The Clipboards Tell the Story…

I remember the first day of the Spring 2025 NYCB groups, I laid out clipboards with a personalized program and a cheap pen attached. One of the company soloists was the first to walk into the training space, and when I handed him his clipboard, he said, “wait, these have our names on them? You did a different one for each of us?”

We definitely didn’t invent strength and conditioning for dance, but one of our core values is one that we brought to Lincoln Center with us: every dancer needs an individualized program based on their training age, responsibilities as a dancer, and injury history. We don’t do cookie cutter “dance conditioning classes.” We train people. One dancer at a time.

So when you walk into the training space at New York City Ballet or the School of American Ballet, you’ll see these simple cardboard clipboards. The dancers take notes on their work, write down their sets and repetitions, and feel ownership of their training. “Go up a little next time,” or “remember to push your hips back” are the kinds of notes dancers write to themselves, and sometimes they’ll write notes to us too.

…and the Exercise Selection Explains the Outcome

If personalization is one of the foundational values we brought to Lincoln Center, a sports performance lens was the methodology. Susan and I are both Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialists, or CSCS for short, which is the same designation you’ll see in weightrooms across the sporting landscape. We borrow heavily from track and field, powerlifting, weightlifting, and even bodybuilding to help dancers perform at elite levels. Neither of us were dancers, but the job of a CSCS is to evaluate the needs of a given sport and to program accordingly.

The dancers we work with do exercises mostly unheard of in the dance world, like Zercher squats, hang power cleans, and split jerks, because we respect dancers as athletes who require high levels of strength, power, and athleticism. We’re simply introducing to them the same movement tools used across the spectrum of sporting development. They jump higher, improve their stamina, and tend to improve their resilience against injury because they’re using the same playbook other athletes have long had access to.

But, it’s not enough to just coach dancers through exercises. These individualized programs we’ve brought to Lincoln Center are scaffolded, progressed, and tailored.

• Scaffolding means that we have incorporated the exercise science concept of long-term athletic development to ensure that we’re taking a years-long view of dancers’ training. We prepare young dancers for their future selves, and we help older dancers build on what they’ve learned previously.

• Progressed means that we’re using the concept of progressive overload, so that artists are moving incrementally heavier weights over time. This is a baseline, foundational concept in strength and conditioning circles, but it’s only relatively recently started to take hold in the dance world. 

• Tailored means that we’re taking into account whether a dancer is in-season, off-season, returning from injury, or is brand new to the weight room. This is yet another reason that we write individualized programs for every single artist we work with.