For Those of You Who Love Leg Day
Legs aren’t just for show. You need them to keep you up, move you side to side, take you up ad down the stairs of your apartment, help stabilize you as we leap up and down the stage on a single leg.
Unfortunately, even though performers spend copious amount of time working their legs out — during rehearsals, independent classes, gym training — they also tend to take their legs for granted. As a performer your legs can be your money makers; they can be the difference between you getting the job or someone else getting it... sooo it is your responsibility to make sure they are capable of performing optimally not just look good.
In conversations with many of my dancer clients, producers, and friends about their auditions experience, they often highlight the that one of the most important characteristic that initially separate them from the other performers standing next to them are their legs; their ability to use them proficiently in a multitude of ways whether it be to hold a position, create forms, and/or depict strength as they move on stage. So it goes without saying that dancers (and all performers alike) ought to train their bodies to be powerful tools from a two legged stance to a single legged stance. You must be able to depict an unified mastery of movement from the bottom up.
Simultaneously, you have to ensure you can maintain your mobility and ability to be dynamic and light (springy). Your leg training should encompass momentum absorption and force production, which develops stabilization of your knees and ankles during landing so you can then take that momentum and turn it into the force needed to do the next move.
If you think about it, We don’t operate in two legs only.
When we move, we move one leg at a time, when we jump we can jump with both legs or with a single leg, when we land we land with either two legs or a single leg.
So it goes without saying that as performers your legs MUST be strong enough to not only hold you up against gravity, but also have the strength to overtake gravity and further empower you to jump and run and leap as much and as high as you want.
But here is where I see a lot of performers go wrong. The idea that what you do in the gym or during your workouts must be functionally applicable to how you move is taken to an extreme and it shows up in the training I often see performers do on their own. Performers’ workouts often mimic the movements performed during their dance routines. You see it when dancers are perform different versions of an arabesque while rowing a dumbbell while balancing on a BOSU ball… This despite what you may think has no translation what so ever to you improving mobility, single leg strength, hip stability or ankle stability, and most definitely not working on your back muscles either.
I ask you to not be fooled by the idea that your workouts should replicate what you do in the theater or your classes. Strength training before, between or during show runs is meant to complement what your demands are, specific to your craft as an artist and performer. The purpose is to improve your strengths and strengthen your weaknesses by providing a different type of stimulus to your body so it can augment it’s resiliency and versatility as a tool for your art.
Keep this in mind:
If you dance, walk and live with your hips rotated to the outside, but refuse to learn how to move your hips and legs the opposite way because you’re only training outward rotation for dance and performance... then all you are doing is taking your body down a path of impending hip injuries, poor hip and lower back health and possibly a shorter performance career.
Stop looking for better results in redundancies.
