Tips for dancers

Jean Luc Lafitte has been involved in health care for twenty years and during this time he has treated “A” list Hollywood stars and Royalty. However as much as he loves treating a variety of patients he is passionate about treating dancers, whether it’s from a hip hop background, street, or ballet. His partner was a professional ballet dancer, as were his father in law and mother in law. In their time they have danced with some of the greats. The majority of his dance patients share many similar injuries, so in this first article he wants to start by showing you what you can do to minimise some of these injuries.
If I am asked what is the difference between “dancing” and other jobs? I would say that to be a dancer you have to have passion, be focused and dedicated, often with little monetary return. However this is why I like working with dancers, because if I send them away with an exercise to do I know they will do it, if I tell them to make changes to their diet they will do it, “Why”? Because I know without these changes they may not be able to dance.
I believe to have complete health you have to have balance nutritionally, physically and emotionally. However in this article I want to focus on just one of these, and in later articles I will focus on the other two.
Physical fitness for a dancer can change very quickly as the demands placed on the body is high. It is not uncommon for my patients to say to me, “I don’t understand, only yesterday I was feeling fantastic” So how can a dancer go from feeling great one day to feeling like they have been run over by a steam roller the next?
There is a lot that the human body can put up with and it does on a daily basis. Some of these include environmental pollution, poor diet, emotional stress, and physical stress. The body’s ability to do this is called adaptive capacity, and as long as you stay even one percent under this threshold you can keep symptom free. However this does not mean you are well, it just means you are symptom free. So why is this so important to a dancer? If you have ever been to a dance show or ballet, you will see some very talented and dedicated dancers performing for up to three hours and sometimes more. What you do not see however is the hours upon hours of rehearsals, long days, and late nights. So what is really a short time that you marvel at their amazing talent, can often be that one percent that takes them beyond their adaptive capacity?
Now being a person that believes there is always a solution, how can we keep you as a dancer within this adaptive capacity range, and even better improve it.
They say that the definition of madness is to do something that does not work, and then keep doing it. So let’s start by making these changes.
Physical fitness does not just start and stop when you enter the dance studio and leave, or coming on and off stage. In my experience it is the little things that add up to the big things, and then inevitability injury that can have you laid up for weeks. In everyday life just walking around on concrete pavements, our muscles and bones are constantly adjusting to this stress and strain from the changing surface beneath our feet. If you said to a friend that you saw a person come into the dance studio, and then proceed to do hundreds of step ups just on their right leg, you may think they had lost the plot and that you would never do such a thing? “Wrong” because this is exactly what you and all the other dancers out there do, albeit unconsciously. If I could give dancers one bit of advice above all others it would be this. Right handed people look left and left handed people look right. This also goes for stepping off and on to the pavement. The reason for this, is that if you are right footed you use your right foot to stabilise you as you step up and down with your left foot. In the dance world symmetry, especially within the ballet world, is very important, however it does appear that once out of the studio, or off stage, this can be forgotten. This is important, because if you dominate one leg more than the other this force has to, and will be, transferee to somewhere else. In this case it’s the lower back and pelvis. So let’s take the example of a right handed person, who as stated already will also be right footed. They will stand with their right leg back, and step of with their left leg while stabilising their right. This will force the right pelvis up and posterior, and at the same time the left pelvis inferior and anterior. This then means that in its attempt to find symmetry, the neck and spine will lean in the opposite direction. It is at this point that I see dancers who say “I don’t understand, all I did was pick up my dance shoes, and now I am in agony. Now, because this is often something you do unconsciously it’s all about training yourself to bring this into your consciousness mind.
I have found that over the years if I give my patients too much information and ask them to do too much in one go, it can overwhelm them, with the result being they make mistakes, or have to keep calling me to remind me what I told them to do. With this in mind I am going to ask you to do just one thing, we can go over more in future articles. I want you, even if you are not a dancer, to try to alternate the foot that you step up and off pavements, stairs, and steps. This means if you step off a pavement with your right foot, then next time do it with the left, and then back to the right again. You may even try counting how many times you step down on one foot; believe it or not this can amount to hundreds of times a day.