Dancer Strength and Conditioning: Movement Quality Matters
A few days ago I posted a video of me doing weighted chin-ups on Instagram with the following caption.
Generally speaking, I don’t argue a lot about approaches to strength and conditioning online. There’s usually not a lot of good that comes from it. I’m much more interested in seeing different people’s approaches and understanding the logic behind their why. So much of what we do as coaches comes down to preference (outside of the most obvious things pertaining to keeping people safe).
My approach to chin-ups and pull-ups, for example, is to cap my reps at 5. Someone else might not do that, and they would have good reasons for it. But I like 5. I like 5 perfect chin-ups. Slow. Controlled. Maintaining the hollow body position.
When 5 becomes easy? I like to weight them.
What I’ve noticed in my own training and coaching others is form tends to break down on these the more repetitions people do, even when they’re strong.
So that’s why I like 5. I wouldn’t write a dissertation on it. But I like 5, and these are my totally subjective reasons.
Tressie McMillan Cottom , whose work has deeply impacted the way I not only live but conduct my business, commented on the post. So did another sharp-thinking, accomplished, academic follower, whom I’m also lucky to have engaging my work, saying that she sensed an essay on the horizon.
Smart people are smart in part because they’re curious, and what I inadvertently stumbled into with what I thought would be a throwaway post on a Sunday afternoon was a bit of a challenge that I read a little bit like, “No, you’re going to have to explain yourself.”
So, this is that.
There’s a continuum in strength and conditioning with brute strength but questionable form on one end, and perfect form but not a lot of strength on the other hand. (For our purposes here, we’re assuming the best form of these poles, so think about maybe an elite powerlifter on the one end and advanced physical therapy on the other end). What we try to do in our work with dancers is find the right spot along that continuum, because we don’t get a lot of time with them. We have to make them as strong as we can in about two hours a week, but we cannot get in their way as performers. So we give them multi-joint, multi-muscle exercises that make them stronger (squats, hinges, pushes, and pulls) and we program dancer-specific exercises to keep them healthy (hip internal rotation drills, breathing activation work). Together, these brute force and rehab-type prescriptions help us accomplish as much as possible within the finite amount of time that we have.
The connective tissue between the brute force work and the rehabilitative/preventative stuff that we pack in is movement quality. It matters as much on the brute force work as it does on the smaller joint articulation movements. This is why we’re such advocates for strength and conditioning coaching in the professional dance world: artists can actually make themselves more susceptible to injury if their only focus is fitness and strength in a way that ignores movement quality.
The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research published an important study back in 2015 that perfectly illustrates this point. “Exercise-Based Performance Enhancement and Injury Prevention for Firefighters: Contrasting the Fitness- and Movement-Related Adaptations to Two Training Methodologies.”
Researchers broke the firefighters into three groups (all of the.participants in the study were men, which is really something that we shouldn’t be doing anymore in S&C research):
Control group
Movement-guided fitness (strength and conditioning with targeted movement coaching)
Conventional fitness (strength and conditioning without targeted movement coaching)
The way to understand the difference between groups two and three is to think of group two as having someone check your form, while group three was simply following a program. “Both training interventions comprised 12-week periodized exercise programs designed to improve firefighter fitness but differed notably with regard to the attention placed on how each exercise was performed.”
At the end of the 12-week program, the researchers tested the firefighters on a range of “whole-body” tasks not specific to the training interventions to test the carryover effect from the strength and conditioning work.
Groups 2 and 3 outperformed group 1, but what is really interesting is that group 2 exhibited safer movement patterns during the whole-body testing. Not only that, but 43 percent of the group 2 movement-emphasis participants exhibited only positive training effects, compared to 30 percent of the fitness-only group. Another way of saying that is that almost two-thirds of the fitness-only group had some negative side effects from their training, such that they learned poor movement mechanics that became apparent when asked to do other tasks.
If we think about what we’re trying to achieve with strength and conditioning for dancers, it’s not that we want them to be the most prolific weight lifters. We want to help them develop characteristics that will make them more adaptable to a wide variety of choreography, which is a function of both fitness and movement quality. Movement quality notoriously breaks down as dancers get tired, so we do need to make them stronger and more fit. But that can’t be the end of it: if we ONLY make them more fit, we could be leading them down a path of greater susceptibility to injury.
This study shows that exercise could be an effective tool to reduce musculoskeletal injury risk, provided that generalizable movement-oriented instructions and feedback are used to reinforce “protective” behaviors (e.g., “maintain control of frontal plane knee motion when.”). Conversely, the data here suggest that emphasizing physical fitness alone may not reduce occupational injury potential, as these same protective movement patterns are unlikely to emerge without directed efforts to transfer these exercise adaptations. Despite showing significant improvements in fitness, the FIT participants were also found to change their movement behavior in ways that could increase the risk of sustaining a future exercise-, training-, or fireground-related injury. The degree to which exercise adaptations transfer is most likely individual-, task-, and program-specific. However, the finding that firefighters who received movement-oriented exercise instructions and feedback were less likely to use “risky” movement behaviors in unrehearsed tasks is promising
Which leads me back to those chin-ups. Movement quality tends to break down the more repetitions people complete on chin-ups, and it’s easier as a coach to hold someone accountable for five progressively overloaded chin-ups than it is for twenty. If I add chains or a weight belt to a dancer performing chin-ups, then I can keep making them stronger while ensuring their movement quality stays high. That accomplishes the task of making them stronger, enhancing their movement qualities, and keeping them safe when they’re asked to complete an overhead task in which they have to maintain lumbo-pelvic stability.
Coaching matters. Preprofessional dancers who can afford it ought to try working with a strength and conditioning coach early on to learn how to move well in a gym. Professional dancers who can afford it ought to work with a strength and conditioning professional at some point even if they think they understand the gym. (Men, that goes for you too. I know y’all think you “know what you’re doing in the gym,” but I’ve trained enough people to know that each and every one of you could benefit from coaching oversight). It’s time that we stop separating the concept of dance training from physical preparation. There’s just an overwhelming amount of academic research and real-world results to suggest that they’re one and the same.