Pedantic much?I didn’t say anything about strengthening. I clarified my question by responding toPhilster,specifying" if one is in overall good shape / has low body fat". In other words, if you don’t have a big tire of fat around your mid section, are belly dancing excercises considered effective for “exposing a lean, strong abdominal wall”. It’s just a question for curiosity’s sake so no need to exert anymore effort on it.
I apologize. My mistake.
The closest I’ve gotten to a belly dancer is in the Hawaii Five-0 opening theme, so I went looking for it on you-tube. To my surprise, there seems to be a much newer version of it. I didn’t know this show made a come back.
Anyway, the belly dancer shot is only about .03 seconds long in the new version’s opening theme, but it looks like she’s a bit thinner than in the older version.
In the 70’s version, the belly dancer has nearly an entire second of screen time and it’s clear that she’s vivacious, supple and curvy, which is what I thought women were trying to be. For this, you need to have a significant layer of body fat. Is the OP’s BF expecting skin on muscle and washboard abs? That seems really unappealing for a belly dancer. Imagine it: a belly dancer with no belly.
Mine looks more like a keg 
It depends entirely on what degree of lean, strong abdominal wall you want exposed. When I was belly dancing I had fabulous obliques. (Like this: tummy) but not a six-pack. I xdon’t actually think I could get my body fat low enough to get a six-pack, actually - at least not without liposuction of the belly area.
I think how lean looking you can get really depends on your body type - I’m an hourglass and as such I carry weight in my boobs, my butt and my belly.
I still don’t understand what you are asking. Is it
- Is belly dancing a good way to develop attractive muscles? That is, do most belly dancers have what would be attractive muscles underneath the fat?
or
- Is belly dancing a good way to burn off fat in order to expose the muscles you have?
I suspect the answer to the first question is yes, but no more so than many other exercises. The only advantage belly-dancing might have is that it’s fun, and so a woman might be willing to belly dance a lot more hours a week than she would be to do crunches (or run).
I suspect the answer to the second question is no, both because belly-dancing is going to burn fewer calories than many other forms of exercise (though, again, if you are willing to do it for longer, that’s worth a lot) and because you are seriously underestimating what it takes to lose enough fat to have actual exposed abs–especially for a woman, and especially for a woman with a tendency to carry her fat in her stomach. It’s not a matter of a big ole spare tire obscuring the abs: it’s a matter of a quarter-inch layer of fat blurring them out. For most women, getting rid of that last quarter-inch takes a great deal of work, and you need to be doing a significant amount of strenuous exercise and pretty serious eating restrictions to get there. I’d go so far as to say that belly dancing on a very serious level would be a problem simply because of timing: for a woman to have exposed abs, she’s probably putting in a couple of hours a day of aerobic exercise; to be a serious dancer, you need to be practicing a couple hours a day. Hard to do both.
Everyone has abdominal muscles, but no-one has “six-pack abs” without specifically exercising them.
I have pretty close to zero body fat, I’ve been skinny my whole life. I’m now 46 and have the same body I had when I was 18, minus a few scars. But I’ve never consciously exercised in a trying-to-build-muscle way, so I don’t have a six pack. Even at my thinnest, when I was very ill a couple of years ago, my belly didn’t look like an underwear-model-guy’s belly. It looked flat. Not “ripped”.
Six-pack abs are unnatural in the sense that no-one had them (apart from body-builders and, possibly, a handful of people whose work required them to do the sorts of things that build up abdominal muscles) until recently. They’re not normal, they’re abnormal. Regular normal non bodybuilder/model guys don’t have them by default.
Big Oriental dancing fan here (that’s the preferred name, not belly dancing. It’s not so much PC as it is reminding the unaware that it is not “shady stripping for the overweight”). Most active Oriental dancers (I mean ones that do it regularly, even if not professionally) will actually have some good abs, but, and this is where I love it, it mixes very gracefully with their natural curves. Most Oriental dancers tend to have Michelangelo-style bellies, not “muscle bitch” bodies. It’s called taste.
I have seen some thin girls dance, and apart for a few exceptions, where the talent of the dancer is such that it trumps everything, they dance with a serious disadvantage, that is they start with a handicap in sensuality. You cant be all straight lines and pretend for curvy sensuality.
One thing that I love about Oriental dancing is how it can literally transform an average looking girl (or even a rather unattractive one) into a Lilith. I remember the first time I attended a class (wasnt trying to enlist 
), the music came, and suddenly, dozens of girls, over which I would never have lost a second noticing in real life, became the center of the universe for me. This thing is magic.
And of course, since being sensual is all about exhuding confidence, a lot of their charms comes from this. They know how to move (the dance is more about the hips than the belly) like no one else.
So no, they actually have firm bellies, they’re just keen on keeping their curves.
I don’t know, because hula dancers seem to have.
sigh
That’s a hula dancer. It’s Hawaii* Five-0.*
As for belly dancers … when I was an Anthro major in college, the going theory was that the practice developed as a way to prepare women for childbirth. It arose with the nomadic desert peoples of the Middle East, and as you might imagine that’s a hard life for someone pregnant & giving birth. Strengthening those muscles – not just the abs but the whole midsection – and those undulating movements could go a ways in helping ease the process.
As others have said, though, the LOOK of the midsection has NOTHING to do with how strong it actually is.
By the way, the idea of “toning” is a myth, and it’s not a distinction between strong muscles with fat and strong muscles without. As stumptuous.com says, there is only muscle building and fat loss. That’s it. I do agree, though, that the modern idea of a “six pack” and an uber-flat, even concave, belly is an artificial construct. You can MAKE the human body look that way through a lot of work, but it’s not an indicator of absolute strength/fitness and it’s not natural. Look at the athletes and fitness gurus of any time up through the '60s. Jack LaLaine, the guys who played Tarzan who were Olympic swimmers, etc. They had bellies that are totally out of fashion now, but they could pick you up and throw you into next weel.
I have the six pack
…Just unfortunately am missing the plastic thingy that holds them all together
Every instructional video I’ve ever seen seems to take advantage of the jiggle. So color me surprised when people say it isn’t necessary.
All the ones I’ve seen, it seems even the ones that look toned have a jiggle. Maybe their muscles are what jiggles.
OK, I can sort of understand where the OP is coming from, because…yes…this year, after a hiatus of nearly 30 years, I’m working at a Renn Faire again.
Well, at our Renn Faire there are a disproportionate number of “gypsy belly dancers” (being ever-so common in Elizabethan England…right…but I digress). And since I’m working all day (giving sword fighting demonstrations for 4 hours, and walking around being a general nuisance the other 4) I get to see, chat with, and work with these dancers. And a very large number of them, more than 50% of those over age 20, have tummies which are very large, and which actually hang over their beltline, like I commonly see among 40-something year old male executives at work. And it’s not that these are obese women either, nor even overweight - many of them have well-toned and even stick-thin arms and legs…with a tummy that looks like it belongs on someone with a BMI twice what they actually are.
So…selection bias, purposeful body shaping, or some sort of unintended side effect?
ETA: yes I’ve read this goddamn thread too, and the other one. I’m mainly sharing why people may think they don’t have toned bellies.
I think it’s maybe that a lot more women have figures like that than you realize, but it’s generally considered undesirable, and so women with that sort of figure actively conceal it most of the time through things like clothing choices and foundation garments, and also by outright avoiding things like bathing suits. Lots of women carry their excess fat around their stomachs and will be stick thin everywhere else before the pooch even begins to go down. Belly dancing is really about the only place where that shape is celebrated, and so it’s the only place where you see it (and it may well also attract women who feel unattractive in other contexts).
Only in French, where the word oriental refers to the Arab Middle East and North Africa. (It doesn’t have that meaning in English.) Danse orientale being a direct French translation of Arabic raqṣ sharqī, literally ‘eastern dance’. In Arabic, raqṣ sharqī is the standard term for it. Belly dance, rightly or wrongly, is the standard term in English.
There are two terms in Arabic. Raqṣ sharqī refers to the glitzed-up “cabaret style” that is popular internationally, which is what non-Middle Easterners think of as belly dance.
Raqṣ baladī is the original dance style of the common people which lacks the foreign influence of the cabaret style. Baladī literally means ‘of the country’, with connotations of unpretentiousness, of the ordinary everyday people you’d meet in your neighborhood. The nearest equivalent in English that I can think of is the Southern U.S. expression “down home.”
However, athletes have always had a six-pack.
Lots of examples show toned, rippling abs in ancient statues.
Ancient statues are idealised versions of the human physique. They’re not accurate depictions of real human figures and they were never meant to be.
Yes, it’s true that some people had six-packs in ancient Greece, because body-building was popular in ancient Greece. Just like it is in the modern day.
However, without working on exercises to build them up, nobody has a belly like like that, then or now. What Claire Beauchamp writes is absolutely correct: washboard abs are not natural, they are created artificially. There may have been jobs that required people to do things that coincidentally led to washboard abs, and they were observed and reproduced because some people think they look good, but bellies do not look that way without deliberate effort to make them look that way.
Someone like me, a skinny person who has never deliberately done an abdominal crunch in his life, does not have washboard abs; he has a flat belly without the defined “six-pack” of the body builder. That is what a normal not-fat and not-bodybuilder belly looks like. Nothing like the idealised versions you see in ancient Greek sculpture and modern magazine ads.
This thread has been going on for a long time. As has been stated above, and which statement I shall reiterate: they are fat, the one’s who don’t have “toned” bellies. Your body doesn’t give a shit about how many crunches you can do, but about your body-fat. The reason is, indisputably, that the belly-dancers are too fat for you to see their muscles. No cite needed – it’s common knowledge.
Besides, why is having a “6-pack” a desideratum for a female? I contend it is not. Just shed the fat and your average belly dancer might have smaller tits but be more “toned” – not my preference, but not a problem if that’s what they desire.