It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but I’d argue that the younger the dancer, the more important it is to have access to weights. Mature dancers or professionals are strong enough to do advanced bodyweight exercise variations that will still challenge them. But younger dancers often lack the strength needed to even complete 10 perfectly executed pushups, so for them it’s helpful to be able to develop shoulder and chest strength with lighter dumbbells that get progressively heavier.
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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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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.
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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?”