Looking for love? Try to wiggle on the dancef loor!

NEXT time you hit the dancefloor, don’t be shy and shuffle on the sidelines.

For scientists have found what moves the best women dancers make – and they’re not for the timid.

They discovered that vigorously wiggling your hips, arms and thighs is considered to be the most attractive to men.

And not only is it a fun way to boogie, but the experts believe these moves may also signal your fertility and availability to the opposite sex.

To identify the steps that separate the divas from the duffers, the team filmed 39 women shimmying to a rhythm of 125 beats a minute.

Using a computer, the dancers were then turned into three-dimensional figures. This was to pare the moves down to essentials only.

The scientists, from the University of Northumbria, then asked 57 men and 143 women to rate each dancer’s ability.

They found three movements were key to good dancing: hip swinging, and moving the arms and thighs in an ‘asymmetric’ way.

This involves each arm moving differently to the other – for example one moving vertically above the head, while the other moves side-to-side.

However, before you start throwing wild shapes on the dancefloor, they also discovered that a degree of restraint is required. For if the arms move too wildly, it looks ‘pathological’.

The researchers believe that the reason that these three movements – in the arms, hips and thighs – are so attractive is because they give an exaggerated impression of a woman’s femininity.

Therefore, dancing in this way makes her seem a better prospect to a potential partner. Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers also suggested that ‘fertility may be apparent in movement’.

Explaining why asymmetric movements are appealing, they said that bad dancers are less able to operate their arms separately. So, being a good dancer shows good co-ordination, a trait that could be passed on to offspring.

Associate professor Dr Nick Neave, who led the study, said that women are not only dancing to attract men but also to ‘show off to other women’. He added: ‘You are able to interpret a lot about a person from the way that they move.’