Dance-specific, Part 4,405
The ad nauseam debate among dance medicine professionals around what constitutes dance-specific training isn’t likely going to be resolved soon, particularly as some of the highest profile trainers to dancers continue to successfully market their methodology on social media. What we’re seeing is reminiscent of the questions surrounding New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s trainer, whose dubious claims around sports performance serve as a reminder that sometimes the way an athlete trains works despite, and not because of, the exercise and nutrition methods in use.
So I’m not interested in re-litigating whether or not a trainer should put their dancers in an arabesque with a barbell on their back while standing on a BOSU ball. What am I interested in, particularly for this piece, is focusing in on why we train the way we do. It comes down to one word: efficiency.
I was listening to a podcast on which Dr. Greg Rose was a guest, and he said something that reminded me why we decided to do what we’re doing with dancers. He was defining what efficiency means to him in the context of rotational athletes, and he cited three characteristics:
“Maximize power with the least amount of effort.”
“Repeatability.” (The athlete can throw the pitch in the same way repeatedly, for example.)
“Command.” (The athlete can throw the pitch where she wants, for example.)
Dancers aren’t baseball players or golfers, obviously, and Dr. Rose says in the interview that he doesn’t care whether the athlete looks good while they’re doing what they’re doing, as long as they’re efficient. Dancers obviously don’t have the luxury of not caring how something looks. Nevertheless, I think there’s something useful in Dr. Rose’s efficiency definition.
If you look at that first point, “maximize power with the least amount of effort,” what you’ll see if you work with dancers at the professional level is that they report feeling like they’re in better cardiovascular condition when they’re stronger and more powerful. It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? If you want someone to have the cardiovascular strength to execute big jumps toward the end of a difficult piece, wouldn’t you want to work on cardio? But it’s powerful legs with plenty of reserves that gives the dancer that feeling of conditioning, because one of the things athletes of any stripe learn through the process of strength is how to maximize power with the least amount of effort. Dancers can jump higher with less effort because they’re stronger and because they’ve learned how to do so more efficiently. Strength training is at least as much about creating efficient neural pathways as it is building muscle, bone, and connective tissue strength.
That point gets lost in a lot of the discussions around whether strength training will add dreaded “bulk” to a dancer. So much of the mechanism for increased strength is neural in nature. Sure, all things being equal, a bigger muscle is usually going to be a stronger muscle, but that doesn’t mean increasing size is the only way to make someone stronger.
I was talking to a long-time dancer with a well-regarded contemporary company, and he said something interesting about fatigue. He’s a strong jumper and his technical grounding in ballet is solid, so performing seemingly difficult pieces full of grands jetés is not as difficult to him as a less athletic piece with complicated timing. From a strength training perspective, what that means is I would need to give that dancer the general physical preparedness necessary to continue executing a late-performance piece full of intricate timing. The last thing you’d want to do is have a dancer under your care make it through several athletic jumps only to hurt themselves on something basic late in a performance because of concentration-induced fatigue. Or, put another way, if I can make his body a more efficient producer of power, he’ll have more reserves for the late-performance intricacy that tends to fatigue him more rapidly.
In sports, coaches know that, skill levels being equal, the stronger more conditioned team will win. In dance, as long as the performer has strong technique, their capacity to execute on stage will be greater if they are physically stronger and in better cardiovascular conditioning. Those are general attributes that can be developed safely and effectively with modern strength and conditioning methods, not dance-specific ones.