Social Wellness is the ability to successfully interact in a global community and live up to the demands of personal commitments. Health-Related Quality of Life is defined as a multidimensional concept mainly based on a person’s subjective judgment of physical, functional, emotional, and social well-being. It is considered an important public health research topic and could contribute to the detection of health problems beyond medical controls.
A friend and I commiserated over the holidays how to accelerate our goals….”ugh finding the time to exercise is so difficult…”. She had an ingenious idea “let’s join the YMCA and start going to Zumba class!”. I recalled going to Zumba many years ago, but hadn’t given it a second thought since. Since that day, 3x per week you can find me with a group in the studio moving to the sounds of electric music and smiling faces.
The curious person I am questioned “what is the draw?” Well, research predicted this response:
Gretchen Rubin from the Happiness Project says certain personality types: “readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectation.” For instance, they wouldn’t miss a work deadline, but they’d find it hard to find time to exercise on their own.” I noticed if I miss a class, the regulars nudge me and say “we missed you” which in some way draws me back each week.
If you prefer peer reviewed research published in the National Library of Medicine; researchers studied 65 sedentary middle-aged worker women ages 38+. Each woman completed a 16-week intervention randomly assigned to: dance fitness group based on Zumba Fitness classes for 16-weeks. The Research Team observed dance fitness intervention based on Zumba Fitness classes generated notable improvements in a wide range of Health-Related Quality dimensions in sedentary middle-aged worker women. Lastly, increasing fitness levels and improving body composition as a protective tool for health, has been shown to improve several important areas of quality of life such as sociability and emotional and mental health.
Public, Mental, Social, and Physical Health improvements all in one class? Well…. next class here I come.
References: Dance Fitness Improves Health-Related Quality of Health https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312518/; Outer accountability https://gretchenrubin.com/articles/how-to-set-up-accountability-as-an-obliger/ 7 Wellness Dimensions https://heartwhispers.cafe/
