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.

Ice vs. Heat

Now that you know the effects of cold and heat on the human body, here is the answer to the ever-popular question, “Should I ice it or use heat?”

How Cold and Heat Affect the Body

You strain your hamstring doing a penche, so you put ice on it. Your muscles are achy when you’re lifting your sousaphone over your head after the first week of band camp, so you use a heating pack to soothe them. You know that ice and heat help, but how do they help?

Cold application (cryotherapy) and heat application (thermotherapy) are often used in athletic medicine at all levels, from weekend warriors to professional athletes. But why? Changes in temperature result in predictable physiological changes within the body. As you would expect, cold temperatures often result in different changes than warm temperatures do, but there are some changes, such as reduction in pain, that can be caused by either cold or heat application.

Lateral Ankle Sprains

The body’s joints get their static and dynamic stability through a combination of bony architecture, tightness and orientation of ligamentous structures (ligaments and the joint capsule), and muscular contractions. The amount of a joint’s stabilizing forces coming from each of these factors at any given time is dependent on the specific joint and the current position of that joint. Joints are most stable when the majority of the joint’s stability comes from the bony architecture, and they are often least stable when the ligamentous structures are left to contribute the most to the joint’s stability.

The ankle joint is most stable in a combined position of dorsiflexion (lift up your toes and front of your feet so you can walk only on your heels) and eversion (try to “aim” the soles of your feet as far away from each other as you can without rotating your legs) and least stable in a combined position of plantarflexion (point your feet and toes) and inversion (soles of the feet turned toward each other).