Dancers

This is the reality:-

1.) A human being is designed by nature, to be a hunter gatherer.

2.) If you live in a ‘civilized’ society, you are not hunting and gathering.

Even if you are very active, you have still grown up in a standard ‘western’ culture, therefore you will have been conditioned by that same culture, you will have powerful ingrained physical habits, learned from your parents as a child. You will have spent around 11 years in school and you will almost certainly have spent far more time in a car, on a sofa, at a desk and in comfy beds than the average hunter gatherer should do!

You will therefore have created the muscular patterns of dysfunction that are almost indigenous to ‘civilized’ western cultures.

Your training as a dancer can build power and grace but if you impose that training upon the standard patterns of dysfunction that most of us develop, it is possible that rather than create the true strength of muscles working in harmony, you create powerful compensations giving the illusion of strength, that can only be maintained within the framework and nature of your training.

In order to aid me with assessment and treatment, I use various types of muscle testing, most involve isolating muscle groups and subjecting them to a resistance they should easily be able to withstand.

With dancers, the failure rate on these tests are very high if you have low back hip or pelvic pain, sometimes even in your knees and shoulders. Your training has enabled you to perform feats out of the ordinary, yet ordinary people with no training will be able to

out-perform you on these tests.

If you go to the muscle dysfunction page, you will see how muscles have a threshold at which they become symptomatic. The pain you are experiencing may be a pulled hamstring, an apparent groin strain, or shoulder pain. You may blame this on the lift where you first felt it, or blame the hamstring pain on the stretch you were doing when the searing pain first burned in the back of your thigh. Perhaps you blame the knee pains on a squatting action that first seemed to cause it.

In most cases, you’d be wrong, a strong, well balanced human structure, is capable of the most extraordinary feats without injury, so how come you’re in pain?

The answer lies not in the activity, but in the in-activity. The sedentary nature of our lifestyles is where the muscle imbalance and dysfunction begins, the activity simply highlights that there is a problem.

Dysfunctional muscles will not strengthen very well, if at all, nor will they ever stretch very well, (see stretching and strengthening). But your training is something the body has to adapt to, so because it can't fully strengthen the muscle/s you’re working, it strengthens further, the muscles that are already compensating for the dysfunction.

You are in effect, reinforcing your body’s patterns of dysfunction. Moving ever closer to that threshold where they will cause you pain as the compensations becomes more and more difficult to sustain.

The result is pain, in your back, in your legs, your knees, your hips/groin, your shoulder, or wherever the compensations have broken down and thresholds reached.

Now the good news… your body wants to function perfectly, strongly and painlessly. The treatment I give is designed to re-establish harmonious balance within the muscle groups, primarily by removing the tension in hyper-tonic (over tight) muscles, naturally allowing weak muscles to regain their strength and respond to stretching and strengthening exercises. With this process your pain will disappear, and your training will begin to reinforce the new more harmonious balance within your muscular structure.