Time-Bound Metrics for Strength are Useless
Every once in a while I’ll see strength recommendations for dancers that are time-bound along the lines of “dancers should engage in two to three hours of strength training per week.” Advice of this sort pertaining to strength training is almost meaningless when it comes to athletic populations. Strength training for dancers and athletes should be needs based, not time-based.
I’ll take an extreme example to illustrate my point, and then apply the thinking directly to dancers.
A powerlifter’s goal is to execute three lifts as heavily as possible: squat, deadlft, bench press. Powerlifters aren’t concerned at all with aesthetics, and they’re not really much concerned with being able to move in different planes of motion well. In competition, it’s all about those three lifts and getting as much weight on the bar as possible.
On the other end of a lifting spectrum you might say are bodybuilders. They’re nowhere nearly as concerned as powerlifters are with strength, because their only goal is being as big and as lean as possible. Lifting for max strength and lifting for max hypertrophy/leanness look completely different. (Hypertrophy and leanness, generally speaking, have much more to do with workout density and volume than using maximally heavy loads.)
A powerlifter might do seven sets of three repetitions at 75 percent of their one-repetition maximum, resting for as many as five minutes in between each set. Let’s say lifting the weight three times takes 15 seconds. Over 21 repetitions, you’re talking 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Let’s say the powerlifter also rests for four minutes in between each set of three. Across seven sets, she will have rested 24-minutes. This means that 30 minutes of her workout is going to be consumed with just one lift.
In 30 minutes, your average bodybuilder is going to get through multiple exercises, with rest intervals sometimes at one minute or shorter, depending on whether she’s incorporating supersets.
The point is, time intervals aren’t created equal in a strength training setting, so setting time-bound parameters tells a dancer almost nothing about what they should be doing to prepare their bodies for the rigors of artistic movement.
The dance medicine community is trying hard to establish science-based guidelines for training as a defense against the ill-conceived and often injurious training methods steeped in tradition. But there is an extent to which we can over-quantify and end up underserving dancers in the process.
What we’ve found in our studio is that almost every dancer we’ve worked with benefits greatly from two strength and conditioning sessions with us per week. Those sessions are full body in nature, and can run anywhere from 30 minutes (usually in-season) to an hour and fifteen minutes (off-season). Dancers who are less skilled in a weight room require more coaching and thus might face longer sessions, whereas someone with a history of strength training might be able to get in and out with a bit more efficiency.
The problem with setting time-bound parameters for something like strength training is it sets dancers up for mindless movement. What if a dancer get through a workout in forty-five minutes? Does that mean she should continue doing stuff for the sake of it? Or she should get out of the gym, go cook a well-balanced meal, and perhaps get to bed? What we’re constantly trying to do in our studio is see how much we can accomplish with dancers in as little time as possible, because time itself is one of the most important variables in a dancer’s lifestyle.
The powerlifter/bodybuilder dichotomy I set up above isn’t directly applicable to dancers, who would lie somewhere in the middle of that false continuum I established. But, instead of thinking through time, think through what movements a dancer needs to be going through in any given training week, and then make those movements happen in as little time as possible. Again, we’ve found that we get most of what we need to get accomplished in two training sessions of varying lengths.
Dancers need:
Power, jumping, and landing
Knee extension movements (squats, lunges, step ups)
Knee flexion (hamstring-specific curls, Nordics, glute/ham developer work)
Hip hinges (deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, kettlebell swings)
Horizontal pushing (chest press variations)
Horizontal pulling (row variations)
Vertical pushing (shoulder press variations)
Vertical pulling (lat pulldown and pullup variations)
Conditioning
Dancer-specific rehabilitative or preventative work
That’s a lot to pack into just two sessions! But that’s where the use of supersets can really be beneficial, which itself can obviate the need for a lot of stand-alone conditioning work. If you want to get someone’s heart rate up, try giving them a set of walking lunges followed by an overhead press and a dumbbell row. If I followed that by another superset with a different three exercises, the dancer might not need to do any more and could potentially make it through that training session in as little as 45-minutes.
Most importantly, we must always return to the central question that dancers ought to be asking: are you able to physically do what you need to do in the dance studio? If the answer is no, then some sort of strength and conditioning intervention is needed, and that ought to be based on the gaps existing the dancer’s physical ability, not in some random amount of time.