Bad posture can cause other problems in life. Never too late to fix a posture. People at late age do so when doing yoga or tai chi. So why not with Tango. Not only will it help with dancing but also with general life.
Excellent point that's often lost in talk of musicality, vocabulary, and good dance technique that's no good for the body (of which there is a lot . . . ask a ballerina).
When I started tango in 2013, I'd been working at a desk job and doing little more active than walking (to be fair, a lot of walking) for 18 years. I suffered from tension headaches due to FHP and costochondritis caused or aggravated by a "closed" chest posture. Yet by 2015, one of my private teachers said he could tell a tanguero was approaching from several blocks away, before he could recognize my face, due to my good posture. It took just two years of tango to sort out 18 years of painful habits.
Unrelated, I was prehypertensive when I started. Now I'm not. Just the exercise of dancing and working on dance for 15-20 hours/week – and probably the associated relaxation, although I cannot prove it – took care of that.
This is my top argument for tango dancers to focus on athleticism – on matters like balance, endurance, flexibility, posture, precision, speed, and strength. I was fortunate to start with speed and strength, but I gained in all of those other areas . . . and had fun doing it! Unfortunately, some dancers seem to focus on pure-dance work like steps, musical phrasing, and toe-pointing, and then wonder why they're not really advancing as dancers. They're putting the cart before the horse.
Most people until well past 80 or 85 can hold a good posture.
I dance with women in their 80s who have better posture than the majority of women in their 20s and 30s. Of course, part of that is that 80-somethings probably didn't spend as much of their life hunched over a desk or a computer, while the young women walk around with their head perpetually bent into a phone . . . Also, love it or hate it, the 80-somethings date to the "charm school" era, and did active work on posture, like walking with books balanced on their head. I think that's now seen as passé.
Most AT posture related issues in dancing are not age related.
They are largely related to people deciding to dance steps without the balance, flexibility, and precision that are prerequisites for them, so they force themselves into contorted postures to kind-of, sort-of fake it without falling over or taking a misstep. It's also related to trying to jump on musical phrasing despite the lack of necessary speed and precision, leading to more contortion. I see it all the time.
One guy asked me not long ago how on earth I did something or other, and I explained the technique, to which he replied, "Well, it must be nice to have a body like yours. Mine would fall over." Which struck me as hilarous, as I'm working with a small paunch, a busted-up ankle, an abdomen that has been opened up and stitched back together twice (leaving me with severe scar tissue), and 45 years of inactivity prior to tango. It just takes a couple of years of
not taking shortcuts but instead working on posture and its friends to work around such things.
