If the sunshine and milder temps of spring aren’t lifting your mood, we’ve got something that might do the trick: Dancing.
Aside from getting your blood flowing and your heart pumping, busting a move is a great way to get those endorphins going.
“So much of the world of joy gets stuck above the neck and intellectualized,” Radha Agrawal, the creator of the joy-sparking digital dance workout platform Daybreaker+ previously told Well+Good. “But we’ve actually found that a lot of real joy can come from activating the body-brain connection through movement.”
All you need to do is start moving to the beat. But if you don’t feel comfortable just freestyling it to your favorite tunes, a new 10-minute energizing hip-hop follow-along routine for Well+Good’s Trainer of the Month Club from professional dancer and Lululemon Studio trainer Amanda Baxter will get you stepping, jumping, and smiling.
Baxter will take you through six compound dance moves that you’ll put together for a short routine at the end. If that sounds intimidating, don’t worry: Baxter teaches the moves one at a time, and makes sure to review it all. Throughout, she focuses on feeling yourself, putting your own personality into the moves, and not letting something like a hand motion bog you down from grooving in time with the beat.
“With each execution you’re gonna get a little more comfortable and more energized,” Baxter says. “Give a little swag to it, give a little sass, a little attitude.”
You can expect to be hoppin’ it out and swirlin’ it up, doing low lunges with knee knocks, and a shuffle with throwin’ some elbows. Baxter will (helpfully) remind you to breathe, since she expects your heart rate to spike. Most of all, she wants you to be having fun.
“I wanna see those big, sweaty smiles,” Baxter says.
