Belly dancers use their torsos a lot-much more than ballet, modern or tap dancers. Only jazz dancers come close to our use of rib movements and undulations. These movements, coupled with shoulder movements, exercise the back muscles, and they exercise the muscles evenly. Strong back muscles prevent back injuries, and they promote good posture as well.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had times when I hurt my back a little bit working around our place and not only does belly dancing help me stretch it out and make it supple again, I’ll bet that having already been dancing for a while my back muscles were stronger and therefore limited my back injury to just kind of annoying instead of actually injured. In fact, the only times when I have hurt my back in my whole life happened after I had taken some time off of belly dancing. Coincidence? Hmmm, perhaps not…