Listening to Your Body
Dancing Smart Newsletter
February 25, 2005
Last week's newsletter on turnout pain in 4th and 5th position hit home for many readers. Renate wrote in response to the question in last week's newsletter concerning what is worrisome pain versus okay pain and how to tell the difference.
"I have always found as a teacher that this is the important question for dancers to understand. The sensation of working muscles, or muscles in training is often perceived as painful when the lactic acid builds up. I try to help my dancers differentiate between Joint / tendon pain which is unproductive and harmful, versus muscle pain which usually indicates strongly working muscles. Of course there is the fine line between working muscle sensation and muscles stressed and tearing pain. This is one of the challenges of teaching as we the teacher can't "feel" the sensations that the student is feeling. I find myself training my dancers to learn to "listen" to the sensation in their bodies. A mild "hello" from the muscles is ok but a "scream" is and indication that the exertions was too great. Your point of view on this subject would be interesting.
Renate
You are on right on, Renate, with helping students learn how to listen to their body. General guidelines might be to first note where they are feeling their discomfort. If it is in between the joints, it's generally muscle. When it is at a joint you need to figure out whether it is a tendon problem in which case you would work with releasing or strengthening the muscle it is attached to, or a joint problem, which has more to do with misalignment of the joint. This is a starting place for evaluating an injury.
I have my students who take my functional anatomy course write out what they know about their body. Start with what they know about their alignment, what do they know about their muscles, what do they know about their health habits, etc. I want them to put down on paper as much as possible, including things that seem obvious, like 'I know when I don't sleep 8 hours a night I don't perform as well in class'. 'I know I need 2 cups of coffee in the morning to get going'.
We need to encourage these dialogues with ourselves. If I have a dancer come in with an injury, one of the first things I ask them is what makes it better and what makes it worse? I want to know as much as I can about the patterns around the injury. Have you ever had problems in this area before? What is your injury history? What are you working on in class? We know our weak spots, but often don't know that we have subtly compensated for these areas.
Time and time again, I can have a dancer come in with an injury, let's say left knee. I'll ask them about their injury history, and they'll say they haven't had any problems before. As we continue to talk I find out they twisted their right ankle and never considered it an injury because they took a few days off from class and were able to continue walking on it. Meanwhile as they are standing talking to me, they have all their weight over on the left leg and are sitting into their hip. Hmmm.. I start to see a compensation pattern building and know I'm going to have to address an uneven muscle balance between the two hips and possible right down to the feet.
My point in describing this to you is not to have you all become therapists and begin to diagnose your dancer's injuries. Far from it. We all need to go to our dance doctors and physical therapists for that. But we can help our students become much more savvy in understanding the relationships in their body, especially when they begin to feel strain or pain.
Fortunately, most dancers know that when their bodies start screaming at them they better pay attention! The lesser gradations of pain and discomfort are harder to evaluate. Learning how to listen to your body and understanding its cues won't happen unless we help our students become intimately conscious about what they know and don't know!
What I know is that I have to look at each dancer with fresh eyes. There are common patterns that I have seen over the years that may or may not be applicable to that dancer's situation. Even if I see a common pattern emerging (like screwing the knee to make the feet look more turned out) that dancer with their unique body, will have their own unique asymmetries. Working with dancers keeps you humble because as soon as you think you have figured something out, a dancer comes in with a pattern that disputes your findings!
Back to listening to your body. I wrote an article for Danceart.com on Soreness versus Pain – A Dancer's Dilemma. In that article I talk in more detail about distinguishing the difference between the two. If you'd like to read it you can go to the website below. Check out the Mind over Mat section for some great explanations of the Pilates mat exercises by Anneliese Burns.
http://www.danceart.com/Mechanix/sorenesspain.htm
Have a great week, everyone!
On with the dance!
Deborah