Відео

Why am I always bare foot in my own training videos? And why do you so often see the people we work with not wearing shoes? I explain here: in short, your feet have muscles too, and we want to make sure they’re strong. Also stability STARTS at the foot, so it’s helpful to get immediate feedback if we’re tilting one way or another.

If you're a dancer who gets notes about your arm height with your port de bras, one of the things for you to think about is that the issue might not be shoulder or arm strength, but ribcage positioning. A common presentation in many human beings is having a compressed right side (think about visualizing the right side of your ribs being smushed down toward your right hip). If you have this pres...

The dumbbell step up can be a great single leg strengthening movement for dancers. Two keys: don't use the foot on the floor to push off, and don't crash down from the step.

The dumbbell push press is often the first "power" movement that we will program for dancers. The benefits of a push press are that you can load it more than a strict press, and it begins to challenge the body to work as an entire unit to move the load above head. It also introduces the idea of triple extension, which is critical for athletic development.

This is a staple single leg variation that can offer the benefit of training deceleration, an important consideration for dancers.

If you're a dancer who only has access to dumbbells for your training, using isometrics can help you make the jump from one weight to another. This can be particularly useful if you're working out in a commercial gym that doesn't have incremental weight increases.

The dumbbell walking lunge is often a staple of programming leg strength for dancers. It helps promote solid deceleration, and is a great way to target both the quadriceps and glute muscle groups.

A quick tip on the Paloff press: don’t set up with your feet too wide, or else you risk robbing yourself of the work you’re actually trying to do. People who set up extra wide are seeking stability, and what we’re after with this exercise is stability emanating from the trunk/core.

This core exercise is often of the first places I'll begin when training dancers. The exercise, borrowed from the physical therapy world, is a nice one because we can challenge the core to stay stable while our feet are planted on the floor and an upper extremity is moving precisely the sort of thing we're asking the core to do while engaging in athletic or artistic movement.

This overhead pressing variation is often where I'll start dancers when I first meet them. We want to make sure that their ribcage stays stacked neatly over the hips and that their overhead range of motion is "real" in other words, that they're not borrowing from their spine in order to fake getting overhead. This is one of the key things we'll look for when watching dancers perform. When lifti...

While it's not always true that there should be a pull for every press, that can be a good rule of thumb for designing well-rounded dancer cross training programs. This lat pulldown exercise is a great complimentary exercise to any sort of overhead pressing movement. In this video we'll talk briefly about the different attachments on typical lat pulldown machines, and a bit about how do do the ...

The cable unilateral row is a great dancer cross training exercise targeting both the lats *and* the serratus anterior (if we add a reach in the beginning of the movement). Dancers often exhibit a "down and back" posture, and so this cable unilateral row is a great shoulder health exercise that can fill a bucket that's not normally filled during normal dance preparation. This type of movement i...

Single-leg hip thrust

Dumbbell reverse lunge

Hollow body holds

Dead bugs

Dumbbell floor press

Hamstring "curl" (using a bench)

Dumbbell bird-dog row

Dumbbell 3-point row

Dumbbell Z press

Shoulder mobility for dancers

Dancer warmup: hips and low back

Barbell Zercher squat

Barbell bent row

Hip hinging

Dumbbell Goblet Squat

Port De Bras

Butterfly Stretch