Mid-Season Thoughts

Happy New Year to everyone who reads. We’ve been busy expanding our studio space to accommodate a semi-private training model so that we can train multiple people on our gym floor simultaneously while maintaining the individualization necessary for us to “coach the dancer in front of us.”

Another thing we’ve been working on is our Dancer’s Guide to Strength and Conditioning, which has morphed from a mostly written text to a living library with dozens of videos, coaching cues, and a sample training program. (We can’t wait to share this all with you when it’s ready). In other words, the end of 2019 was a busy time at Present Tense Fitness.

With 2019’s Nutcracker firmly in the rearview mirror, I thought I’d share some thoughts as we’ve made our way through so much of the performance season.

Train the dancer in front of you, but notice the patterns

Professional ballet. Professional contemporary dance. High school dance. College dance. Men. Women. We’ve worked with a nice variety of dancers in our studio this year, and one of the striking things is how similar a lot of their concerns are. A continued epidemic in the dance world is lack of direction.

Lose weight.

Get stronger.

Jump higher.

I suppose the New Year is a good time to point out that these outcome type goals are no more useful as directives to dancers than they are as goals for general population clients looking to get fit to start the year. Dancers need process goals, and they need specificity. I’ve yet to meet a dancer who doesn’t know she needs to be stronger, but I’ve met plenty who’ve been given no realistic path toward getting there. I think one of our goals as professionals who support these artists is to never tell them to do something that we can’t support with some degree of specificity. So instead of “get stronger,” we ought to be saying things like, “it appears as though your posterior chain is weak, which is causing you to have these performance issues. Here is a specific program that will help you develop hamstring strength and mobility.”

Keep getting stronger

In the sports world, the strength coach community largely has coalesced around the idea that athletes need to continue to try getting stronger during the season. While in-season strength training is more accepted now in the dance world than it used to be, the idea of pushing to get stronger in-season might not be.

We’re not necessarily talking about improving someone’s one-rep max on an exercise, but rather taking detailed notes on all of a dancer’s lifts, such that we know whether she is improving her eight-repetition landmine press. One easy mistake to avoid is simply walking into the gym and lifting the same repetitions for the same weight every time one walks into the gym. If we plan accordingly, we can make sure the dancer’s lifts are improving while also giving them the rest that they need throughout the season.

Pay attention to menstrual cycles

Female dancers can’t change their dance schedules according to their menstrual cycles, but we can certainly pay attention to them in the gym space. We have most of our dancers incorporating deload weeks, which is an intentional reduction in workout intensity every fourth or fifth week. For women, it can be a good idea to sync that deload week up with the approximate week of the month when they feel their worst with regard to menstruation.

The logic is pretty straightforward. While every woman will have a unique experience with her menstrual cycle, we know that there usually are a few days in every given month when everything feels more difficult. That’s not a great week, then, to have the most intense gym sessions planned. If you’re going to be deloading during the month anyway, why not allow it to coincide with when one’s body needs the rest? Dancing, rehearsal, acquiring new choreography, company politics. These are are stressful aspects of living the life of a movement artist. If we can dial back some of that stress just a little bit with good planning around menstrual cycles, it seems like a pretty easy way to do it.

In-season conditioning is situational

We’ve not seen much use during the season for dedicated conditioning work. In the off-season, we use conditioning to prepare dancers for the rigors of performances, but once performances begin their conditioning often takes care of itself. What dancers sometimes perceive as “being out of shape,” is often a sharp reduction in jumping power. Early in the season or early in the show, the dancer feels strong and confident jumping and landing. Late in the season or late in the show, the dancer struggles.

The answer isn’t more elliptical. It’s usually “stay strong throughout the season.” (See above).

But this isn’t an ironclad rule, of course. Every time I see one of the dancers who works out at our studio I’m asking them questions about what their work week looks like, what their choreography entails, and what they “feel” like they need. Sometimes we might sprinkle in some conditioning work during an odd gap in their dance work when they might not be dancing as hard or there might be more standing around than usual. In this instance we’d be using gym-based conditioning work as a bridge between intense dance work.

But the one way we’re not using conditioning is to try to rush to get a dancer in shape for a difficult piece in-season. Once the season starts, if a dancer already isn’t in the condition she needs to be, rushing to try to make that happen with a lot of cardio is probably a recipe for wearing that dancer down. That’s where early off-season conversations around schedule, the previous year’s performances, and educated guesses about the coming year are critical.

Don’t ignore mental and emotional health

I’m agnostic about what people do to maintain their mental and emotional health, but fairly dogmatic about the idea that they should be doing something with regularity. Meditation, yoga, journaling, baths, intentional time with friends. These strategies can help limit the extent to which a dancer lives in his head around roles, and spotlight, and company politics. Insecurity lurks in the dance world, so the artist who is able to employ some type of mental health framework regularly puts himself in a position to be well in-season. We necessarily focus on the physical health of dancers because of the high injury rates associated with the art, but the mental and emotional piece of living well deserves more attention if we purport to care about the dancer as a multidimensional person.

Dancer’s Guide to Strength and Conditioning

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