Minding your pecs and lats - Health And Fitness For Life - strength training for male dancers - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, August, 2002 by Rhoda Fukushima

HERE'S A POP QUIZ: WHO HAS TO BE able to lift 100 pounds, sometimes repeatedly, doing it beautifully, gracefully, and musically, with perfect form--and no grimacing allowed? You guessed it: It's a male dancer, especially in ballet. Sure, there are plenty of athletes out there who can heft more than their body weight--but they get to focus on only the lifting. Doing such movement within the context of an art form is a challenge unique to dancers.

Lifting a living, moving being is far more difficult than hoisting a barbell with a constant weight. Dancers have to lift partners of varying sizes, often within one ballet--partners whose costumes and sweaty, bare skin can make it harder to lift them properly. Then, too, barbells don't coming hurtling at you from across the stage, expecting you to toss them in the air. The variables are daunting. What's required are strength, second-nature response, and proper training.

Prevailing thinking long held that dancers only had to dance more to correct problems, says Peter Marshall, company physical therapist for American Ballet Theatre. Dancers everywhere did few activities outside of ballet, worrying that gym workouts would make them look like the Incredible Hulk. Yet their injuries persisted, with the lower back especially vulnerable. Without sufficient power in his shoulders and arms to do overhead lifts, a dancer might jerk his partner overhead, straining his lower back.

By the mid-1990s, dance medicine began to take cues from sports medicine, according to Marshall. Alternate forms of training became more acceptable, physical therapists started working with dancers at an earlier age, and dancers became more knowledgeable.

Jock Soto, principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, has seen the mind-set toward preventative therapy change, as companies began to use chiropractors, physical therapists, massage therapists, and athletic trainers. "People got more health conscious and wanted ways of getting stronger," Soto says. "So many dancers were getting injured. To prevent this, you had to join the club."

Therapists realize that preserving the long, lean "look" of a male dancer will figure into treatment. They work with dancers over the long haul in order to bring them back with maximum range of motion, Marshall says.

After helping dancers get a grip on the pain, therapists utilize various techniques to get their dancers back onstage. Walk into a physical therapy studio at a ballet company and you're likely to see oversized rubber gym balls, medicine balls, Therabands, light weights, and other equipment. Using a dancer's body weight is San Francisco Ballet physical therapist Michael Leslie's first course of action. He tries to get dancers to hold the spine in a neutral position and use their own weight as resistance. As they improve, they often move into a regimen of Pilates, trunk training, and gym workouts that target the upper extremities. Leslie recommends three sets of fifteen to twenty reps at 40 to 50 percent of the dancer's maximum lift for each exercise.

ABT's Marshall lets dancers lift weights only if they can align the pelvis correctly. He hammers home details about proper form, whether they're sitting at a machine that works the back or lying on the floor about to do sit-ups.

Carla Corrado, consulting physical therapist for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, says that nothing replaces class work but that supplemental training techniques can help keep injuries to a minimum. In general, male dancers should lift weights three times a week, Corrado says, alternating between their upper and lower bodies. She suggests specific workouts for the pectoralis major (chest), rotator cuff (shoulder) and scapular stabilizers (rhomboids, latissimus dorsi, and trapezius). More repetitions using less weight defines muscles without creating bulk.

Damian Smith, a 29-year-old principal dancer at San Francisco Ballet, learned the importance of prevention the hard way--by getting injured. Like many young dancers, Smith was focused on learning classical technique; his upper-body training consisted mainly of push-ups done in class. Dancing, not partnering, was paramount.

But after injuring his back doing a lift, Smith changed his thinking. Now he goes to the gym three days a week to work out on machines and with free weights. He exercises different muscle groups each day, alternating between back and shoulders, biceps and triceps, and chest and stomach. He also works his abdominal muscles using gym and medicine balls. "The lower half is certainly where the strength of technique is, but it's good to have the strength of the upper body to partner," Smith says.

Unless they've danced, most ballet-goers have no idea of the strength and skill that go into the breathtaking lifts and intricate partnering they love to watch. But Soto and Smith and every other male dancer know the careful preparation that goes into making the movement work--safely.

Rhoda Fukushima also covers health and fitness for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Her work is circulated in the Midwest by Knight Ridder.