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Dancers who want to get the most out of their experience in dance—whether in college, high school, a dance studio, or a dance company—can now take charge of their wellness. Dancer Wellness will help them learn and apply important wellness concepts as presented through the in-depth research conducted by the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) and their experts from around the world.
Four Primary Areas
Dancer Wellness covers four primary topics:
1. Foundations of dancer wellness, which explores the dancer’s physical environment, the science behind training, and conditioning
2. Mental components of dancer wellness, which investigates the psychological aspects that influence a dancer’s training—imagery, somatic practices, and the ways that rest, fatigue, and burnout affect learning, technique, and injury risk and recovery
3. Physical aspects of dancer wellness, which examines dancer nutrition and wellness, including the challenges in maintaining good nutrition, addressing body composition issues, bone health, injury prevention, and first aid
4. Assessments for dancer wellness, which offers guidance in goal setting, screenings, assessing abilities, and designing a personal wellness plan
Each chapter offers learning objectives at the beginning and review questions at the end to help readers recall what they have learned. Sidebars within each chapter focus on self-awareness, empowerment, goal setting, and diversity in dance.
“Dancer Wellness meets the needs of dancers in any setting,” says Virginia Wilmerding, one of the book’s editors from IADMS. “Our authors are leaders in the field, and they thoroughly investigate their areas of specialization. Through that investigation we have provided theoretical concepts and practical information and applications that dancers can use to enhance their health and wellness as part of their dance practice.”
This text offers foundational information to create a comprehensive view of dancer wellness. “Wellness defines the state of being healthy in both mind and body through conscious and intentional choices and efforts,” says coeditor Donna Krasnow. “Anyone interested in the health and wellness of dancers can benefit from this book, regardless of previous training or level of expertise. This book covers each aspect of dancer wellness, whether environmental, physical, or psychological.”
Part I Foundations of Dancer Wellness
Chapter 1. The Dance Environment
Chapter 2. Dance Training and Technique
Chapter 3. Cross-Training and Conditioning
Part II Mental Components of Dancer Wellness
Chapter 4. Mental Training
Chapter 5. Psychological Wellness
Chapter 6. Rest and Recovery
Part III Physical Components of Dancer Wellness
Chapter 7. Optimal Nutrition for Dancers
Chapter 8. Bone Health
Chapter 9. Injury Prevention and First Aid
Part IV Assessments for Dancer Wellness
Chapter 10. Dancer Screening Programs
Chapter 11. Your Dancer Wellness Plan
The International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) was formed in 1990 by an international group of dance medicine practitioners, dance educators, dance scientists, and dancers. Membership is drawn equally from the medical and dance professions, and has grown from an initial 48 members in 1991 to over 1200 members at present world-wide, representing 35 countries. IADMS enhances the health, well-being, training, and performance of dancers by cultivating educational, medical, and scientific excellence.
Virginia Wilmerding danced professionally in New York City and is now a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she teaches for both the exercise science and dance programs. Courses include kinesiology, research design, exercise physiology, exercise prescription, exercise and disease prevention, and conditioning. She also teaches at the Public Academy for Performing Arts, a charter school. Ginny is formerly the Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS). She is past president of IADMS and served on the IADMS Board of Directors from 2001 to 2011. Ginny was the Associate Editor of science for the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science. She has published original research in Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, and Idea Today. With Donna Krasnow she has coauthored resource papers for IADMS. Research interests include body composition, training methodologies, injury incidence and prevention, pedagogical considerations in technique class, and the physiological requirements of various dance idioms.
Donna Krasnow is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Dance at York University in Toronto, Canada, and was a member of the Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts in the United States. She specializes in dance science research, concentrating on dance kinesiology, injury prevention and care, conditioning for dancers, and motor learning and motor control, with a special emphasis on the young dancer. Donna has published numerous articles in the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science and Medical Problems of Performing Artists, as well as resource papers in collaboration with M. Virginia Wilmerding for the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS). She was the Conference Director for IADMS from 2004 to 2008 as well as serving on the Board of Directors. Donna was the Associate Editor for dance for Medical Problems of Performing Artists. She conducts workshops for dance faculty in alignment and healthy practices for dancers, including the Teachers Day Seminars at York University, and is a nine-time resident guest artist at Victorian College of the Arts and VCA Secondary School, University of Melbourne, Australia. Donna has created a specialized body conditioning system for dancers called C-I Training (conditioning with imagery). She has produced a DVD series of this work, and in 2010 she coauthored the book Conditioning with Imagery for Dancers with professional dancer Jordana Deveau. She offers courses for teachers in Limón technique pedagogy and C-I Training.
Ginny and Donna co-authored Motor Learning and Control for Dance: Principles and Practices for Performers and Teachers, published by Humaan Kinetics in 2015.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
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Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
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Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
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Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
Save
Save
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Muscular Strength, Power, and Endurance Training
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping.
Muscular strength is the ability to exert maximal force in one single contraction, such as lifting a weight that you could lift only once before needing a short break. Muscular power refers to a great force production over a short period of time, such as in fast leg kicks and explosive jumping. Muscular endurance is when less force is sustained over a longer period of time such as in gallops, skips, pliés, and swings. Dancers often confuse endurance with strength, so it is sometimes useful to think of endurance as continuous and strength as maximal.
This dancer displays muscular strength as well as flexibility in this difficult balance.
CPRowe Photography 2012, University of Utah, Modern Dance.
In dance you are required to jump, catch partners, move down onto the floor and up out of the floor at fast speeds, and perform other explosive movements. These movements require a level of muscular strength and power. While technique classes can improve muscular strength and power, it is not necessarily the main goal. Some current dance technique classes are increasingly asymmetrical (practicing coordination on one side only) and are more focused on stylistic and artistic aspects of dancing rather than adequate repetitions to develop strength, power, and endurance. Therefore, you should do supplementary exercises for muscular strength, power, and endurance outside of your dance technique classes. Without a certain baseline of these important abilities, you are more likely to incur musculoskeletal imbalances and injuries. Injuries developed from muscular imbalances or from lack of core strength in large, explosive movements are common.
You need a good level of muscular strength, power, and endurance in order to effectively perform a variety of dance movements such as lifts, jumps, and explosive movements. An adequate level of muscular strength, power, and endurance not only assists the technical and aesthetic aspects of performance, it can also minimize the risk of injury by increasing joint stabilization and improving bone health.
A common method of strength training is with resistance machines or free weights, such as dumbbells. Even more common for dancers is using exercise bands or stretchy surgical tubing as resistance. You can also do strength training using your own body weight, such as in push-ups and leg lunges. You should exercise larger muscle groups before smaller ones, because smaller ones fatigue more quickly. It is important to alternate muscle groups to allow for recovery before performing another exercise on the same muscle group. For muscular strength gains, you should exercise a muscle through its full range of motion for 8 to 12 repetitions. The amount of weight or resistance should be challenging; after the set, you should feel muscular fatigue. Young teens or dancers rehabilitating from an injury should use lower weight or resistance and higher numbers of repetitions. For exercises targeting muscular power, remember to perform fast repetitions. You can repeat exercises two or three times in a given conditioning sequence.
When exercising for muscle strength, you should isolate the muscles to be strengthened; carry out the correct motion fully in a smooth and controlled manner without other muscles compensating. People tend to compensate when they are tired, which is when other muscles take over for the fatigued muscles. When you are exercising, be mindful of this tendency and make adjustments in resistance in order to isolate the appropriate muscles. Whenever possible, exercise a joint through its full range of motion so as to work the entire muscle and not to use too much weight or resistance during the end of a motion.
Apply the principle of specificity by replicating movement patterns of dance as closely as possible and stressing muscle groups that are most needed in current dance activities. For example, when you are returning to technique class or rehearsals after an ankle sprain, you will need to condition the ankle to be able to jump. It is best for you to incorporate foot exercises that best match the jumping speed and range of motion similar to what occurs in dance jumps. While slow and sustained strengthening exercises, such as work with an exercise band, are recommended, you will benefit from restrengthening the feet with an increase in tempo, coming as close as possible to actual jumping speed and with a similar range of motion.
To realize gains in strength and power, apply the principle of progressive overload. Overload should happen in a gradual and progressive manner whereby intensity, duration, and frequency of the exercises are steadily increased. It is a good idea to begin with an initial 2-week period of high-repetition (15-25 reps) training with low resistance. Following this period, increase load with fewer (8-12) repetitions, allowing the focus of the exercise to shift from endurance to strength. A rest period of 60 to 90 seconds between each set is important, and exercises for the same body area should not be done on successive days. You may not notice results for 5 to 10 weeks, but do not become discouraged; results will occur.
You can train muscular power by incorporating explosive exercises after seeing initial strength gains. Plyometrics training is a form of jump training in which you exert maximal force in short intervals, which has been shown to effectively increase leg power. Usually exercises are quite short but fairly explosive. An example of a plyometrics exercise is 6 to 8 high tuck jumps followed by a rest and then repeated twice more. If progressive overload is applied here, the frequency of the jumps may increase from 3 to 4 bouts and the number of repetitions may increase from 6 to 8 jumps, to 8 to 10 jumps, and so on.
Dance technique classes cannot be solely relied on to provide the conditioning exercises needed to target various components of physical fitness such as muscular strength, power, and endurance. These aspects of conditioning allow you to perform dance movements such as jumping, catching a partner, moving down onto the floor and up from the floor at fast speeds, and other explosive movements. It is therefore recommended that you do supplementary exercises for these aspects of conditioning outside of dance technique classes.
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Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Motor Learning in Dance
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person’s capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills.
Motor learning refers to changes that occur with practice or experience that determine a person's capability for producing a motor skill. These changes are relatively permanent, and they are associated with repetition of motor skills. In dance, motor learning is the process that allows you to learn basic and sophisticated skills that are not acquired through typical human motor development. Specific examples include pirouettes, large jumps, and balances. In addition, the aim of motor learning is to gain these skills with the specific intent to improve the quality of performance by enhancing smoothness, coordination, and accuracy.
The Learning Process
The motor learning process includes these essential stages:
- Attention and observation (perception) of a demonstrated skill
- Replication (execution) of what has been observed
- Feedback
- Repetition (further practice)
In most formal dance classes, your teacher provides the initial information by demonstrating and explaining a dance combination. You then perform the movements, and those movements are encoded in your mind. With repetition, that movement becomes a part of your memory. When the same or similar movements are required, you must recall it mentally and transfer it to physical execution. By the time the motor skill is embedded in memory, it is an image or concept of the task that is recalled at this level of execution, as opposed to a complicated series of details, multiple body parts, or individual muscle activation. This step is the final goal of the motor learning process.
Perception
As the teacher demonstrates the combination or skill for the dance students, the process of motor learning starts with attention and perception. Perception has two components. First, you observe and organize your present experience; second, meaning is attached to that observation based on past experience. Perception is dependent on the senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste). For example, you see the teacher demonstrate the shift from first position to retiré, and you might relate it to any number of childhood games in which you attempted to balance on one leg. You also hear the music for the exercise, giving the movement a temporal context. It is likely that the first attempts would include some wobbling and adjusting while the brain seeks strategies to accomplish this shift in a smooth, coordinated way as demonstrated by the teacher. Note that learning can be enhanced through use of attention (conscious focus on what is being learned or the environment), but perception does not necessarily demand attention.
In addition to the sensory information, perception relies on another way of sensing. The bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and skin all have specialized tissues (nerve cells) that receive information during stance and movement, and they send this information to the brain; this type of sense is called proprioception. Considerable fluctuations exist in the ability of the brain to utilize proprioceptive information during some of the adolescent years, and deficits are noticeable during growth spurts. It is not uncommon to see dancers regress in ability to balance on one leg during these growth spurts. If you are already accomplishing multiple pirouettes, and a growth spurt occurs, you may suddenly find that you can no longer achieve this task; you might consider doing fewer turns during this phase and attend to other motor or artistic components of the skill.
Perceptual skills are those skills that are inherited rather than learned but can be enhanced by training. Perceptual skills include hand-eye coordination, rhythm, visual discrimination, spatial discrimination, body control, and balance. Thus, one of your goals is to take the innate skills that you bring to class and fine-tune these abilities. For example, some dance students have an innate ability to balance easily before any training has occurred, but they may do the given task by lifting the hip of the gesture leg and leaning the torso off to the side. You can learn ways to fine-tune your skills by listening to feedback (to be discussed later) that encourages a vertical alignment of the torso and a translation of the pelvis onto the standing leg.
From Perception to Movement
Motor learning is set in motion by perception and continues with replication; in this phase, you attempt to do the observed task. Learning a dance or movement skill depends partly on how the information is presented. Motor learning can take three general forms: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic (touch and sensation). You can become aware of what your preferred learning strategies are, to make the best use of class time. It is also of great benefit for you to observe your peers attempting the material, and working through problems and errors. By seeing others correct and improve the attempted skill, you can see what constitutes a successful strategy and try applying it to your own experiences. This process has the added benefit of encouraging the idea that making mistakes is a natural part of the process, a necessary component of learning to dance. When you develop an overwhelming fear of making mistakes, you can limit your progress.
Diversity in Dance
Examine Your Preferred Learning Styles
Examine your learning strategies. How do you prefer to learn dance movement? Are you a visual learner? Are you a kinesthetic learner? Are you a verbal/analytic learner? Now think about how you might expand your learning strategies. What type of learning strategy would you like to be better at? How would you work on expanding your ability in this type of learning? If you can be diverse in your learning strategies, you can work easily with a larger group of teachers and choreographers.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.
Understanding the Screening Process
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment.
The dancer screening process involves a collection of uniform information by a team of experts including dance educators and dance medicine specialists. This team will gather the information from individual dancers about their personal history and their training environment. Screenings also include a selection of physical measurements related to dance activities, such as measurements of muscle strength, joint motion, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness.
These variables are obtained through tests that yield objective scores. For example, a dancer's external and internal hip rotation can be quantified in stance or prone using low-friction rotational discs or a goniometer, respectively, each of which provides a numeric value. Rotational discs are small platforms placed on ball bearings that can rotate in either direction. A goniometer is a tool used to measure the angle of a joint between two limbs. Another example could be measuring left versus right leg jump height, which can be given a numeric score when measured using measuring tapes or other instruments. Figure 10.1a and 10.1b illustrate the rotational discs and the goniometer.
Methods of measuring turnout: (a) Rotational discs measure functional turnout; (b) the goniometer measures passive turnout.
Photos courtesy of Colleen Hahn.
Purpose of Screening
The purpose of dancer screenings is twofold. First, they assist individual dancers in identifying factors in their physical and psychological makeup that can be improved in order to enhance their dancing. Second, it is to assist the dance community in better identifying the boundaries of functional capacity that dancers need in order to perform within the largest window of safety and wellness.
The ability to dance well and to dance safely is influenced by many variables, including those intrinsic to the dancer such as muscle strength, age, years of training, general health habits, past injury history, coping style, muscular flexibility, as well as variables in the environment that are extrinsic to the dancer such as shoe wear, floor surface, and teacher or school policies about rest. One method of determining the relative importance of each of these stand-alone variables to a dancer's health is to compare individual dancer findings to the average values of each of those factors from a very large sample - a group of dancers. With a large number of data points, dance medicine experts can calculate anonymous dancer norms, also called normative values. Normative values are expected values for a given population of people based on previously measured values from people in that same population. One of the most successful ways to frame answers about optimal health for each dancer is to obtain normative screening data on large groups of healthy dancers within a given dance form.
When the range of capacities of injury-free, elite dancers from a particular form are known, clinicians are equipped with normative values to which individual patient measures can be compared. This information assists in identifying whether an individual dancer possesses the attributes necessary to participate safely in his or her form of dance. Having this data is also helpful at the time of an injury occurrence and over the course of the dancer's rehabilitation, in order to evaluate how that dancer is progressing toward restoration of preinjury level of health.
Averaged group screening data can be a valuable guide to health care professionals in anticipating clinical problems. It can help teachers develop training programs that maximize performance while avoiding injury. For dancers, it may serve as a basis for comparison of their personal fitness levels with that of elite dancers and as a guide for what to focus on in their personal training to attain their peak performance.
Even though large group normative data is used for individual comparison, dance medicine specialists understand the aim is not to develop average dancers. Each dancer has a unique set of attributes that should be optimized during dance performance. A dance medicine specialist can assess whether risk factors, relative to the larger group normative values, are present that predispose a dancer or group of dancers to health problems so that a personal best health program can be put into place. Success in dance does not rely solely on any one variable. Rather, a combination of many skills forms a dancer's talent and determines success. What one dancer may excel at, another may not. A dancer who may be considered deficient in one area should be encouraged to improve in that area when possible or make up for it in another. Identifying an individual dancer's attributes and concerns is the first step toward providing the dancer with a specific counseling, treatment, or training regimen aimed at preventing injury and maximizing performance potential. Screenings provide dancers with guidance for how to progress to a successful life in dance.
For normative data to be useful, it must be valid, meaning that it has to capture accurately the information that each researcher or practitioner intended to capture, in an equally careful manner. Collecting data using validated measures in a standardized or uniform way between dance medicine and dance education professionals is necessary in order for the combined data to be trustworthy. With trustworthy information gathered, dance medicine and dance education professionals can confidently associate causes of injuries and observe their trends in order to more effectively work with dancers and dance organizations to prevent them.
Learn more about Dancer Wellness.