Yes, dancers, you actually can (and should) exercise outside of dance!

The most common misconceptions about exercise for dancers and why they’re wrong

Dancers – raise your hand if you’ve heard someone say that exercising outside of dance is bad for you as a dancer. (Ok, now put your hand down because everyone who can see you right now is trying to figure out what you’re doing.)

No single article can cover all of the misconceptions and flat-out lies that surround exercising for dancers, but this article will attempt to debunk the most heinous ones that rear their ugly heads most often.

The Main Culprits

Women who weight train will bulk up

AKA: exercising outside of dance will make me “too bulky” for the stage
If you really want to bulk up while exercising, you can. But you REALLY have to work for it. Especially if you are female. A key component to building muscle is the level of testosterone in your body. This is why some professional athletes (illegally) take testosterone to get bigger (and presumably stronger) muscles. However, most women do not have enough testosterone in their bodies to ever naturally become muscled enough to be confused with a bodybuilder.

In addition to needing high enough levels of testosterone, hypertrophy (the physiological term for adding bulk to a muscle) requires weight training to be performed in a specific range of weight, sets, reps, and rest periods. To stimulate muscle growth, you need to lift about 75% of the maximum weight you can do for one full repetition of a particular exercise, do 3-5 sets of 6-12 reps each, and rest for 30-90 seconds between sets of the same exercise. Training with less weight for more reps per set (you only need to do about 2-3 sets, though) and shorter rest periods will improve muscular endurance without bulking up the muscles. Training with more weight for less reps per set with longer rest periods will improve strength but will not necessarily lead to bulking up.

Bulking up should not be confused with what many people call “toning”. This often results from a change in body composition: increasing lean muscle mass and decreasing body fat. This leads to muscles becoming more noticeable, but this is not the same thing as having large muscles that stick out and scream for attention when people look at you.

Cross-training will make me lose flexibility

Cross-training does not necessarily mean that you will lose flexibility – like most things related to exercising, it depends on what exactly your routine entails. You can lose flexibility through cross-training if you do it incorrectly, like: lifting weights in a shortened arc of motion (think doing a ton of arm curls but only bringing your hand halfway up to your shoulder), not doing a good dynamic warm-up, or not stretching after exercising. Of course, you can also lose flexibility by laying curled up in a ball on your couch for hours at a time day after day for weeks or months on end.

True flexibility (how much range of motion your muscles let you move through) is not a “once you have it, you’ve got it” kind of thing, it’s a “if you don’t work to keep it, you’ll lose it” kind of thing. In other words, you can lose flexibility through doing any activity that does not include a component designed to maintain or improve your flexibility (this includes doing nothing).

So, if you can improve your cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength (which will improve your dancing) while also maintaining or improving your flexibility, why would you decide not to cross-train?

Ballet-specific: I shouldn’t exercise because I’ll be in parallel.

This can be associated with one of the following “reasons,” too:

1. I'll lose my turnout.
   
2. It won’t help my dancing at all.
   

Many dancers develop overuse injuries throughout the course of their dancing career. So why would you want to train outside of dance doing the same motions that you’re doing in dance? By exercising in parallel, you’re exercising in positions and motions that are different from the ones you do every day in class and rehearsal. This allows your body to continue to condition and build strength without exposing it to the same physical stresses associated with dancing. After all, the concept behind cross-training is that you’re conditioning for your activity by doing something that is not exceedingly similar to your main activity. So why would you attempt to cross-train through activities that are the same as dancing?

Like nearly all activities, dance tends to develop certain muscle groups more than others. If the strength difference between specific muscle groups becomes too great, this can lead to pain and injury. Training the body in different positions (like parallel for ballet dancers) or focusing on the muscle groups that are largely ignored in dance class can restore these muscular imbalances and protect against developing injuries and pain.

“I’ll lose my turnout”
A note: By strengthening your internal rotators (that are most likely VERY weak if you are a ballet dancer) and stretching your external rotators, you may “lose” the pseudo-turnout that your super-tight external rotators pull your legs into when you are resting. However, this will not affect your functional turnout that you actually use when you’re dancing. It will just help you look a little more like a “normal” person instead of a duck when you walk.

“It won’t help my dancing”
Any physical training that you do correctly will improve your fitness and overall health, which will have positive impacts on your dancing ability (just like eating nutritiously or getting enough sleep on a regular basis). As to training in parallel helping dance ability, I offer this anecdote:

A pre-professional dancer under my care voluntarily transitioned her rehabilitation program into a conditioning program for the remainder of the season because she felt that she was jumping higher after her rehab than she did before her injury. The latter stages of her rehabilitation program focused on performing large jumps in parallel. By using jumping styles that are outside of ballet technique, her body was able to learn how to use her gluteal muscles (among the largest and strongest muscle groups in the body) to jump more efficiently. This translated into higher jumps in ballet class despite the fact that she was training in parallel with unaesthetic deep squat jumps.

Be sure to read about the truths behind the most common myths about working out and why dancers need to stop believing that running is bad for them.