Adolescent Dancers Need to Learn the Skill of Strength

What we’ve been seeing in the team sports world for a while is that the most elite players have access to quality strength training, strength training facilities, and strength coaches. In the dance world, where a big part of what separates the elite from the average is merely the ability to survive a cruel process, the idea of long-term athletic development has yet to really take hold. This is not just a shame, but shameful, and reflective of the lack of respect shown to the girls who sacrifice their bodies to create art.

Dancers should be strength training from a program

The dancers come in and work, and then they leave to go home and cook and eat and sleep and talk to loved ones and watch Netflix and go to bed on time so they can wake up the next morning and make breakfast and prepare for work and learn new choreography and meet with the costume designers and go to the post office.

Jason HarrisonFebruary 1, 2020Present Tense Fitnesslong-term athletic development, LTADComment

Good Strength Training is Good Connective Tissue Training

Parents of young dancers should seriously consider a long-term athletic development program that coincides with dance training so that adolescents build the year-over-year connective tissue strength that will pay off into adulthood. According to a recent widely cited study, “physical activity-associated bone loading both during and after skeletal growth is positively associated with adult bone mass.” Those early dance years are important for honing technique and developing passive flexibility, but these things needn’t be prioritized at the expense of strength or long-term health.

Big Words for Younger Dancers

This seems like a minor point, but part of coaching and teaching young people is seizing every opportunity to develop the person in front of you over time. The point isn’t to teach them everything you know about the knee joint in a quick aside, but to take the opportunity to expose them to a concept that hopefully will be reinforced over time. That’s a piece of long-term athletic development.

Jason HarrisonSeptember 14, 2019Present Tense Fitnessscience, terminology, long-term athletic development, ltadComment