Positional Breathing for Dancers

Progressive overload is one of the most basic tenets of strength and conditioning. Introduce increasingly difficult stimuli to tissues (muscle, bone, connective) and your body will react by building stronger tissues.

But because sound movement isn’t just about strength, we need to apply the principle of progressive overload not only to building stronger and more resilient tissues, but also to alignment and posture. In other words, we want to be able to train dancers to maintain good, healthy positioning even while under stress.

To think of a simple example for why this is necessary, look at the propensity for male ballet dancers to suffer from shoulder injuries and back injuries. The obvious culprit is all of the overhead lifting male dancers are asked to do in traditional ballet settings, but have you ever stopped to wonder why? Sure, a shoulder is going to be under stress during an overhead lift, and the same can be true for backs. But why should such movements lead to injury?

The answer? Poor relational positioning between the ribcage and the pelvis. If a dancer is lifting his partner overhead but allowing his ribcage to flare and his pelvis to dump into an anterior tilt, then chances are he neither has the shoulder stability nor the lower back stability to execute the lift safely.

So how do we teach him to do that in a low pressure situation?

Positional breathing.

The whole idea around positional breathing is that if we can learn the proper orientation of our ribcage in relation to our pelvis, then we’re going to gain greater movement capabilities in our limbs (legs and arms), while keeping our back safe. An added benefit—not at all ancillary to the movement quality—is better breathing, which in turn will help a dancer work harder for longer periods of time.

To go back to the example of male ballet dancers, if we can hold them accountable in the gym space for maintaining proper ribcage and pelvic orientation, then often we’ll reveal limited shoulder range of motion—but that’s a good thing! We know how to increase someone’s ability to flex at the shoulder joint, which in turn will help guard against both shoulder and back injuries. But if we allow him to borrow range of motion from his spine by allowing his ribcage to pull away from his hips, we allow him to hide that shoulder deficiency. That is, until it reveals itself as a nebulous “shoulder impingement” diagnosis or low back back pain.

Here are some progressions you can use to help teach dancers to maintain a good relationship between the ribcage and the pelvis, all while reinforcing sound breathing.

Step One: Rockback Breathing — No movement involved

Step Two: Bear Position Breathing — Breathe while stabilizing

Step Three: Walkout Breathing — Breathing with movement

Step Four: Bear Position Row plus Breathing — Breathing with loaded movement

You can see how in the examples above we’re applying the idea of progressive overload, but instead of applying that principle to increasing weights or volume, we’re applying it to maintaining sound positioning under increasingly difficult circumstances.

These progressions are another great of example of why we don’t believe that strength training for dancers needs to look like dance. None of this is pretty, but all of it will help provide a solid foundation for quality, safe movement and quality breathing, both of which mutual reinforce one another.