Fitness

• Dancers require physical fitness to excel at their craft. The physical rigors of dance pose a risk of injury that has to be managed by dancers throughout the dancers' lives, but this is balanced by the benefits of being in shape. According to a study at the University of South Carolina, people who work in sedentary occupations are 64 percent more likely to die from heart disease than people who are active for most of their workday. Dancers are active throughout almost their entire workday, and good health is the result.
  
  

Schedule

• The hours a professional dancer works functions well within the lifestyle many people want to live. Typically, during rehearsal periods dancers work long days with evenings off, but once performing in a show their days are left free with a show in the evening. This leaves daytime hours to seek further work and for free time. For dancers with young children, free days often mean being able to look after a child during the day while a spouse or partner looks after the child in the evening.
  
  

Skills

• A study of professional dancers in Australia was conduced by Professor Elizabeth More of Australian Catholic University. She concluded that one of the assets professional dancers develop is a wide range of different types of intelligence. While some people only get to work strongly on developing language or mathematical competency, dancers develop these and many other types of skills during their career training. They learn music, how to work well with people, spacial awareness, awareness of their bodies and more. This training creates highly intelligent, highly skilled people.
  
  

Future Opportunities

• Dance is a hard career, and the physical demands of the profession often lead to relatively short professional careers. However, the good news for dancers is the training they receive as dancers qualifies them for other professions after their dance careers are over. Professional dancers become choreographers, coaches and instructors for other dancers after completing their own professional careers. The best in the industry find lifelong work in the dance industry.