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105. How Dancers Can Prevent Injuries During Busy Seasons ft. Physiotherapist Erika Mayall
2 Playsin 2 days
Physiotherapist and dance medicine specialist Erika Mayall, founder of Allegro Performance + Wellness in Vancouver, BC, joins us to share expert guidance on managing and preventing injuries during a dancer's busiest seasons.
Erika breaks down why high-stakes periods like auditions, competitions, and intensives carry such elevated injury risk, and what dancers can do to protect themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally. She walks us through how to build a smarter annual training calendar, how fatigue directly increases injury risk, and practical strategies for recovery even when a full night's sleep isn't realistic.
Key "Pointes" from this Episode:
- Why auditions, competitions, and intensives are the highest-risk times of year for dancers.
- The physical and emotional/mental aspect of dance injuries.
- Warning signs that a dancer may be heading toward injury.
- How to tell the difference between normal muscle soreness and an injury.
- What a well-structured dance season should look like and when to prioritize strength and flexibility vs. rest and recovery.
- The science behind fatigue and injury risk.
- Practical tips for recovery when getting more sleep isn't possible.
Connect with Erika:
Follow Erika on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dancephysioerika/
Allegro Performance’s Website: https://www.allegroperformance.com/
Listen to The Dance Physio Podcast: https://www.allegroperformance.com/podcast
Links and Resources:
BRANDLLET: https://www.brandllet.com/
Complimentary Career Mentoring Consultation: https://www.thebrainyballerina.com/career-mentoring
Let’s connect!
MY WEBSITE: thebrainyballerina.com
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thebrainyballerina
Schedule your complimentary career consultation: https://www.thebrainyballerina.com/career-mentoring
Questions/comments? Email me at caitlin@thebrainyballerina.com
This episode was brought to you by the Pivot Ball Change Network.
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Transcript
When is soreness a sign of injury?
00:00:00
Speaker
So if we have a dancer who has some soreness that developed within a few hours of doing something in class, like by the time they got home that evening, they were already feeling it and it's lasted for more than a couple of days and it feels worse at the end of their dance days and better in the morning when they wake up, that's probably something we want to get checked out because that could potentially be more of an injury.
Introduction to Brand New Ballerina
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm Kaitlin, a former professional ballerina turned dance educator and career mentor, and this is the Brand New Ballerina podcast. I am here for the aspiring professional ballerina who wants to learn what it really takes to build a smart and sustainable career in the dance industry.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm peeling back the curtain of the professional dance world with open and honest conversations about the realities of becoming a professional dancer. Come along to gain the knowledge and inspiration you need to succeed in a dance career on your terms.
00:00:57
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Brainy Ballerina Podcast.
Erica Mayall on managing dance injuries
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm your host, Caitlin Sloan, and I am joined today by Erica Mayall. Erica is a physiotherapist and the founder of Allegro Performance and Wellness based in Vancouver.
00:01:11
Speaker
Today we are talking all about how to manage injuries during busy seasons as a dancer, including audition season, competition season, and summer intensives.
Busy seasons and injury management
00:01:21
Speaker
And honestly, it feels like as a dancer, every season is a busy season and never really stops.
00:01:26
Speaker
So before we get into that, Erica, can you tell us a bit more about your background and what you do as a physiotherapist? Yeah,
Erica's journey to dance physiotherapy
00:01:33
Speaker
absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My background is similar to a lot of people who end up in this field. I grew up dancing. I started dancing when I was quite young and Grew up in a typical studio environment, more based in syllabus systems. So we did a lot of exams and performing, but did not necessarily compete. That wasn't really a thing sort of at our studio or even back then competitions didn't really exist the same way they do now. But grew up dancing and was always really interested in
00:02:01
Speaker
the technique behind dance. I now recognize that that was the biomechanics and I was interested in the anatomy. But as a kid, it was more that I was really interested in the technique and, you know, I wasn't as interested in the performance side of dance. So I kind of thought I would end up in the teaching world. I never really had dreams of like going on and being a professional and being on stage. Like I liked performing, but that wasn't really the part of dancing I liked. I liked training. I liked being in the studio. So Thought I was going to go into teaching and then had a few personal experiences in physiotherapy with a few injuries when I was a bit older, like as a kind of high schooler and realized that, oh, this could be a really cool.
00:02:44
Speaker
kind of profession and potentially a way to stay involved in the dance industry. At the time, there was not really anyone who specialized in dance physical therapy. It's certainly not in my town. And so I was just going to the local sports physical therapist. And although they were really great practitioners, they had no idea what to do with me and, you know, getting treatment alongside like the basketball players or whatever. And they're just kind of like, oh, yeah, just do what they're doing. And, you know, was not dance specific. So I sort of saw an opportunity or a
00:03:14
Speaker
lack of that service at the time and kind of had a little bit of an inkling of like, oh, wouldn't that be cool if there were somebody who really understood dancers or like knew about dancers a little bit more?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah,
Injury prevention and studio collaboration
00:03:27
Speaker
then i ended up doing my undergraduate degree in kinesiology and went on to do my master's in physiotherapy and have been working in that field ever since and pretty much right out of school started working specifically with dancers. I was really fortunate that one of my teachers who I grew up training with was very interested in injury prevention and she was also doing a kinesiology degree at the time. And so she like right off the bat was sort of like, we need to collaborate on research with these dancers and I want you to come in and, you know, treat them in house and, you know,
00:04:00
Speaker
do injury prevention programs and all sorts of things. So I kind of had free reign of this whole studio of dancers right from the beginning, which was incredible because as I was like honing my skills and learning more about dance specific physio, I had a lot of dancers at my disposal. So I have been working since then specifically with dancers and now have a clinic. locally in Vancouver, and we specialize in working with dancers and other artistic athletes as well. So we do injury rehabilitation, we do a lot of injury prevention, or we sometimes just call it like performance sessions. So people come in with specific goals, they want to improve their extensions, they want to get better at turning, whatever it is, and we work a lot with dancers on those. So even before dancers are injured, and other things like pre point assessments and things like that as well.
00:04:49
Speaker
Can you
High-risk times: auditions and competitions
00:04:50
Speaker
talk about why auditions, competitions, intensives, all of these really busy periods of a dancer's year are such high risk times for injuries?
00:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a few reasons. They tend to be high stress times of year as well. And there's really powerful connections between sort of like the mind body connections. And so when we are going through times of increased stress, We often are at increased risk of injury as well. Our nervous system doesn't have the same capacity to adapt and deal with training loads and even recovery and things like that. So that is certainly part of it.
00:05:28
Speaker
One of the things we also see in the dance world that is different from the sport world is In sports in general, there is this idea of, we call it tapering or deloading, but there's an idea of before you need to peak. So whether that's for a game or a race or a tournament or whatever it is, there's going to be a period of unloading prior to that. So it might be in the day or two before, it could be a week before, depending on what the event is, where we're actually doing less. So prioritizing rest and recovery and oftentimes prioritizing fueling and all of those types of strategies, but not actually training a lot so that the body, when we want it to sort of like, quote unquote, peak, the body is actually prepared for that. It has the energy stores. It has the capacity to be able to perform at a high level. And in the dance world, we don't follow that same model. And if anything, we traditionally...
00:06:26
Speaker
pack in a lot more rehearsal and we you know we're calling last minute rehearsals and we're at the theater until super late at night, the day before a performance or those types of things. And so we're almost doing the opposite. We're overloading the body before the body is actually meant to then be be performing at the highest level. And this definitely puts dancers at like an increased risk of injury as well.
00:06:49
Speaker
So can you talk about how we could do this differently because you're absolutely right that we start packing it in and then a lot of time it is depending on the theater schedule and when we can get in there or if we have an orchestra or with or all these the lighting design or all the different people who are involved depending on how we can schedule these dress rehearsals or everything like that so what would you say would be your recommendation for how we could do that differently Yeah, absolutely.
Periodization in dance training
00:07:15
Speaker
So the overall kind of terminology for this is what's called periodization. And again, in the sports world, they're following these periodization programs through the entire season, or oftentimes there's even like multi-season periodization, like the Olympics just ended recently. And if we think about those athletes, they're meant to peak on a four-year cycle. So they're on like a four-year periodization plan. And so periodization is
00:07:40
Speaker
includes more than just the performance part of it. It also includes like what we're doing in preseason, then what we're doing in the main part of our season, and then what we're doing in like the postseason and the offseason as well. So when we think about like how do we address this for a performance or a competition, we actually need to almost back up and think about periodization for like the entire dance calendar. And so if we are kind of using a bit more of that sport model or that periodization model, and we have a more defined pre-season where we're kind of slowly ramping up, it's more about conditioning, it's more about base level technique, we're not necessarily drilling choreography and things like that during a pre-season, we move into the regular part of the season that is going to be more dance specific skills, that is going to be our choreography. And throughout that main part of the season, we're then going to have these peaks, which would be our performances, our competitions, but we can have these sort of tapers or deloads prior to those. So again, periodization, we sort of need to look at it through a cycle of the entire season. In terms of your question of like, what do we do for those actual performances? Because you are 100% right. We are often at the mercy of theater schedules and things like that. And we can't not have a tech rehearsal or not have a dress rehearsal. That is absolutely necessary. But if we're thinking of periodization again through this entire season cycle, we could consider an entire show week or a show run. A show run could be three weeks long. It depends. If we're doing Nutcracker, it's not one performance we're peaking for. It's Nutcracker we're peaking for.
00:09:19
Speaker
And so as long as we're thinking of those tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals and stuff as part of the peak part of the season, then we can look at the deloading happening prior to that. And
Planning to reduce injury risk
00:09:31
Speaker
requires a lot of planning is really what it comes down to. And I think in the dance world, sometimes we are not always as good at forward planning. And so there's often a bit of a panic of like, oh, we're not even done the choreography and the show is coming up in two weeks or that type of thing. So It really is about that forward planning and seeing, okay, Nutcracker Run starts, I don't know, December 10th, let's say. And so in the weeks before that or the week before that, let's say you know that you're going to have like pulled back a bit in terms of the intensity. And that's not to say you have an entire week off. It's just pulling back in the intensity of what we're doing. Instead of throwing in those extra rehearsals and last minute things, we're intentionally focusing more on maybe active recovery strategies. Maybe we're doing a yoga session in class. Maybe we're just doing really basic technique classes so that there's a little bit of that deloading happening.
00:10:23
Speaker
Okay. What are some of the most common injuries that you tend to see during these busy training periods? Yeah. Yeah, specifically during the busy training periods, I would say what we see is what we would classify as like chronic overuse injuries or more overuse type injuries. We actually don't see, or at least I don't see in my clinic, a huge spike in acute injuries. So those are injuries that happen all of a sudden, like somebody twists their ankle or pulls their hamstring or things like that. Like we don't see a huge increase in those injuries necessarily. Those injuries are certainly happening, but they're sort of happening throughout the season. what we see is this increase in the overuse training injuries. And so in terms of specific injuries, this can vary when we look at research on dance injuries. Foot and ankle injuries are the most common injuries. And I would say that holds true in my practice, that that is what we see a lot of is foot and ankle. But I also see quite a lot of hip and low back it in terms of these overuse injuries as well. It varies a bit with style that dancers are doing. So I do treat a lot of dancers who are doing a lot of ballet. And so then we sort of see a lot of the hip and potentially low back. If we are treating dancers who are dancing in other styles, those injuries do change a little bit, but it is those sort of overuse injuries that we'll see a big increase in during these really busy times.
00:11:44
Speaker
What are
Signs of overtraining in dancers
00:11:45
Speaker
some of the early warning signs that you see that a dancer might be overtraining or they're heading toward an injury? And that could be physically, mentally, or emotionally. Yeah, that's a great question. There's actually lots of things that feed into this that I think a lot of dancers sort of brush off or maybe don't realize are warning signs of potentially that overtraining. So certainly from the physical side, the just fatigue, in general, or like feeling exhausted a little bit out of proportion of what might be expected for how much they're training. Like people will be like, well, I always train this many hours a week. Why am I so much more tired or just feeling like they can't catch up on sleep or every spare minute they have, they're wanting to nap or kind of Yeah, sleep. So that is one is sort of fatigue or exhaustion.
00:12:34
Speaker
Oftentimes that is also accompanied with insomnia as well. And so we'll actually hear dancers kind of report that they're struggling to sleep. And so they often attribute the fatigue with, oh, I'm not sleeping well, but that not sleeping well or struggling to sleep can be associated with overtraining as well. And it can be a cycle that can be a little bit hard to break because They're exhausted, but then that exhaustion for anybody who's ever had a small child and you know if they miss a nap and then the next nap becomes like a much bigger battle, it's kind of the same idea. So insomnia, fatigue, exhaustion. Another thing that we see is a lot of. different kind of muscle and joint aches and pains. So it'll be somebody who's sort of, you know, one day their hips hurting, the next day their foot's bothering them, then their back sore for a few days. And it's just kind of one thing after another. And maybe none of them seem really significant, but it's just this something is always feeling sore or feeling painful in a way that is not typical for them. And it often is hallmarked by like moving around a bit. So it's not a
00:13:38
Speaker
specific injury necessarily it's just pain in particular muscles or joints that kind of spreads or travels around that can often be really frustrating for dancers because they're like oh as soon as my knee felt better now my other hip is bothering me and so it feels like it's just like one thing after another they're always having to like modify what they're doing because of that so that is something we really really commonly see as well Other things, changes in mood for sure. So dancers, if you're feeling like really irritable or frustrated or getting angry really easily, we see that and it can be a sign of overtraining for sure. and then the final one, i mean, there's others, but another big one that we'll see is a decrease in performance. And this is often dancers all of a sudden saying like, I just, I'm falling out of my turns constantly, or I just can't. get this element and so they're working really hard on specific things and they just almost feel like they're getting worse rather than better and that is often a sign of over training where practicing over and over and over again is not actually giving you the improvements that you're looking for that might be a sign that actually maybe you need to step back and prioritize more rest and recovery to allow those skills to come back and That is often not the mindset that dancers have. If dancers all of a sudden feeling like, oh, I've lost my turns, they're usually in the studio after hours practicing and like drilling turns over and over and over again. And that may not be the most productive use of their time.
00:15:10
Speaker
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00:16:37
Speaker
How can dancers tell the difference between some normal soreness that should be expected because you're working so hard and then something that's more serious that's an injury or leading to injury?
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, this is a great question and one that we often get. And even from parents, a lot of time they you know sort of question, well, I wasn't sure if they actually had an injury or if they were just sore because they had a really tough class the day before. And so there's a few things that we use. One of them is the onset. So in terms of like, when does that soreness or when did that soreness present? So if it's happening sort of within 24 hours of a class or a rehearsal or whatever it is that was sort of a strenuous activity, that might point to it being more sort of muscle soreness. It generally will show up if anybody's had, we call it DOMS, but it's that delayed onset muscle soreness. It usually shows up sort of the day after that event. So we say within 24 hours, I will say it's often like when somebody wakes up the next morning, like you have a hard class, you go to bed the next day, you wake up and you're like, oh, my hamstrings are really sore today.
00:17:41
Speaker
That's probably general muscle soreness. If it's appearing much more suddenly than that. So say you've had class and by the time you cool down and put your shoes on and head to your car, your back's already sore and hurting. That might be a sign that it's a more serious, like something that's more of an injury than just muscle soreness. So when the onset of the pain, we take that into consideration and then also how long it lasts for. so The delayed onset muscle soreness is generally not ever going to last for more than about 72 hours. And most of the time it's 24 to 48 hours. So, you know, we have soreness, it appears after doing something strenuous, and then it goes away within that kind of 48, 72 hours max, if it was like a really strenuous activity.
00:18:26
Speaker
If we have soreness that's lingering beyond 72 hours, then the recommendation would be to get it checked out because chances are it could be more of an injury than just muscle soreness.
00:18:37
Speaker
And then the last thing we consider is the response to movement. So muscle soreness that's just from exertion generally is better when we start moving. So we feel super stiff and sore. You wake up in the morning you're like, everything hurts. And then once you get up and you get going and you get some blood flow going and you start moving, things generally feel better. Once you stop, maybe you sit down to watch a movie or something, everything kind of tightens back up again. So general muscle soreness, it feels better with movement and worse with rest. And injuries most of the time are going to be the opposite. They're actually going to feel worse the more you move them and they're going to feel better with rest. So that's also something we're taking into consideration. So
Differentiating soreness from injury
00:19:20
Speaker
if we have a dancer who has some soreness that developed within a few hours of doing something in class, like by the time they got home that evening, they were already feeling it and it's lasted for more than a couple of days and it feels worse at the end of their dance days and better in the morning when they wake up, that's probably something we want to get checked out because that could potentially be more of an injury. Okay. Okay.
00:19:43
Speaker
For dancers, think about what they can control when it comes to these busy periods. So of course, they can't really control their rehearsal schedule and a lot of the things that come along with it. But what can they focus on to prepare their bodies? And how far in advance would you tell them based on what you said earlier with the periodization portion of it to kind of start preparing physically for an audition or an intensive?
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think just based on what we were talking about before, my answer is going to be like as far in advance as possible, which again is not always possible because we don't always know what's coming up, even especially in the case of like an audition. Sometimes you find out about it a week before and you're like, oh, there's this audition this weekend and I really want to go to it. So we can't always be preparing. But for something like a summer intensive or a performance period like Nutcracker or something like that, we know about that ahead of time. So we want to start planning for that ahead of time. Again, knowing, like you said, that they don't have a huge amount of control over their dance schedule.
00:20:46
Speaker
Hopefully, they have more control over other parts of their schedule so they can start to think about planning and, okay, when is my rest and recovery going to be? you know It's probably not the time where you want to start to add in lots of extra you know social events with friends or other time commitments, whether it's school events or things like that. you want to start to think about, okay, what's my schedule overall going to look like? How do I prioritize rest and recovery? Knowing that the dance part of it is going to be busy. And then as far as like preparing their body, again, that is ideally happening as far in advance as possible. And so if thinking of that sort of whole cycle of the entire dance season, a lot of the preparation we think about in our body in terms of building blocks of strength or cardiovascular fitness or even flexibility and stuff, we ideally want that happening in the preseason and even in the off season.
00:21:43
Speaker
Again, not a lot of dancers have an off season nowadays, but that is the idea of off season is actually that is your time to build your base and build up your capacity, knowing that during the regular season or the performance season, you're not going to have as much capacity to add on extra things like cross training or strength training or things like that. So again, if we really have to like pull back and look at it from sort of a a larger year round perspective, ideally dancers have prepared from at least a physical capacity standpoint more in the off season and the preseason. So in the performance season, they can focus on just performing.
00:22:23
Speaker
And during that time, would you recommend a dancer work with someone like you to develop a plan that's more preventative and aspirational, I guess you could say, as opposed to just trying to deal with an injury that's going on? like How could they be proactive about this?
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, in my ideal world, that would be exactly what dancers would be doing is using their off-season and pre-season to be really proactive and working on building up individualized conditioning programs and addressing any sort of, you know, if there's a muscle imbalance or they've had a growth spurt or any of those types of things. And then during the performance season, we obviously will support if there are any injuries or issues, but more of our work would be done in that sort of like preseason time where we can do more preventative stuff. Again, it's really hard to be working on preventative stuff in the middle of a performance season. And it's not even my goal with dancers a lot of the time, like they're so busy that me saying, okay, you're going to do this cross training program three times a week on top of your schedule. Like it's just not realistic. So in an ideal world, would dancers be able to work with somebody individually and have these programs? Absolutely. And it could be a physical therapist who specializes in dance, but there's also really great like strength and conditioning coaches and other people within the industry who are doing similar work and are really excellent in building those programs for dancers.
00:23:46
Speaker
my vision for the dance world would be that it's happening a little bit more at the studio level because I don't think it's super realistic for every dancer to be able to go out and access that individually. There's, you know, cost limitations and then just access to services and stuff. And so in an ideal dance world, I think if studios are taking time to add in sort of strength and conditioning sessions and perhaps even bringing in experts who are designing those programs for their dancers, but then being able to share it with the dancers at their home studio. I think that is ideal, but we we see some studios doing that now, but it hasn't yet become sort of the standard that all studios are doing that.
00:24:27
Speaker
You mentioned really prioritizing the sleep, the rest, the recovery during these periods. And I know as a dancer, a lot of my acute injuries came in periods when I was super fatigued because I was just not paying attention or I'd make a misstep or something. But I am curious what the science is behind how fatigue affects injury risk for dancers. Yeah.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So the research does overwhelmingly show that we see an increase in injuries when people are fatigued. And so there's one study that's like really commonly quoted, and I use it when I'm doing presentations with especially young dancers because it's like a little bar graph. And it's very clear that you see this like really big increase in injuries with decreasing hours of sleep a night. So the lowest injury rate is dancers getting eight or more hours of sleep a night. But even dropping down to just seven hours or six hours of sleep, the injury rate increases exponentially. And so sometimes when dancers see that, they're like, oh, like that's a really big difference in injury risk for just one hour of sleep. Could I maybe not scroll on my phone as long at night before I go to sleep and get that extra hour of sleep? So we do have research that shows that. That particular study was actually looking at adolescent athletes, not dancers, but
00:25:46
Speaker
you know I would put dancers in that same category when it comes to adolescents who are participating in high levels of activity. We also have research that shows us that we see more injuries at the end of a rehearsal day. We see more injuries at the end of a week compared to the beginning of a week. And we see more injuries at the end of a show run than at the beginning of a show run. So again, fatigue is playing into all of these.
00:26:12
Speaker
We don't necessarily know all of the mechanisms for why that is sort of possible. But a lot of, like you said, those missteps that happen or just that, you know, sometimes it might be considered like in coordination of movement is all of those fine movements and the high level things that we're performing are coordinated by our nervous system. And so we need to have, we call it neuromuscular control, but it's basically our nervous system's ah ability to control what our body is doing. And these things are happening in split seconds. And if the body is fatigued and the nervous system is fatigued, those signals are transmitting slower than they ideally should be or need to be. And that is often when we see these injuries happen. So there's probably many, many, many factors that contribute to fatigue playing a role in injuries. But that is one of the big ones is just this decrease in neuromuscular control that happens when we're more fatigued and certainly happens when we see decreasing hours of sleep at night.
00:27:10
Speaker
And
Role of sleep in injury prevention
00:27:11
Speaker
if I to tell the dancers one thing, I would say, get more sleep. That would have changed my life. And I get how hard is because I remember as a dancer being at rehearsal to 9 p.m. and then doing homework till midnight, waking up for school at 5.30.
00:27:22
Speaker
five thirty Like it did seem kind of impossible at times. If you're a dancer who's feeling lost, overwhelmed, or even just unsure about your next career step, I am here for you. As a former professional ballet dancer turned dance career mentor, I help dancers get clear on what they really want out of their careers and build a real, actionable strategy to get them there.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:28:10
Speaker
Just head to the show notes to schedule your consultation and let's fill the dance career you've been dreaming about. So I'm curious what you think dancers can do to manage fatigue beyond getting more hours of sleep at night. Is there anything else they can do? Like do power naps help?
00:28:24
Speaker
Does anything else help during a busy day? There
Managing fatigue: beyond sleep
00:28:27
Speaker
is some research that does show that these sort of power naps, so things that are like less than 30 minutes duration, kind of 20 minutes seems to be the sweet spot, can actually be really beneficial for some people. i know a lot of people who struggle to, you know, if they lie down for 20 minutes, they may not fall asleep. Like they just can't fall asleep that quickly – aren't used to sleeping during the day and things like that. But if you are somebody who can nap, short naps can absolutely be beneficial. Longer naps, like when we have people who are having these like two hour naps in the middle of the day, those actually can be really disruptive to our circadian rhythm and then can interrupt nighttime sleep. So if we are using napping as a strategy, we do want it to be shorter naps throughout the day. There's other strategies, things called, i don't know if you've heard of the, it's the non-sleep deep rest, but it's basically a sort of a form of mindfulness. There's guided meditation apps and things like that. There is programs that take you through these like restorative, and again, it's looking at recovery and restoration for the nervous system, but it's not actually sleep-based. And so a lot of people find these really helpful as like a 20-minute reset in the middle of the day. So you're not actually going to sleep, but you're getting this reset that's a little bit like a meditation, but specifically aimed at this deep rest.
00:29:43
Speaker
So those can be strategies for sure. and then other things that can be really helpful for recovery are simple things like myofascial release techniques. So using
Key recovery habits for dancers
00:29:54
Speaker
foam rolling or a lacrosse ball or things like that for rolling or even massage techniques and things like that can actually be helpful for recovery in a non-sleep way when we are in a period where we're really struggling to be able to get adequate sleep at night.
00:30:09
Speaker
Are there any other really important recovery habits that you think dancers should prioritize during these times? I mean, like you said, sleep is the number one. Like if I'm working on anything with dancers, it is often looking at their schedule and figuring out if there is a way that we can prioritize a little bit more sleep at night because that is such a critical part of it.
00:30:28
Speaker
But fueling is also really, really important for recovery. And I think it's something that dancers don't necessarily think of as a way of optimizing recovery. A lot of dancers maybe are aware of like fueling for energy for rehearsals or performance, but they don't often think about fueling in terms of recovery as well. So that is something that I will always recommend dancers look into. And if it's something that they're struggling with, potentially working with a dietician or somebody who is an expert in that area, because there's a lot of fueling strategies that we can use for recovery. And then there are other
00:31:05
Speaker
types of kind of aids for recovery that a lot of dancers find helpful. Things like compression. I don't know if you've seen those big like compression boot things that are like little sleeves put on your legs. Like there's a bunch of different brands of them, but things like compression sleeves or cold plunges or heat like saunas and stuff like that. So there's there's lots of those types of strategies that dancers can use. And I often get asked about, you know, the effectiveness of those strategies. And what I will say is if you're not doing the base things like sleeping and fueling and like those really important things, if you're not doing those well, then adding on compression or cold plunges and stuff is likely not going to be a big dial mover for you. But if you're doing all of the foundational things well and you're looking for that extra 1% or that little extra edge, then those tools can also be really beneficial and be really helpful for dancers.
00:32:02
Speaker
And I will say as a self-proclaimed sleepy person, I'm always sleepy. i now ask myself if I'm feeling fatigued. When did I last eat? When did I last drink water?
00:32:14
Speaker
And usually the answer is not recently enough. And as soon as I do those things, I feel a lot more energized. So I think for dancers, we underestimate how much fuel and water we really need, especially during a and really busy season. So asking yourself, have I eaten anything in the past couple hours? Maybe I need a snack and that will help boost my energy.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Thinking about injuries and maybe something more acute or even something that's been cropping up, what do you think a dancer should do if something starts to bother them while they're in an audition or an intensive?
Handling injuries during auditions
00:32:48
Speaker
So they're already there, are they've committed to this and they have something happen. What would their strategy be?
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, I would say i might talk about these slightly differently in terms of strategy. So like an audition or something that's a one-off thing, if you're coming into it and you already know you have an injury, so say you're recovering from an injury and you have a few limitations, absolutely tell them that beforehand. And that can be reaching out, say, via email before the audition even and saying, look, this is what I'm dealing with. This is the limitations I still have in my rehabilitation.
00:33:23
Speaker
do you still want me to come to the audition and do as much as I can? Or is there another option for me to audition? Could I come and do company class later? Or is there another audition date coming up? Could I video audition? Whatever. And they will let you know what they think most of the time.
00:33:37
Speaker
i will say in my experience, they still are, you know, getting people to come in and still audition and just saying, that's fine if you can't do point work or that's fine if you can't do... all of the Grand Allegro right now or whatever it is.
00:33:49
Speaker
If there's something that happens during the audition, so it's like an acute, you know, you land from a jump and roll your ankle or something like that. say something right away. Most of the time, they're going to know that it's happened most of the time. And especially you know in an audition session, like they're actually sat watching you the whole time. That is their job is that they are looking and assessing and they will know. And oftentimes they'll say, oh, are you okay? Or they'll almost check in and a lot of dancers will be like, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. And they kind of brush it off. And I would say,
00:34:19
Speaker
be honest. They want to know, and they don't want you, or hopefully they don't want you to be pushing through something you shouldn't be pushing through or dealing with, you know, something that could be making the injury worse. So just really open and honest communication with whoever is in the room.
00:34:36
Speaker
Almost everybody who's in that audition room is a former dancer themselves, if not everybody. And so they have all they all know what it is like to have an injury at an inconvenient time. So Don't be afraid to sort of say this is what happened. And sometimes, especially, you know, if it's just happened, you might not know exactly what the results of it is. So a lot of times dancers might, you know, just sit off to the side for the next exercise or two. And then once they calm down and shock wears off, whatever, they might be like, oh, actually, it's like fine and I can keep going. Or maybe it's not fine and they need to, you know, sit out or leave the audition or or that type of thing. So that would be more of like an audition setting where it's kind of one-off event.
00:35:20
Speaker
For a summer intensive, it's or an intensive of any type, it doesn't have to be the summer, but mostly they're in the summer. For an intensive, because you're going to be there for a longer period of time, again, the communication is just going to be so, so, so key. More often than not, intensives now have healthcare care professionals that are involved with the intensive. So depending, if you're at a really big program, They're going to have people on site who, as soon as something happens, they're going to say, go see the physio or go see whoever it is who's on site, usually in the same building.
00:35:54
Speaker
Generally, it's the people who work with their company members or that type of thing. Some of the smaller intensives may not have somebody who's on site, but they are almost certainly going to have a relationship with somebody who they send their dancers to and who's kind of like on call for these types of situations. And so again, just open communication as soon as you know that something's happened, communicating with the teachers or if it is an intensive where there's housing provided, so there's more of a residential system. A lot of times the health care access can come from whoever the house parents are, who your contact is. So it depends. Every intensive is going to like be a little bit different in terms of the communication chain, but just making sure that you're saying something so that you can get the help you need while you're there because A lot of times those auditions or those intensives, you've been there or are going to be there for a number of weeks. And a lot of injuries maybe are not going to be serious enough that you have to leave and go home. It might be you need a couple of treatment sessions. You might need to modify things for a few days and then you can fully participate again. But if we ignore it and kind of pretend we're not injured or hide an injury, it could get progressively worse to the point where it becomes a much more serious injury. So I would say communicating as soon as you can and then taking advantage the healthcare that is available at these intensives is really important.
00:37:16
Speaker
I
Recovering from injury during intensives
00:37:17
Speaker
have a very funny story about an intensive experience I had where I was in a really horrific golf cart accident a few weeks before my five-week intensive in Pittsburgh, and i had second-degree burns down my whole leg. It was it was wild, and i wasn't really sure what to do. I was actually in a wheelchair at first because I couldn't bend my knee. I had to have it completely straight because of where the burns were. And then eventually I was able to use crutches. So when I arrived in Pittsburgh, I was on crutches. So when this accident happened, I wasn't sure if I should pull out of the intensive, if I should still go. But we contacted Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and told them the situation. And they were very understanding and very accommodating and encouraged me still to come. They put me in an individual room so I'd have a little bit of privacy.
00:38:06
Speaker
There was a medical team there that I could see throughout this whole process. So when I started my first couple of days, i was barely doing anything. But by the end of the intensive, five weeks later, i was back on point. I was in the final performance. I actually got cast really well in and that performance. I had improved a ton in the intensive.
00:38:26
Speaker
And I think having that... situation where I was able to focus on my dancing so completely during that recovery period and be surrounded by other dancers really helped. Because if I had stayed home, I probably would have been pretty depressed, feeling really emotional about it. And I have had periods of time as a dancer where being in the studio with an injury has made me feel worse. But for this particular situation,
00:38:52
Speaker
where I was continually improving and able to start dancing again, being in the studio all day long and really helped me get back to where I wanted to be So I definitely agree you should communicate with the intensive and just be super duper clear about where you stand, what you're able to do Every single teacher I had throughout the intensive was informed of what was going on with me, so I never felt pressured to push past my limits. They were very supportive, and it was a great environment for me to recover in.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, like five weeks is a long time when we're dealing with an injury, like a lot of healing can occur even within three weeks. So if it's a week-long intensive, that might be a different conversation because it's just not such a long time period. But most intensives, if we're looking at between three and you know potentially even like six or seven weeks, that is a long period of time. And yeah, even if you can't do everything to start with, usually there is going to be progression and you're going to be able to do more as you progress through that.
00:39:51
Speaker
Absolutely.
Where to find Erica Mayall
00:39:52
Speaker
This has been so informative, Erica. If anyone listening wants to learn more about you or your work, where can we find you? Yeah. So on social media, I am at Dance Physio Erica and Erica's with a K. The clinic is called Allegro Performance and Wellness. Our website is allegroperformance.com. It has resources for dancers, but especially for dance teachers. I have a lot of educational resources for dance teachers on the website as well. So if there's any teachers listening who are interested in more information, the website is a great place to go. But for others and dancers who just want to connect social media is a great place to find me. I also have a podcast called the Dance Physio Podcast that you can find on all major podcast platforms if there's particular topics that people are interested in learning more about. chances are there is a podcast episode about it.
00:40:42
Speaker
Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
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00:40:50
Speaker
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00:41:03
Speaker
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00:41:16
Speaker
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