For a man with a serious back problem, J.J. Johnston has a whole lotta flash in his stage name, DJ Jimmy Jazz.

The Vancouver bus driver suffered for years from crippling back spasms, the legacy of a fall from a big rig when he was driving truck in his mid-20s. For the past 10 years, though, the 50-year-old has been spasm free. Part of the cure? Swing dancing.

"When I'm on the dance floor, the body pain is gone," Johnston, who also instructs and deejays, told the Georgia Straight. "I have no worries about anything.…If you're into dance, you're no longer going to bars to get drunk and no longer sitting in front of your TV or Internet, you're out dancing."

It's no secret that dance is great for you. Depending on the type of movement, formal dance burns between 170 and 700 calories per hour.

Naturopathic physician Juliet Ghodsian told the Straight it's a great cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and brain workout. If more people did it, we'd probably be healthier, as a city.

"Dance is a huge part of culture," said Ghodsian, who also teaches belly dance. "In western culture, it's been lost a little bit. Now it's so structured: you go to a dancing academy where you take dance lessons. I think people feel intimidated."

Ghodsian says that when she was in medical school, she danced "till my feet ached and I was dizzy" for stress relief and fitness. Now a new mom, she also notes that belly dance is ideal for developing pelvic-floor muscles for a healthy childbirth.

North America hasn't completely flushed formal dancing. Sukhi Ghuman, a founding director of the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration, grew up with the South Asian dance tradition. At weddings and birthdays, and on Saturday afternoons in friends' living rooms, Ghuman still dances the 500-year-old dance.

"It keeps me fit," Ghuman, who works in communications for Statistics Canada, told the Straight. "Being a working professional and taking part in volunteer activities, I find going to the gym very hard. But on the weekends, two or three hours in the living room makes up for it."

Since she formed a team in high school to raise awareness of it, Ghuman's goal has been to extend the reach of this very physical dance. On her performance team, she dances with a Caucasian woman, and she competes against dancers with origins around the world. At community centres, she said, there's even bhangra aerobics. Workout-wise, an hour of step aerobics and an hour of bhangra are pretty similar, she said.

Like other old-fashioned dances such as belly dance, flamenco, swing, and salsa, bhangra has stepped out of the class and onto the club floor. You won't find it at Richard's on Richards, but square dancers romp through Vancouver, too.

At 60, John McKinstry, the president of Squares Across the Border-the international gay and lesbian square-dance club-said he's too old for nightclub dancing, which starts at 10 p.m. Square dance, he said, is over by 10, gives him a great moderate workout, and keeps his mind lively.

"You don't have to know anything to go out on a dance floor and shake your arms up and down," he told the Straight. "There's huge benefits to organized dancing. [In a square with seven other people] you have to relate."

McKinstry has always danced. Growing up in Barbados, he was part of a culture where anniversaries, birthdays, Friday nights, and dinner parties were all excuses for his social circle to foxtrot, waltz, or quick-step. He learned the dances as a child.

"In the '50s and '60s, I think we had more time," he said, explaining why he thinks modern Canadians dance less often. "People are way, way busier now. Mom didn't work, so she had time to plan these things and be ready for them."

McKinstry credits square dance with one more benefit: community harmony. Squares Across the Border is often invited to dance with straight dance clubs. He pointed out that gay men and straight men will do-si-do together, and they don't think about it anymore. That's progress, he said.

"Square dance breaks down barriers," he said. "We're perceived as being normal. If [straight] people can say, 'Oh, they play baseball or hockey, or dance, they must be all right,' it's bullshit, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes."

What will it take to bring formal dance back to the centre of Canadians' social and recreational lives? According to Johnston, all it takes is one try and most people are hooked.

For the sake of our hearts, minds, communities, and muscles, that's a healthful compulsion.