More on Consolidating Stressors
One of the first few blog posts we ever wrote in this space was a call for dancers to take an entire day off. No class. No “cross training.” No spinning. No treadmill. No yoga. An entire day off to allow the central nervous system and physical tissues a chance to recover from the stress of performance and life and relationships.
To get an entire day off, dancers need to learn how to consolidate stress, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately in a personal context. I recently reduced my training days from four days to three days per week. I’m 43, I co-own a business, and I train and program for a lot of clients. The cumulative stress of all of that had started to mean that my sympathetic nervous system was basically turned on all the time. I could feel this happening during meals even, when I would race through eating for no reason at all. I lived in “fight or flight” mode. Now, with more rest, I’m sleeping better, my workouts are more intense, and my resting heart rate is down to where it ought to be given what I know to be is my work capacity. I achieved more by doing less.
No one would ever confuse me for a dancer, of course, but there are some lessons ensconced in my personal experience. Dancers’ schedules are overwhelming, so finding an entire day off can be tricky. Here are some ways to think this through.
The Ideal World
In a perfect world, every dance company would have physical therapists, athletic trainers, dietitians, and strength coaches all on permanent staff. All of these professionals would work together to craft individualized plans for every dancer in the company. They’d meet regularly to discuss specific dancer concerns and their work would mutually reinforce one another’s. So, for example, as the physical therapist is rehabilitating an acute injury, that person would work in conjunction with the strength coach to figure out how to tailor the next month’s training program to work around the injury while still pushing strength and conditioning goals. The dietitian might weigh in on how the altered training program might shift caloric intake needs higher or lower, taking into account individual dancer food sensitivities or medical concerns.
All of these professionals would work with the artistic director to craft a schedule that maximized rest for the dancers. A particularly heavy studio day would coincide with a training day in the gym. The dancer would essentially have a “high stress day” (studio + gym) followed by a “low stress” day, where potentially the dance-specific work wouldn’t be as intense and the training protocol called for yoga instead of external loading with barbells and dumbbells.
The Real World
We all know the ideal world situation I’ve described above is a rarity. Artistic directors and choreographers aren’t likely to be coordinating their activities with a strength coach. So for the most part what needs to happen is ongoing conversations between dancers and strength coaches on any given day. “How are you feeling?” Depending on the intensity of the day and the subsequent schedule, we might push the intensity more or less. Conventional wisdom might suggest that dancers have more of a handle than general population clients on the physical demands they’re facing in any given week, but often the opposite is true. Dancers running a difficult piece of choreography might find themselves running and rerunning a piece in the studio in a way that takes them a bit by surprise. On those days if they have a strength training session scheduled, my job is to account for the unforeseen stress they encountered during their work day—but not cancel the session. It’s better to still move some, but perhaps differently, in the training gym than it is to postpone strength training to the next day. A hard day dancing followed by some lifting with a day off the next day would be better for central nervous system recovery than a hard day dancing, followed by a hard day of lifting the next day because of the near constant drain on central nervous system capacity.
Dancers sometimes will log an hour on an elliptical machine on a day off because they perceive this as a “low stress” activity that will help them burn calories. But they would have been better off training with higher intensity during their work week and taking a day completely off, confident that their nutrition plan and strength and conditioning work will keep their caloric balance where it should be. (And confident also that their low intensity cardio cup already is being filled by class and rehearsals). Fear, I’ve found, is often a driving factor in pushing overuse because dancers are cautioned incessantly about their body composition with little actionable advice around how to get to where they’re being asked to get.
Is Less, More?
Every once in a while strength coach Twitter (I don’t recommend it, for the most part) will blow up over someone’s innocuous claim about minimum effective dose for training and then someone else will say people don’t train hard enough and then the two sides will engage in a full-blown social media meltdown built upon a foundation of straw man arguments and the worst assumptions about other’s intentions. These kerfuffles are rarely useful, when in fact every great strength coach I’ve ever known has employed some variation of the same strategy. Train hard. Rest well. Eat well. Sleep. Hydrate. Monitor stress.
Strength coaches fortunate enough to have a dancer trust them with their artistic instruments need to always keep in mind that the dancer mindset is always to do more. Run it again. Cross train. Diet more. Cardio on the day off. Early morning yoga to stretch. So much of our work is to help dancers find the minimum effective dose, to rest their bodies, and to build confidence in a well-crafted, detailed, and flexible process. Consolidating stress requires all of this and great communication between dancer and coach. It’s not always easy and it’s often more art than science, but that’s literally the job when working with performers.