Why I tell dancers to stop static stretching...It's not that stretching is bad. It's that static stretching, the kind where you hold a position for a long count, does something specific to your muscles called neuromuscular inhibition. In plain terms, it slows down how quickly your muscles respond when you ask them to do something, like jump.

Most dancers don’t have “weak ankles”. But many dancers have underprepared ankles. If your strength work consists almost entirely of turned out relevés, eleves or parallel heel raises, you’re only training your body for a fraction of what your choreography actually demands. And then we’re surprised when pain, instability, or injury show up. Typically, we aren’t dancing in just one plane. So your strength training shouldn’t reside there either. And, if, while you are doing loads of eleves and...

If you’ve ever felt a nagging ache that slowly crept in…that didn’t come from one specific moment…that you kept dancing on because it “wasn’t that bad” or it would go away as soon as-or pretty soon-ish after you finished dancing…You’ve likely experienced an overuse injury. And if you’re a dancer—this isn’t the exception. It’s unfortunately a pretty typical pattern. What is an Overuse Injury? An overuse injury happens when your body is exposed to more load than it can currently...