Yoga for Performing Artists...and staff! 6 Poses to Keep Stage Crew Bodies Happy

This is the last in a series of articles designed to help you identify a handful of yoga positions that will be most beneficial to your particular performance genre. This article focuses on stage crew. Previous articles have been written for marchers, dancers, and instrumentalists (not marching).

Practicing yoga offers performers many significant benefits, including lowering stress levels, promoting physical and mental relaxation, improving balance, and maintaining or improving flexibility. All of these things can help keep your immune system functioning optimally, maintain a healthy body weight, and reduce the likelihood of falls that can cause injuries. Additionally, regular yoga practice can improve body awareness, which can improve precision of movement, lower unnecessary muscular tension, and improve posture.

Concussions in the Performing Arts

March is National Brain Injury Awareness Month

The most common brain injury suffered by athletes and performers is a concussion. A concussion is a traumatic injury to the brain, and it comes with a plethora of symptoms that can affect nearly all of the systems in the body. Even with prompt and proper care and recovery, suffering a concussion can result in permanent or life-threatening consequences.

When people think of activity-related concussions, they typically think of high-impact sports like football, hockey, or boxing, but performing artists are at risk of suffering concussions, too. Most commonly, activity-related concussions are caused by collisions, falls, or blunt trauma to the head (getting hit in the head or hitting the head on something). In the performing arts, concussions are almost always caused by accidents or mistakes while executing choreographed movements.

Injury Risk Factors for Musicians

Playing a musical instrument, like all activities in the performing arts, carries a certain amount of inherent risk of developing an injury. However, identifying the injury risk factors instrumentalists face isn’t always easy since nearly all injuries instrumentalists suffer are chronic injuries (also called “overuse injuries”). It’s much easier to identify risk factors for a traumatic injury, because these injuries are typically caused by a single incident (like a fall or collision), whereas chronic injuries are caused by a combination of a number of predisposing factors and events.

3 Upper Body Stretches Dancers Should be Doing

This article continues a series examining upper body stretches for specific types of performing artists. The stretches presented in this article are grouped together for dancers. Previous articles have examined stretches for marching musicians and musicians who play while seated with their arms elevated.

Lifting Belt Controversy: Should You Use One?

This is the fourth article in a series examining low back pain in the performing arts. Previous articles examined the causes of low back pain, rules for safe lifting, and proper lifting techniques in the performing arts. This article discusses a commonly-used piece of safety equipment: the lifting belt.

There are many types of lifting belts, also occasionally referred to as “back belts.” The lifting belts most commonly encountered in the performing arts and athletic worlds are specifically designed for athletic use. These belts are designed to support the lower back while minimizing the extent to which they interfere with body movement. Conversely, some back belts are intended for people with specific back injuries or for manual laborers to wear at work. These belts may have suspender-like supports or may be made of inflexible materials, like hard plastic, which make it harder to perform athletic movements while wearing these belts.

Industrial Lifting Belt

How to Care for Your "Shin Splints" and Avoid Them in the Future

Pain in the shins, often referred to as “shin splints,” can be debilitating. But what exactly are “shin splints”? Medically speaking, “shin splints” don’t exist – the phrase is not a medical diagnosis.

The term is actually a catchall for any number of conditions that cause pain and inflammation in the lower leg, including tendinitis, muscle strains, stress fractures in the lower leg, medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS), recurrent chronic anterior compartment syndrome, and inflammation of the connective tissue around and between the bones in the lower leg (called periosteitis and inflammation of the interosseous membrane, respectively).

How Ergonomic Principles Can Improve Your Playing

Since the 1950s, the word “ergonomics” has been used to describe the study of humans and their interaction with objects in their lives. This field has focused on improving the design, manufacture, and arrangement of objects within a given (work) environment to make these locations and the actions performed in them safe, healthy, and comfortable. Instrumentalists can benefit greatly from modern ergonomics, as musical performance requires a very high amount of repetitive motions that can lead to injury.