New Year’s Day is right around the corner. Many people  will be making resolutions to get in shape. If one of your goals for 2013 is to improve your dancing, and your overall fitness, it’s important to know where your personal starting line is. When we know where we are now, we can accurately look back a few months from now and applaud how far we’ve come. Small successes are the very best motivators! You […]

The psoas seems to have become the trendiest muscle in belly dance over the past few years. Now, I’m not saying that dancers are only now using it – but they sure do talk about it a lot more in the past 5 years.

Your mother told you to stand up straight. Your dance instructor reminds you to check your posture.  Thanks to your erector spinae muscles you can do these things! The erector spinae is actually a muscle group made up of many smaller muscles and tendons that attach them to your bones. The erector spinae group begins at your sacrum, the back portion of your illiac crest (hip bone) and your lumbar vertebrae at the lower back. […]

Learning how to shimmy is a huge challenge for many new belly dance students. Even if they come to Middle Eastern dance with several years of other dance training, most likely none of it prepared them for that small, repetitive movement that is so integral to belly dance styles.  When they sigh “HOW do you do that so fast?”, we usually tell them “Practice, LOTS of practice!”. It’s true, practice makes perfect – or at […]

Every dance class and workshop should start with an effective warm-up.  Our warm up helps us make the transition from resting to dancing. A proper warm up can reduce the risk of injury and even asthma attacks for those who are prone to exercise-induced asthma. About 5-10 minutes is all it takes to prepare our bodies to do our best in dance class. No matter what the activity, an effective warm up gets all the major muscle […]