Longevity is the name of the game.
What are you training for? What is the end game?
In my opinion, as singers, dancers, and actors you have demands of your body that aren’t dissimilar to athletes. As performers you are asked to perform 8x a week during a run of 4-6months. Your body goes through a lot of physical demand and thats if best case scenario everything goes smoothly on the show, which we all know it never does. So not only do you have to be prepared to perform at your best 8x a week but you also have to be mentally and physically prepared to pivot and fulfill different demands than those you were training for. All that is assuming you take a break between runs, if you happen to finish a show and you are lucky enough to be starting a different show immediately after think about what you are asking your body to do…start the process all over again without any time to recover.
This is not any different than how athletes and artists we often hear about perform in their careers. They have to prepare their bodies for a full season, knowing that there will be expectations of performing at the highest level from training to game-day. They have to adjust to travel and its toll on the body due to switching time zones, altitudes, weather, etc.. They have to pivot and be ready to fill in when other athletes are not performing up to par.
However, there is one major difference between these two athletes and that is the preconception on how to approach the balance of training your craft and training performance. As singers and dancers you dedicate so much time to perfecting your art and skill —dancing, singing, acting — because that is what will get you in the room and hopefully in the show. After all how often see major Crossfit athletes auditioning for broadway?
Yet when you train your skill; when you put all those hours into your craft do you do it with the intention of performing one show and thats all? Or do you do it with the intention of doing it over and over and over again for as long as you physically can? That’s where longevity comes in.
All the athletes around the world we hear about spend their lives working to make their craft their lifestyle for the rest of their lives and they recognize that in order to have the endurance and physical and mental capabilities to last that long they have to train their skill as well as their bodies. They adjust their training to match how their particular bodies will respond in order to meet their specific demands.
The same should apply to performers. The stage is your career and your lifestyle. Both your career and your lifestyle are particular to you, which means if you want to be ready for the demands your body will be exposed to then you have to train it in a way that is particular to you and how your body responds to those demands. You are not a Crossfit athlete, nor are you a soccer player nor are you basketball player. You have to build mental and body resilience, endurance to get you through all the rehearsals and classes and performances performing at your best, breath work efficiency for better recovery and better diaphragm synchronization with your movements, explosiveness to change directions easier, smoother and faster, strength and proper use of your joints in internal and external rotations because shoulder injuries, lower back injuries, hamstring injuries, ankle injuries, are so common in performers that its become part of the business.
I’m saying this because if you do this right, if you train in a way that is responsive to your body and your particular craft; not off of a template put together by a random person, found online, on youtube, on instagram with the intention of getting your neighbor to move, you will see how your craft will continue to improve while at the same time your body adjusts to those demands. Your will be not only ready to perform 8 shows a week for 4-6months but also be at a place after closing that If somebody asked you to jump into the next show you are going to feel like your body is in a much better place to take on that next journey without scheduling your next appointment with PT or acupuncture, or whatever else helps rehab. This means better performances, longer performances on your end and more importantly a longer career, but in the big picture better awareness on how important it is to understand how to train your body as artists.
Again this I just my opinion, as a former athlete and current trainer of former and current performers. I hope to create a ground that raises the training level available to performers who work to meet the demands and the expectations beset upon them. As performers you set the standards for how you prepare your own body and in turn how the theater values your body. Look if you are working out now and you are using an online templates like I mentioned earlier and you look great, power to you, like I said you are not just performer you are athletes so your bodies can do and endure much more than the general population, but just like any high quality product — luxury car or your latest iPhone— at first its going to work and run great, but if you don’t take care of it as you should, you put the wrong gas wrong oil, you leave the phone around, turn it on and off on and off on and off, drop it, its going to stop running as smoothly until eventually it will not work as well anymore.
