Rib Cage

Have you been told your upper body needs to be more active?!?

A dancer is always required to keep their upper body active. Understanding how to keep your upper body moving constantly can be difficult, especially when trying to maintain correct lower body movement. While dancing, you are required to keep your rib cage stretched and/or lifted. Understanding how this affects the other actions in your body is the long-term goal. In order to understand how your rib cage will affect the rest of the body, you must understand how your rib cage works independently. This will allow you to understand the range of movement you have in your rib cage, which will make the effects of maintaining lift in your rib cage more clear when combining with other actions. A common approach to creating upper body movement is to focus on using your latissimus dorsi (lats) muscles (which are used as well); often the lift and stretch of the rib cage can be overlooked. 

Enjoy the illustration below and click here to view exercises to help improve proper usage of your rib cage.