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.

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