Dancer Cross-Training
The primary problem we believe we’re trying to solve with training dancers is the finite nature of time and energy: dance is such a skill-intensive endeavor that it requires a lot of time and energy of the artists. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon the strength and conditioning professional to design and implement periodized programs that help make dancers stronger while not adding to the cumulative fatigue that is the source of too many injuries.
If you’re a longtime visitor of Present Tense Fitness, you might have noticed that all of our old blog posts are gone. Eight years worth of work! With an inadvertent slip of the keyboard, I managed to erase all of those old posts. But, what that does is afford us the opportunity to start fresh and present to you how we think about dancer strength and conditioning today—which has changed significantly over the several years we’ve been engaged in this work.
So, with these first few blog posts, I want to reintroduce who we are, how we approach this work, and what you’ll be seeing over the next several weeks.
Present Tense Fitness (PTF) is a group of strength coaches in New York City and Dayton, Ohio, who specialize in training professional and pre-professional dancers. I’m Jason Harrison, the co-owner of PTF, and I’m based in New York City, where I train dancers from New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem among many others.
The PTF approach to dancer strength and conditioning is similar to the approach strength coaches around the world take with athletes of myriad types. We believe taking the best practices derived from the team sports world and applying them to dancer populations allows us to blend the most innovative exercises science techniques with the received wisdom of dance cultures spanning back centuries.
The primary problem we believe we’re trying to solve with training dancers is the finite nature of time and energy: dance is such a skill-intensive endeavor that it requires a lot of time and energy of the artists. Therefore, it’s incumbent upon the strength and conditioning professional to design and implement periodized programs that help make dancers stronger while not adding to the cumulative fatigue that is the source of too many injuries.
That’s who we are, and that’s what we do. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about our approach in more detail, including how we’re currently thinking about plyometric training, cardiovascular conditioning, strengthening, and mobility.