Dance specific or sport specific doesn’t mean you mimic the activity of the sport on the training floor. It means you identify strengths and weaknesses endemic to a certain activity and you try to make sure you round out an athlete’s abilities while enhancing what they need to perform at a high level. It doesn’t mean you make a dancer dance with a barbell, but it might mean understanding that dancers typically have trouble hinging properly, so you’ll work on glutes and hamstrings. It might mean for a female ballet dancer you recognize that she might have trouble “finding” her serratus anterior, so you include activation drills in her warmup before pressing movements. These are the things that make strength training dance specific.

Jason HarrisonDecember 4, 2019dance specific, Boyle, Mike Boyle, Eric Cressey Comments

You can't prepare for Nutcracker season during Nutcracker season

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.

Jason HarrisonNovember 2, 2019Present Tense FitnessGPP, general physical preparedness, periodization, Nutcracker, filling buckets, Mike BoyleComment