Ballet, modern, jazz and ethnic dance classes provide intense, rigorous exercise, but professional dancers require additional workouts for injury prevention. A well-designed, dance-specific workout enhances flexibility, postural alignment, strength and muscular and aerobic endurance. During the 20th century, instructors such as Joseph Pilates and Zena Rommett and physicians at New York University's School of Dance Medicine identified the specific workout needs of professional dancers and developed suitable routines.
Pilates Contrology
When Joseph Pilates came to New York City during the 1920s, he opened a studio that catered to the workout needs of dancers and athletes. Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Hanya Holm and other well-known professional dancers trained at his studio. At the time, Pilates was one of the few instructors who understood that a dancer's flexibility, when unmatched by an equal amount of strength, makes her more susceptible to injury. Pilates designed equipment and mat workouts that enhanced strength and flexibility simultaneously. His method, which he called "contrology," stressed concentration, movement awareness, precision, core activation and breath-supported movement.
Floor Barre
If you have ever taken a ballet class, you understand the challenges of developing external hip rotation, called turn-out, in an upright standing position. Balanchine and Joffrey Ballet dancer Zena Rommett developed a workout that addressed this problem. She created a series of floor exercises that taught dancers to maintain correct alignment while developing the strength and flexibility required for turn-out and other dance-specific fine motor skills. By working on the floor, dancers avoided some of the typical problems of standing barre work, which included leaning into the weaker side of the body, or forcing external rotation from the knee, as opposed to the hip. The method, called Floor Barre, uses side-lying, supine and prone exercises.
Harkness Dance Medicine
The Harkness School of Dance, in conjunction with New York University, developed a Dance Medicine curriculum designed to create injury-prevention workouts for professional dancers. The dance-specific functional training routine incorporates exercises on the stability ball and leg pulley exercises on the Universal cable machine. The Harkness instructors advise dancers to develop their leg strength by using the leg press machine in a turned-out stance. Agility implies the ability to react spontaneously to outside forces without losing alignment or balance -- an essential trait for dancers. The Harkness Center recommends box jumping and other hopscotch-type exercises for agility training.
Aerobic Exercise
Exhilaration may carry a dancer through an exhausting performance, but, as most dancers know, every performance does not inspire exhilaration. Poor chemistry between dancer and audience, illness, personal problems and room temperature potentially drain a dancer's energy, but an aerobically fit dancer survives these challenges. The Harkness program recommends trampoline training, ski machine workouts, aqua jogging, stationary biking and jumping rope with complex foot patterns for regular aerobic training. The jump board on the Pilates reformer provides plyometric aerobic exercise with less stress on the joints.
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