5 Ways to Make Capoeira Part of a Healthy Lifestyle

By Kate Feinberg Robins, Ph.D.

At Find Your Center, our teaching is informed by research on learning and movement, as well as our many years of intensive training in the arts that we teach. For the next several blog posts, I'm putting on my cultural anthropologist hat to look at some of the research that helps us understand learning, movement, and the history of capoeira. 

Don't those apples look delicious? I've always found that the more I eat fresh, healthy foods, the more I crave them. The same is true with exercise and meditation, and particularly with the highly technical and physically demanding arts of capoeira and ballet. ​Once you experience that sense of complete immersion in what you're doing, that feeling of challenging your body to do things you didn't think you could, and the realization that with focus, persistence, and solid guidance, you CAN do those seemingly impossible things--there's no going back. 
 
What makes capoeira such a good fit for a healthy lifestyle?

​In their study of capoeira and aikido practitioners, Sports Scientist Dariusz Boguszewski and his team found that martial artists were significantly healthier than the average person. While many of the health-related behaviors they identified could be connected with any sport, they found 5 aspects of capoeira that make its practitioners particularly healthy:

1. Capoeira develops physical power, endurance, and coordination.
2. Capoeira develops mental concentration, balance, and flexibility.
3. Capoeira involves learning & following a strict code of ethics.
4. Capoeira results in fewer & less severe injuries than soccer, volleyball, or gymnastics.
5. Capoeira is a lifelong sport that can be practiced by people of all ages.

They also found that even casual martial arts students led healthier lifestyles than non-martial artists:

• Martial arts students had healthier nutritional habits.
• Martial art students sought out more health information.
• Martial arts students practiced more stress relief techniques.
• Martial arts students had healthier exercise and sleep habits.

 
At Find Your Center, we take a holistic approach to our martial arts and dance instruction. We value the process just as much as the outcome. As we guide you through the journey of developing your skills in capoeira, ballet, or flamenco, our primary goal is to help you become a healthier, more centered person. Join us to make capoeira part of your healthy lifestyle. 

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This post looks at Dariusz Boguszewski and colleagues’ 2014 article “The estimation of health-related behaviours of men practising aikido and capoeira” in Journal of Martial Arts Anthropology (14:2), pp. 41-46.

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