Top Tips from your Dance Doctor!
After spending years dancing professionally (CAEA, AEA, ACTRA), touring, long cue to cue days, and now seeing dancer after dancer as patients, there are a few things I would like all dancers to know, do, or consider when training and performing (in no particular order).
DON’T ROLL YOUR IT BAND
This is one thing I have seen a lot in my career. Dancers are often rolling out their IT band, due to tension or referral pain felt along the lateral aspect of the thigh. Our IT bands are super tough, like they could pull a truck without breaking kind of tough. When you are rolling, you actually aren’t compressing or changing the texture or length of your IT band, instead I want dancers to roll our their glutes, lateral hip, with a small lacrosse type ball. Stretch these muscles, increase the endurance of these muscles, do all of these things and you will see your issue improved rather than spending a lot of time rolling out something that just isn’t going to respond to that modality.
TRAIN YOUR FEET
Strong feet are the foundation to biomechanics working optimally up the chain from foot. When doing foot exercises, I want you to think about using all of the intrinsic muscles, so isolated to movement, foot doming, and abduction of the toes to get the lumbrical muscles! While you’re doing those intrinsic exercises, you might as well throw in some for tibialis posterior and fibularis group to increase the muscular stirrup of stability at the ankle.
TRAIN ON BOTH SIDES
One sided training is always an issue. I want you to take this to heart for both your physical health and your mental ability as a dancer. Reversing choreographing challenges the brain and also evens out the training of specific muscles side to side. I always say, “if you can do it on the right, try it on the left. If you can do it forward, try it backwards!”.
TAKE ACRO
I know this seems scary for some dancers, or it might be difficult to find a quality program near where you live, but I love seeing all of my dancers patients in acro class. The increased flexibility, the full body awareness, and the upper body motor control and strength you get form acrobatics can really add athleticism and range to your other styles of dance.
ADD LATERAL HIP/GLUTE CONDITIONING
Sometimes I compare your lateral hip stabilizer muscles to the rotator cuff. With dancer’s hips being so mobile, ensuring good endurance of muscles like gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and tensor fascia latta (TFL) is important in preventing injury and increasing control.
TRAIN MORE BACK FOR CORE
There’s research that suggests when comparing the front and back of our core in terms of endurance, your back should be 1.5 times stronger than your front to prevent low back pain. I find many dancers out there do crunches as their go-to core exercise. While I love crunches, we are excluding the sides and back of our core. By incorporating more back and side endurance training, you have better balance through your core, and help prevent future low back pain.
MASTER THE PLIÉ
Did you know there’s an orthopaedic test that mimics a bad plié? It is called Ege’s test and it’s a test for meniscal damage in the knee. When we work this information backwards, it truly shows the importance of proper ballet training so that the knee is aligned directly over the foot. Without this, you can do damage to your knees by repetitive improper plié technique, which gets even worse when we start doing grand allegro and we are landing massive jumps improperly. Master your plié and your knees will thank you!
TAKE TAP
I love tap, so I may be a little biased, but I think everyone should take tap. My reason behind this is because of the use of intrinsic foot muscles, ankle stabilizing muscles, full ankle range of motion, and the strengthening of tibialis anterior. Physically speaking, training in tap is very opposite to ballet or jazz, but I think offers a nice balance. It also is great for musicality and dynamics!
ADD A PUSH UP PLUS
A push up plus works a muscle called serratus anterior. Serratus anterior connects the shoulder blade (scapula) to the rib cage (although so does pectoralis minor). This means serratus anterior is heavily involved in positioning the shoulder blade so it aligns with the head of the humerus (shoulder joint health). By training this muscle, you can also improve scapular winging!
CLEAN CRUNCHES
I love crunches! I think they are one of my preferred front of core exercises, and always prefer them over full sit ups. I have a few rules with sit ups that I usually abide by when doing rehabilitation with dancers. The first is no rotation. If I want to incorporate more side (obliques), I prefer doing pure lateral flexion with no twist through the spine. This prevents any torque that can strain the disc a little bit too much to do repeatedly as much as we like to do as dancers. I always make sure my patients are engaging their core before doing a sit up. The cue I use is trying to bring the front hip bones (ASIS) closer together with a muscle/wire connecting. I also encourage dancers not to grip in their hip flexors. We use our hip flexors a lot as dancers, so let’s give them a break when we can! Make that double chin! I often see crunches done by jetting out the chin. This brings in more superficial muscles and we should using our deep neck flexors (like longus colli). Finally elbows in line with your ears (your external auditory meatus). This will prevent you over stretch the back of your neck or over pulling on your head.
None of these tips are hard and fast rules, they are just little suggestions I use personally as I’ve incorporated more of my dance background with my clinical expertise. Dancers are such unique patients, I encourage them all to keep your training diverse and current, find a great support system (including a dance chiropractor and RMT), and listen to your body more! For more information, email hello@madetomove.ca or better yet, book an appointment with the Dance Chiropractor at Made To Move at one of our Toronto locations!
