Dance-specific, Part 4,405

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.

How choreography changes your strength training

This shift in programming is temporary to accommodate the reality of professional dance, and it returns us as reality always does to the phrase we can’t say enough: strength and conditioning professionals working with dancers must always be dancer specific, but not necessarily dance specific. Dance specific suggests that two ballet dancers have the same needs, but as we’ve seen repeatedly the needs of two dancers working through different choreography or with vastly different physical concerns require individual training program variation, perhaps especially during the performance season.

Jason HarrisonJanuary 25, 2020Present Tense Fitnessstrength and conditioning, choreography, dance specific, dancer specificComment

Dance Specific Strength Training

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

Strength Training "Fillers" for Dancers

But a person-specific program can’t be downloaded from the web. A person-specific program involves questions like:

“What kind of feedback did you get over the summer?”
“What’s your biggest weakness as a dancer?”
“Do you have any chronic injuries you’ve struggled to keep at bay?”

Jason HarrisonAugust 3, 2019Present Tense Fitnesscoaching, dance specific, dancer specific, programming, programComment