Doing Sport Reliably via Dancing

post by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2024-12-20T12:06:59.517Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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For me, sport is important because it has a reliable anti-depressant effect. I also have more energy throughout the day. I also heard it helps with memory formation when done a couple of hours after learning.

I find dancing very fun. That makes it easy to start. It's also a good workout in itself. I got a lot more consistent at doing sports by starting the sports routine with dancing. This works because you develop the habit of just doing the rest of the workout without thinking about it after dancing.

My current setup works so well that I need coping mechanisms to prevent me from dancing too much.

The rest of the article describes in more detail what worked for me.

First, you need to get good enough such that dancing is fun. Here is a playlist with dance move tutorials. Learning the shuffle was the first thing I did (it took me a couple of hours). Once you get that you'll have something that should make it fun because it looks good and therefore makes you feel competent. You can then just try to make small variations to that basic move.

I converged on always dancing with Miku, watching videos from the Vocaloid 3D playlist. You can learn new dance moves by imitating Miku, and watch Miku being cute.

Except for the initial learning I basically never explicitly train certain dance moves formally (e.g. looping the video at a specific section and trying to "get it"). I just improvise like here, and try to imitate Miku without worrying if it's exactly correct. I think this makes it more fun.

I aim to dance ~21 minutes every day. Currently, afterward, I only do some stretches and pushups. Before I did a much more thorough routine after the dancing. I reduced it to see if I then need to sleep less.

I do sport in the evening (to get the memory formation benefits). But initially, I recommend you do it as the first thing in the morning, to make habit formation easier (waking up is a reliable trigger).

Some more things:

• Here is a playlist of the best non-Miku songs I found for dancing.
• Here is a playlist with some people dancing to get inspiration from.
• Having a large mirror (like a mirror wall that ballet dancers use) is useful to look at your own dance moves. Somehow this makes the entire thing a lot more fun.
• The larger Miku the better.
• At some point much later you may consider getting some special shoes for dancing (I use Crocs though). For shuffles, it can be useful to have shoes with thick dampening soles (to reduce stress on your ankles when jumping around). There are also special shoes (like the first guy here) that have an extra smooth front of the shoe, and a rubber heel, such that it's easy to do spins and move your foot around by moving your heel up. In the beginning though just either use socks on a smooth surface (be careful about slipping) or normal shoes (or put a sock in front of your shoe).

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