As long as the dancer is strong enough and conditioned enough to get through their season relatively pain-free; to build longevity into their career; and to do all of these things without suffering from debilitating pain after they retire, then they're what we would call "strong enough."
So, if you're a dancer, you probably don't need to worry about getting "too strong." Just strong enough.
Read MoreStrength training is, in other words, an opportunity for the dancer to be fully who they are. Yes, it’s about strength and athleticism and injury prevention. But without hyperbole I think the most important thing about strength training for dancers is what it can teach them about their bodies. That’s simply not possible if you’re just replicating the unnecessary volume and repetition to which they’re already subjected.
Read MoreThe end result of this leadership insecurity is that all of the downsides are outsourced to the artists. They're the ones who have to dance through pain. They're the ones who have to face hip surgeries. They're the ones who must wade through a sea of toxic food and exercise "advice" from non-experts, hoping not to plunge into a fatal eating disorder.
Read MoreSo if you're pressing with 10-pound dumbbells, going up to 15-pound dumbbells is actually quite a lot! What might happen in this case is that 10-pound dumbbells feel easy, but 15-pound dumbbells feel really hard.
In that case what I do with a client is either:
*continue using the 10-pound dumbbells but increase the repetitions by one each week until we get to 3x15. Then we'll try the 15-pound dumbbells and see if we can get 10.
*make the jump to the 15-pound dumbbells, but reduce the prescribed repetitions to an achievable level. That might mean something like 3x7 (three sets of seven repetitions). And then each week I'll ask the client to do one more repetition.
That ends up looking like:
Week 1: 3x7
Week 2: 3x8
Week 3: 3x9
Week 4: 3x10
Read MoreGyms can be intimidating places. I’ve been working out myself in a commercial gym now that I’m living in New York away from our home studio in Dayton, and it’s easy to see why people associate certain exercises with “bro culture.” Today I watched a guy grunt and groan his way through deadlifts and bench presses. He didn’t clean up his weights, and he was occupying multiple precious spots in the gym simultaneously. No wonder that people, confronted with this kind of rude taking up space, would decide that neither the gym nor those specific exercises are for them.
Read MoreOne of the most common things I find myself "undoing" for clients (a lot of times it's dancers, but not exclusively so) is the "draw the abs in" cue. You simply cannot do this under the forces exerted by squat and deadlift variations. You won't able to create the intra-abdominal pressure needed to make these lifts safe, and you won't feel as strong or stable when attempting them.
Read MoreI can't do my job if you're not honest with me. I can't do my job if I don't know that you're walking in the door with pain. I can't do my job if you don't tell me that you had a terrible day at work (I don't need the details unless you need to share them) and don't have the capacity to focus on exercise. I can't do my job if you don't tell me that you haven't eaten since this morning and now we're about to do a 7 PM session.
Read MoreEarly in any workout, we make the body work as a unit. Squats. Lunges. Hinges. Plyometrics. The brain and muscles and connective tissue all working together toward a singular goal. Does that mean we never do a smaller movement, like a relevé? Of course not. But, our mission in the gym is to ensure that the lower leg has support further up the chain so that it doesn’t have to absorb the full impact of a jump and a landing. Our mission in the gym is to ensure that a dancer has the requisite shoulder strength and stability to be able to lift a partner overhead with reduced risk.
Read MoreHow many times have you heard of dancers who hit Nutcracker season, and then never really feel the same for the rest of their performance schedule? Some of this comes down to preparation--dancers ought to have structured in-season strength and conditioning--but some of it is also a failure of holistic application.
Read MoreMy overarching goal in this work is to challenge us all to rethink and rebuild our understanding of what it takes to ethically and efficaciously prepare dancers to carve out slices of beauty in a desperately ailing world.
Read More"Athletes' training plans also generally involve a 'taper,' or a reduction in overall workload for a certain period leading up to a big event, allowing time for recovery.
This is pretty much the opposite of how dancers tend to approach training, pushing hardest in rehearsal immediately before, and even the week or day of, a big show. 'It's almost like, if you can survive the process, then congratulations, you get to perform,' says Harrison."
Read MoreAnyway, what you see here is Dayton Ballet’s Katy Gilliam from last year doing a depth jump into a box jump as she was returning to dance postpartum. She’s teaching her body—and more specifically, her connective tissue—to decelerate. And she’s learning how to absorb that force, redirect, and then create force very quickly to jump onto the box.
Read MoreSo when a dancer learns how to get stronger than they've ever been; when they learn how their body can actually work; when they learn not to judge their bodies but to instead listen to them; when they drop a chalked up barbell on the ground with a smile and maybe even a little aggression, it can change their life.
Read MoreSpeaking strictly from a movement perspective, I think it's important to point out that dancers are no more special than any other high-level athlete. Pick the sport: if someone is doing it at a high level, then they are doing something remarkable.
So if we accept that dancers are athletes and that athletes must train smartly in order to achieve longevity and avoid debilitating injuries in retirement, then we also must accept that there are things we can learn from other difficult sports.
Read MoreBut what if we taught dancers not to ignore pain, but to pay attention to what it’s trying to say? How many more opportunities might we have to sharpen technique and elongate careers? Injuries are scary in part because the disassociation becomes more difficult, the pain impossible to ignore.
Read MoreWe can’t have it both ways in the dance medicine space. We cannot refer to dancers as “artistic athletes” and then deny them the tools that every other athlete uses to develop strength, power, explosiveness, and resilience. If dancers had unlimited time, then it’s possible that less efficient methods could be used. But we all know that dancers have the opposite of that: they’re overworked and crunched for time. Because of that it’s incumbent upon those of us charged with supporting them to develop and encourage the most efficient pathways to health, resilience, and performance. And that will always be tools like the barbell, dumbbell, and kettlebell.
Read MoreThe two biggest obstacles facing dancers every day are finite time and finite energy. The demands of the profession are too high and the potential risks of injury too great to apply random exercise to an already overworked professional. The organization structure outlined above—while in no way rigid—is intended to account for progressive overload (which is what will help make a dancer stronger) while avoiding unnecessary fatigue (which can lead to fatigue).
Read MoreWhat I tell myself if I'm feeling overwhelmed and don't want to work out is that if I can get in this one workout, then that sets me up to be able to skip the gym when or if I really need to. If I think too hard about all of the workouts I have in a week, or, to strain the analogy you saw coming at the beginning of this post, if I think about trying to create the Grand Canyon, then it's more likely that I'll sit at home and watch Hot Ones on YouTube (the Viola Davis episode is my favorite).
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