, while yet another controls endurance in a way that permits dancers to sink into the body and access their emotional world.

For some, flamenco is a way of life; for others, it is a temporary escape from the norm. For all, it is an expressive art form that feeds the mind, body, and soul, and fills the world with beauty.

Serious Fun for Adults
Adults and seniors can equally experience benefits from all that flamenco has to offer:

  • Relieves stress, thanks to the concentration needed for repetitive movement
  • Improves balance–known to universally deteriorate with age
  • Wards off memory loss in older adults by continually challenging their brains through learning about new cultures, new dances, and new songs
Child’s Play
For children and adolescents, getting to know their bodies through dance enables them to understand and navigate the world around them:

  • Helps to build self-esteem
  • Prepares them academically, as movement has foundations in math, science, language, and social studies
  • Teaches them about feelings–to be able to enjoy happiness and tolerate sadness
- See more at: http://www.alive.com/lifestyle/flamenco/#sthash.Zo9gwQL7.dpuf