According to a 2015 study by the UK University of Brighton, you can burn up to 300 calories in just half an hour of dancing. If you compare it to figures from Harvard Medical School, it makes vigorous dancing a more efficient calorie burn than swimming or even running at a slower pace. But according to a new study of aging adults published in the journal Neurobiology for learning and memory, there is an added benefit to dancing as an exercise that prolongs the increased fat burning, and it is something that proponents of aerobic dance lessons like Zumba may already know. Researchers say that dancing more helps to strengthen your brain health and specifically sharpen your memory well into old age.
To reach their conclusion, the research team from Rutgers University gathered a group of African-American volunteers, all over the age of 60, and divided them into two groups – one who led a sedentary lifestyle and the other who devoted two hours – long aerobic dance lessons each week for 20 weeks. Some of the participants underwent brain scans, which focused on the medial temporal lobes of the brain (which contain memory), and all underwent a series of cognitive tests along the way.
The study revealed that the dancers had a different brain activity – what the researchers would describe as more youthful brain activity – than those who did not. “The coaches performed better than before on a test of their ability to learn and retain information and apply it logically in new situations,” he explained. The New York Times, paraphrasing Mark Gluck, Ph.D., Professor and Laboratory Director at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers. “This type of flexible thinking involves the medial temporal lobe and tends to decrease with age. But the older workouts scored higher than in the beginning, and those whose brains showed the newest interconnections now surpassed the rest.”
Of course, this is not the first study to shed light on the health benefits of exercising on an aging brain, but it is a breakthrough to help us understand how certain types of exercise drive the brain to reconnect the brain’s ability to stay more powerful and effective.
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