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| HOME STRETCHING DANCE TERMS Is Ballet a Sport? (below) |
| Is Ballet a Sport? In the mid-70's, a study was conducted by James Nicholas of Lenox Hill Hopsital in NY City, to see which sports were the most difficult. He studied 61 sports, including ballet, and broke them down into categories that included strength, speed, and agility. When he added all the net scores to see which was the most demanding of the sports, to nobody's surprise it was professional football with 56 points. But what surprised everybody in the study was the professional ballet scored 55 points. Professional ice hockey scored 54 points. The muscles of a ballet dancer are leaner and stronger than those of a professional athlete because dancers cross-train out of necessity. A choreographer might give a dancer a series of steps that require them to involve different body groups and body parts all at once for long periods of time. You do not experience that type of a work out on a stair machine or a treadmill. The treadmill and bike machine use a limited range of muscle groups and require staightforward up and down, left and right movements. Dancers use their whole body when they perform and take class due to the style of the art. |
| The Importance Of A Raised Floor Many studios do not have raised dance floors and the dancers are dancing on concrete. PCPA has a raised floor to help absorb the energy shockwave of a dancer's movement. The force of impact on which the dancer's foot strikes the ground will rebound off the surface and vibrate up through the body as an "energy shockwave." This shockwave affects dancer's muscles, tendons, and may lead to joint trauma at the ankle, knee, hip, and lower back. Sport Medicine experts explain that the body feels 3x its weight in pressure with each foot fall while running or pounding the floor (like in hip hop) and up to 7x its weight when it jumps (including movements like jete leaps and changement jumps). Jumping on a non-raised floor can result in shin splints, sprains or worse. |