Strength Training: A Maintenance Plan for Dancers

The homework we most often assign to the dancers we work with involves breathing and core control (often breathing to facilitate core control) while articulating around some joint. Today’s blog post gives you several examples of what these drills actually look like.

Hip drills

90/90 Transitions — The goal of the 90/90 transition is to move your hips through a full range of motion both in internal rotation (what dancers often neglect) and external rotation (what dancers often have plentifully). The way to think about 90/90 transitions is that these are for healthy hips, not necessarily expressive hips. Now, these two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive, and if you want sustainably expressive hips with wonderful turnout, you’re going to need healthy hips to do that. But the way to think about this drill is that you’re doing it so that you can move without pain over the long term.

Sidelying Pullbacks — This is probably the execise I’ve assigned as homework to the most dancers over time. You know that front side “pinching” feeling women often get trying to execute a beautiful développé? Often times that pinching sensation arises because the femur is sitting forward in the hip socket. This drill is intended to directly address that. Again, think of this as a “healthy hip” movement that can lead to greater expressiveness as well.

Sidelying Knee to Knee — This is another homework assignment we like to give dancers. You’ll notice the point of this is to get opposite sides of the body to work together while maintaining proper alignment. This is critical for longterm hip health (again, therefore, expressiveness).

Upper Body Drills

If you’ve been following our work for a while, you’ll know that pain in one area of the body often originates in a different part of the body. So, for dancers who partner, for example, lower back pain can actually be the result of poor shoulder range of motion, or poor coordination between the ribcage and the pelvis. Here are some exercises we assign to address those things.

Scapular Reaches — This exercise directly targets a muscle called your serratus anterior, which will promote healthy movement of the shoulder blades on the ribcage. If you’re a dancer who must lift a partner over your head, this ability is critical.

Midback Sqeeze — What does it mean to have healthy shoulders and a strong back? Well, it’s not just about “being muscular” or “working out.” A big part of it is being able to access all that you need to access in order to move well. This midback squeeze exercise is one that will humble a lot of strong people, because the fine movement and alignment necessary are CHALLENGING.

Everything you’ve read about here are examples of why strength training for dancers doesn’t look like what a lot of folks think it looks like. Yes, it’s about getting as strong as possible while balancing all the myriad competing demands on dancers’ time. But it must be a combination of big lifts, like squats and lunges and pushes and pulls, with “smaller” stuff like this. That combination, and not a needlessly narrow devotion to one or the other, is the sweet spot for dancing strong; for dancing sustainably; for dancing powerfully; for dancing with time and energy and space for being both a human being and an artist.

By the way, if you like these exercises, we have an affordable monthly subscription service that you can follow throughout your dancing season. It contains these exercises and so many more that we assign the dancers we work with. Read more about it here.