The dancer's workout: exercise order and intensity

When we write workouts for our dance population, whether it’s in-season or off-season, we have to pay careful attention to ensuring that dancers are exerting themselves in the right way at the right time. Because we use a superset type strategy for almost all of our clients, our workouts usually look something like this:

(A), (B), (C1), (C2), (C3)

The (A) exercise is usually some sort of power movement, like a dumbbell split jerk or a continuous hurdle hop, the (B) exercise is usually a full body strength movement like a squat or deadlift variation, and the (C1), (C2), (C3) movements are usually upper body pushes, pulls, and core work. We’ll also program (D1), (D2), and (D3) movements that sometimes are what are called single-joint exercises targeting one muscle group.

Single-joint movements are things like bicep curls, tricep extensions, and shoulder raises. If you watch people work out in a commercial gym, what you’ll often see is people working really hard on bicep curls, but skipping multi-joint work like barbell rows or pull-ups. But the way you ought to be thinking about these exercises is that your multi-joint exercises are your primary exercises and should feel like they’re the hardest. The single-joint exercises you should approach more like a bodybuilder or a physical therapy patient rehabbing an injury: perfect form with an eye toward a mind-muscle connection. When you’re doing a lateral raise, for instance, with dumbbells, you want to feel your deltoids, actually thinking about their role and sensing them fill with oxygen-rich blood. Think about the difference between moving a weight like this, where you’re feeling what’s happening, and executing something like a dumbbell split jerk.

You shouldn’t be paying attention to any specific muscles on a split jerk. You should simply be moving powerfully, paying attention to form, yes, but not individual muscles. Those (A) and (B) exercises are full body movements intended to give you the opportunity to express your body’s ability to move itself or big weights through space. The dumbbell split jerk, in other words, is more like performing than a single-joint muscle action is. When you execute several grands jetés during a performance, you’re not likely thinking specifically about muscles. This is not to say that those single-joint exercises aren’t important; they are. But you have to know when to think about full-body execution and when to think specifically about a muscle.

If you go back to the formulation above, you’ll notice that the way we organize our workouts accounts for when a dancer should be executing and when a dancer should be dialing into a specific muscle. The complex execution movements always come first in a workout. That (A) slot and that (B) slot are reserved for when the dancer is the freshest and when we just want her moving her body or moving relatively big weight. Sure, we might give a specific cue for her to think about while doing a goblet squat, but for the most part we hope that we’ve coached her well enough that it’s just about the work. As the workout progresses and we expose the dancer to more assistance movements, then we’re thinking about specifics. We might even cue toe activation during a single-leg calf raise, or maybe for a male ballet dancer who’s lifting overhead a lot we might offer a cue to work the long head of the triceps a bit more during a tricep extension exercise.

Another way of saying all of this is that we’re trying to help dancers avoid “majoring in the minors.” Big, athletic movements and big, full-body lifts are the majors. Those are the priorities during any given workout. The assistance movements—the “minors” in the coined phrase—are important but shouldn’t be done first when the dancer is freshest because that would limit a dancer’s ability to perform the big movements (the majors).

Knowing when to perform specific exercises, when to think about specific muscles, and when to just go! are all key aspects of learning how to train more efficiently and more effectively in the gym.