Dance Specific Strength Training

The dance medicine world is in the early stages of a big shift when it comes to cross-training principles as dance companies realize their legacy training systems aren’t enough and as more strength and conditioning professionals demonstrate an interest in ballet, contemporary dance, and other forms of movement-based artistic expression.

One of the most important points of contention is around the idea of “dance-specific training.” Joel Prouty, who is probably the most famous personal trainer to dancers there is, recently wrote a long Instagram post on the subject. There was enough in it worthy of discussion that I wanted to tackle it here, because the issues he raises are critical for the future of this work.

“We work to keep an elongated feeling and focus with every exercise we do. Whether you’ve got a heavy barbell on your back, a dumbbell in your hands, or a band around your ankles, everything is done with a long stretch, a strong foundation, and light feel.”

This paragraph is a pretty good encapsulation of what many people mean when they think dance-specific training for dancers. But there’s reason for concern, particularly if you think about having an “elongated” or “light” feel when your spine is loaded with a “heavy barbell.”

As you can see from the cover photograph of this Dance Magazine feature on Prouty, he practices what he preaches. Right there you’ll see a dancer (ABT’s Lauren Post) with what appears to be 65-pounds on her back in an arabesque. He’s loaded her spine, but she undeniably looks pretty.

The only problem is, looking pretty isn’t the point of strength training, and while dancers need to feel light and fluid on the stage, on the strength training floor often what they need both to keep them safe and to make them strong is tension. Mobility, stability, power, strength, and conditioning are the point of strength training. Our job is to give the dancers with whom we work the reserves of power, strength, and motor to do anything they want on stage, confident that they have more in the tank. The dance medicine research is fairly unequivocal about lacking strength and conditioning playing significant factors in high injury rates.

“When we put a ballerina in a squat rack and safely load up the weight, the [underlying] focus is obviously very different from the bodybuilder doing a similar exercise in the next rack. Although both have the ability to increase strength, balance, and power, with the added focus of being light in our aesthetic look, the ballet dancer will achieve a very different polished finish…not to mention completely avoiding hypertrophy (definition: an increase and growth of muscle cells 🤮).

This is the paragraph I woke up in the morning thinking about, because it’s the one I find most dangerous and most objectionable. This entire collection of words has no basis in exercise science. There are a lot of variables that drive hypertrophy—many of which we’re still trying to understand—but I’ve never seen any discussion around the “polished look” of a squat having anything to do with hypertrophy. What we do know is things like volume, time under tension, and nutrition are critical aspects of building larger muscles. Prouty subtly nods to this by saying in a parenthetical, “Also by adjusting variables to avoid a hypertrophic adaptation.”

So the science of this paragraph is shaky at best, but what I really object to is this use of the vomit emoji to punctuate “growth of muscle cells.” I want to grapple with the most generous form of the argument here, but I can’t fathom using that emoji in the context of a dance world that struggles as much as it does with disordered eating. And I can’t fathom including that emoji in that paragraph as a man, which can only be read as a tacit critique of any woman whose body doesn’t fit a very specific, very narrow aesthetic. Irresponsible is the most charitable reading of this possible.

“The other big difference is the way in which the exercises themselves progress. It’s a good idea to bring any exercise to the point of mimicking a “real life application.” In this case, ballet. If we go back to the squat, we can take a squat (similar to a plié) and progress it to include a relevé…then perhaps a passé…then even an arabesque and so on…” (emphasis added—see the NSCA quote below for why)

It’s important that good coaches look beyond textbooks for their work and understanding of the profession. But sometimes it’s also important to go back to the very basics to get an idea of where best practices come from. Here’s an excerpt from the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s (NSCA) basic text on strength and conditioning. (If you look around professional and collegiate sports, you’ll find a number of people with the NSCA’s Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist certification). Here’s what the NSCA text says about specificity.

“One of the most basic concepts to incorporate in all training programs is specificity. The term, first suggested by DeLorme in 1945, refers to the method whereby an athlete is trained in a specific manner to produce a specific adaptation or training outcome. In the case of resistance training, specificity refers to aspects such as the muscles involved, the movement pattern, and the nature of the muscle action (e.g., speed of movement, force application), but does not always reflect the combination of all of these aspects. Importantly, it does not mean that all aspects of the training must mimic that of the sporting skill.” (emphasis mine)

What’s interesting about Prouty’s paragraph is the argument is directly counter to what most highly regarded strength and conditioning professionals are doing with their athletes. Two of the most influential strength coaches in my industry and certainly upon the way we do things at Present Tense Fitness have been Eric Cressey (baseball and other sports) and Mike Boyle (hockey and other sports). A close reading of their approach to sport-specific training I think is a better way to go than the one advocated by Prouty in this post and in his other online work.

With some variation, both Cressey’s and Boyle’s athletes all squat, hinge, press, pull, jump, land, and sprint. The sport-specificity comes in with what they don’t have their athletes doing. With Cressey’s people, you’ll never see a baseball pitcher doing a barbell bench press, but they will press (they love the landmine press at his facility). And Boyle is famous for eliminating the barbell back squat from the strength training programs of all of his athletes. His argument is that the risks outweigh the rewards, and it’s one I generally agree with. What’s interesting about that is you have a man who coaches athletes like NHL hockey pros who doesn’t have his athletes back squatting, and then you have Prouty asking his athletes to do exponentially more complicated movements with a barbell on their backs.

“In exercise science, this specificity is referred to as the sport specific application and can be done with almost any traditional gym exercise.”

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.

Prouty has been at the forefront of legitimizing strength training for ballet dancers, and he has a worldwide audience that respects and admires him. He’s to be applauded for moving the ball significantly forward and getting the dance world more comfortable with strength and conditioning. I do think, however, that philosophically and practically dance medicine can and must do better than what he’s outlined in this Instagram post. We can make dancers stronger by better incorporating proven techniques honed across multiple sports across decades.

One final note. The barbell arabesque is a particularly egregious exercise for a ballet dancer. But I want to be clear that the danger isn’t necessarily an acute one. If you go back to that 65-pounds on the barbell in the Dance Magazine photograph, I don’t think that dancer is in immediate danger necessarily. But what could happen to her or someone like her is that over the course of years she slowly develops a lumbar issue. At that point the trainer can say something along the lines of “you must have done something in rehearsal.” When really it was set after set, rep after rep, day after day that set her up for a chronic injury. The danger then isn’t to the trainer’s career. It’s to hers.

And that’s why these discussions are so important for us to be having.