You can't prepare for Nutcracker season during Nutcracker season

One of the things you’ll hear dancers say when they’re unfamiliar with the tenets of sports-style strength and conditioning is something along the lines of “if I have a piece coming up where I have to do a lot of partnering, I’ll do more upper body work.” Other variations include “I’ll do more cardio if I have a long, difficult piece” or “I’ll work my calves more if I know I’ll be doing a lot of fouettés.”

The instinct makes a lot of sense. You want to be strong where you perceive you’re going to be challenged during a piece. But it might not be the best approach for your strength or conditioning work.

Renowned strength coach Mike Boyle has a concept about “filling buckets” that drives the way we think about programming for dancers. It’s pretty simple: if you think about all of the attributes dancers have or need to have as buckets to be filled when it comes to training them, you want to try to identify the emptier buckets and fill those. So rather than having a dancer who’s grinding out dozens of fouettés a week do more calf work, we might be better off balancing out her anterior leg strength in a dorsi-flexed position. Her plantar flexion bucket—and thus, her calf strength bucket—already is going to be full or near overflowing.

Another way of thinking about this is that the time to prepare for all of those fouettés was over the summer break, not during the season. General physical preparedness (GPP) is a strength coach’s way of referring to a phase of training when you’re making everything stronger. In a ballet context, the women will be lifting for their upper bodies about as much as the men, and the men will be working their mobility about as much as the women. This phase of training isn’t specialized and is meant to prepare the dancer or athlete for whatever comes next. This is not to say that the training isn’t individualized, as it almost always should be. But the point of GPP is that you’re making everything stronger in order to build a more resilient body. Female ballet dancers might not lift overhead as much as their male counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need upper body strength in order to have a generally resilient body.

Once I’ve built a generally strong and generally fit body, it’s going to be in a much better position to handle the rigors of whatever choreography comes my way, which allows me to offset the potential damage done by repetitious in-season work. But If I’ve waited until I have to do a difficult 25-minute piece to try to build the reserves necessary to perform well, then I’m actually setting myself up for an overuse injury. Not only that, but I could be wasting valuable time filing a bucket that’s already full.

I’ll use another analogous situation to illustrate my point. One of the more common “injuries” we’ll see with general population clients is among new dads who develop elbow pain on one side of their body. The culprit? Holding onto a newborn with a flexed arm while walking around the house. The anterior muscles—biceps brachii—sit in a flexed position while holding the baby, overwhelming the posterior triceps. An easy remedy is simply to have that dad work his triceps more to even out the asymmetry of strength. Voilà! Elbow pain dissipates. The is a simplified, but real-world example of how working more of the thing that’s being worked can be a bad idea. Imagine if that dad had done a lot more bicep curls at the gym while also holding his baby around the house. He’d only be exacerbating his elbow pain.

Probably the most important point to be taken from all of this is that dancers need to be thinking about their calendar in yearlong increments. Your June or July workouts might seem disconnected from Nutcracker season, but that longterm development is what puts you into position to address individual needs in-season with the confidence that you’ve already been building a resilient body over months of work. You can’t prepare for Nutcracker season during Nutcracker season.