Dancers looking to increase their length strength and resilience against lower body injuries know that basic movements like squats, lunges, and hinging can help them. Once they master these basics, dancers often are looking for progressions that can help them . The way this often gets manifested is as greater complexity or difficulty, and so today I wanted to show you some “advanced” techniques that can inform leg strengthening while saving the valuable brain space needed for dancing.
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The biggest takeaway from this discussion? Even if all of us might not agree on an exercise, you should always do an analysis not unlike the above around why you’re including an exercise in a program. If you can’t justify an exercise beyond “I thought it was cool” or “I saw this on Instagram and wanted to try it,” then you’re at risk of wasting valuable time in the gym. That’s time and energy in particular that dancers don’t have to waste.
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Remember, your glutes play multiple important roles: they are powerful hip extensors, they are powerful hip external rotators, they are powerful hip abductors (moving legs away from the body—here we’re talking specifically glute medius and glute minimus), and they keep the femur in the acetabulum of the hip. Given the extraordinary mobility dancers often have in their hips, it makes sense in a training sense to also give them a bit of the stability they can lose over the course of a performance season.
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Every strength coach will tell you that they evolve over time, but at this point I can tell you that I’m certain training the posterior chain for dancers is going to be something that evolves for us over time. Dancers cannot afford not to have easy neuromuscular access to these muscles, and yet there is a risk to loading hinge movements in order to target these muscles when the proper work hasn’t been done to ensure sound biomechanics. This is where early off-season work, when dancers are still recovering from the rigors of performing, can be critical to drilling good form as a foundation for loading later in the summer. But if the loading happens before the form is established, strength coaches could inadvertently be steering dancers into injury.
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My selfish hope would be for the Eurocentric beauty standards that have dominated the traditional ballet world to die. But in the meantime, we know that we can train every dancer in a way that will allow them to build a stronger, more resilient body without the muscle hypertrophy that dance traditionalists fear.
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