Stretching is a vital part of any athletics programme, especially dance. It allows you to achieve your best performance, lessening injury and increasing your days as a dancer as it puts less strain on muscles on dancing. Muscles that are properly stretched on a long term basis are more flexible and are less prone to injury.
You should learn how to recognise your own body-its strengths and weaknesses and how long stretches should be kept for. This is usually about
30 seconds, or until the tension is gone.
Different forms of dancing use different forms of stretches, such as jazz focuses alot on hamstrings and ballet on thigh and turnout stretches. However, all dance forms have the same one thing in common-stretches are only completeld after the muscles are all properly warmed up and at their most flexible stage. Warming up regularly inables you to do various splits, leaps and back bends.
Never force your body beyond what it is capable of. Stretching can cause serious and perhaps permanant injury if not done correctly and many dancers shorten their dancing careers by years by improper stretching. Warm up exercises are NOT the same as stretches and always should come afterwards when all the muscles are properly warmed up!
Stretching should always follow warm-up because the more time left between the warm up and the stretch, the more time the muscles have to loose thier elasticity.
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