If you're uncoordinated, awkward in movement or in handling things then maybe you should take up ballet.

Researchers from Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology suggest found that joining a ballet class may help with clumsiness by improving balance and coordination in daily activities. They also revealed professional ballet dancers' years of physical training have enabled their nervous system to coordinate their muscles when they move more precisely than individuals who have no dance training.

Ballet allows the nervous system, which is composed of the brain, spinal cord and nerves throughout the body, to communicate and coordinate with each other, such as the brain controlling movement of the leg muscles.

For the study, researchers examined whether long-term training to enhance physical coordination, such as dance training, affects how motor modules are recruited when moving. They compared the movements of professional ballet dancers with 10 or more years of ballet training to individuals with no dance or gymnastics training. Gait and activity of muscles in the legs and torso were tracked as the subjects walked across the floor, across a wide beam and across a challenging narrow beam.

They found that ballet dancers and untrained individuals had similar gait patterns when they walked across the floor or the beam. However, when walking across the narrow beam, ballet dancers showed better balance by walking across farther. Ballet dancers recruited more motor modules and did so more consistently than untrained individuals, indicating that ballet dancers used their muscles more effectively and efficiently, the researchers stated. The ballet dancers also used more of the same motor modules when walking across a floor as when walking across the beam compared with untrained individuals, supporting that training can affect control of every-day movements.

Based on their findings, researchers concluded that years of ballet training changed how the nervous system coordinated muscles for walking and balancing behaviors.

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Neurophysiology