As a strength coach I ought to have a plan for when a dancer arrives in the studio, but I also begin every session by asking:
How the dancer feels right now
What the dancer’s week has been like
What’s yet to come in the dancer’s week
If for some reason new choreography has a dancer feeling unusually run down, I might change her program on the fly to accommodate for this reality. Because what matters isn’t getting in two quality workouts during the week, it’s getting in hundreds of quality workouts during the year.
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If you think of training on a spectrum of rehabilitory work to extreme bodybuilding or powerlifting, what you’ll begin to recognize is that athletic performance training falls somewhere in the middle. Athletes put themselves through movement demands that an untrained 9-5er going through physical therapy never does and also that the powerlifter responsible for only executing three lifts ever does. An athlete needs to be healthy enough to practice and compete consistently but also strong and powerful enough to practice and compete with the required intensity.
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Too many dancers skip the general strength and conditioning phase and jump right into the dance specific work, which is in part why studies on dancers tend to show that they lack both the strength and the conditioning their activity actually demands. This is the precise recipe for injury: asking the body to do something for which we haven’t prepared it.
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