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Speed Walking for Strength

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Dancers often think that building strength requires hours on the gym lifting weights. Not so! Did you know that speed walking on a treadmill can strengthen the tendons, ligaments and tiny muscle fibers in your feet, ankles, calves and shins? It’s true! Despite its rigors, dance class doesn’t strengthen every part of your body. And for ballet dancers, who are working in turnout almost exclusively, dance class doesn’t build balance in your legs or hips.

But there’s at least one easy solution: go for a walk! All gyms have treadmills now, so get on up there and give this a try. Here are some tips to remember when speed walking:

  1. Wear sneakers. When you start a repetitive exercise, make sure you are protecting your feet, shins and back by wearing cushiony sneakers made for exercise. This is not the time for flip flops.
  2. Be sure to walk with your feet and legs in parallel. (You may have to watch your feet for a few weeks until this becomes natural. Stay with it. It’s worth doing this properly.)
  3. Keep your pelvis in a neutral position. Don’t tip it forward or backward. Try using your abdominal muscles to pull your pelvis under if it’s too far back; if it’s tipped forward, you’ll know because your torso will be behind your pelvis.
  4. Bend your arms at the elbow when increasing your speed- it helps! (Try not to hold onto the treadmill- it changes how you naturally balance your body as well as your stride.)
  5. Try to work up to a speed of 4.5: this will work your heart and lungs as well as your legs.

If you can get outside to speed walk (or if you don’t like the gym), that’s good too. You can breathe some fresh air and commune with nature while building strength. Just be sure to wear sneakers with good cushioning to protect your joints- this is even more important if walking on concrete. If you can find a track or grass to walk on, instead of concrete, the impact on your joints will be less intense.

Eat More, Do More

Eat More, Do More

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A dancer-friend of mine once told me that she wished someone had imparted this piece of wisdom to her when she was training: rather than eating less (as many dancers seem to do), and feeling that she had to conserve her energy and be careful about not overdoing it, wouldn’t it have made more sense to eat more and do more? Yes! In fact, that is the way to go. The question is, what to eat and do more of?

When most of us think about eating more, we often think this means eating everything. We hear “eat more” and think, “Yes! I AM going to have dessert after lunch…AND dinner! And throw in that bag of chips!”

That’s not what I mean though. What I mean is to eat more whole foods, more REAL foods: more greens and veggies, more whole grains, more fruits, more beans. As athletes, dancers need adequate fuel, and that fuel cannot be substandard in quality. If you were taking a road trip across the country, would you fill your car with the dirtiest, cheapest gas you could find? You could, but you wouldn’t get very far and your car would be in a sad state after a few hours.

It’s a crude metaphor, but the same is true for your dancing body: if you fill it with processed foods, sugar, simple carbs, and/or junk food, you’re not going to much out of it. Most dancers I have worked with tend to eat very little actual food. Instead, they exist on snack foods: pretzels, nuts, rice cakes- nibbles of finger food rather than the real deal. And they usually think that they have good energy and strength; they don’t even know what they’re missing. Once we get them on a diet of whole foods, there are some pretty exciting changes like increased energy and power reserves they never experienced before.

Once you have adequate fuel, you’ll know you can do more- you’ll feel stronger and more energetic. You’ll have the fuel for the cross training which is so critical to improving. (What kind of cross training to do depends on your body, what kind of dancing you’re doing, and previous injuries you’ve sustained. Check out this post from a few weeks ago about fitness and this link to a Dance Spirit article on cross training.)

You’ll also have energy to get through your day. It used to surprise me to hear young dancers talk about how tired they were all of the time- then I realized how little they were eating and it made perfect sense. Of course you slow down when there is no fuel in the system: your body is conserving energy. And with low/no fuel, your dancing suffers. But with a full tank of whole foods that is regularly replenished, your body will be capable of amazing things. How else do we explain marathon runners, mountain climbers, and cyclists? Are we saying that dancers aren’t capable of that level of exertion? I think not. I think most dancers can do a lot more than they think- the trouble is, without adequate fuel, you’ll never know what you’re capable of.