The Health & Fitness Issue

It’s September, which means the summer hours are waning, the heat is beginning to cool off, and most colleges have returned to their daily regimen of classes and extracurriculars. 

It also means a new season of collegiate competitions. 

Finding it difficult to balance everything? Us too. When life is overwhelming, it tends to be our physical health that begins to take a toll. We sacrifice our sleep, our healthy drinking and eating habits, our physical limitations, all in the simple effort of making it through the next week, the next month, the next midterm, the next competition. It’s a game of survival, to try and balance collegiate life when you’re also trying to take dance seriously. 

It’s easy to focus only on numbers, tangible and seemingly finite — a number on a scale, a dress size, a pant size, the number of calories consumed in a day. In a world where you’re surrounded by petite, skinny bodies doused in fake tan, it’s easy to focus on being smaller, losing weight, eating less. What they don’t tell you as a newcomer, and what I had to learn on my own, is that dancing as an activity and not simply a competitive sport is much more about your physical capability, what your body can do, than physical appearance, how your body looks. Aesthetics are important in ballroom dancing, but so is passion, talent, and dedication.

This month, we’re going to try to provide you with some resources to help you focus on being healthy, physically and mentally.

Take care of yourselves, always. If anything, dancing should be a form of self-care.

— Carly Mattox, Editor-in-Chief