How to improve your flexibility is an ongoing challenge for cheerleaders, dancers, and those doing gymnastics. Safe stretching is a learned art. It's especially important for those who are not in dance classes learning ballet technique, to learn proper warm up, and proper stretching positions.
If you are in high school or college cheer leading it's easy to justify a short-cut and skip warming up - especially if you're hot and sweaty just from getting to practice on time! Yet warm up and cool down are important for making your hard work pay off. Also, and just as important, your stretching is more effective.The time taken to warm up protects you from injuries. Stress fractures, joint pain and muscle strains are the least of what can happen if you fail to warm up.
Warm-up gets your body activated for the intense activity of all the choreographic repetitions you will do in any given practice. It wakens your reflexes, or your automatic physical reactions to your own and others' movements. Your heart rate and breathing will increase, pushing oxygen and glucose to your muscles and raising your body temperature. The result is, your muscles get warmer, move and stretch more easily, and will be less painful afterwards. Once warmed up, your metabolism runs high for the duration of your practice, resulting in better fat-burn off.
Your warm-up should work the same muscles you'll be using while exercising. If you are going to be doing a lot of jumps, a slow motion warm up of jumps would be slow controlled squats. Slowly straightening up, controlling your posture, and holding your core muscles, will prepare your muscles and your concentration for a fun and safe session.
Using slow motion versions of your arm movements will warm up your shoulder/neck/arms and upper back.
After five to ten minutes of this kind of warm up, you can do some gentle stretching in all the positions you will be using in the choreography.
After practice, you can repeat your stretching more intensely. Better to take time here while you're really warmed up, and then throw on some sweats to go home in. (Even if you are going somewhere to grab a bite and socialize, better use the time to stretch rather than primp. You are serious, right?)
Cool-down gradually. Just walking around two or three minutes, pausing to lunge and stretch your calves, makes it easy on your circulatory system (heart/lungs/blood flow).
Stretches are technical and must be learned in detail. Warming up in order to maximize your efforts will help you get more flexible for cheer leading, and avoid injury.
Get the wonderfully demonstrated Ultimate Stretching Guide DVD for ballet flexibility if you want to improve your cheer leadering.
Showing posts with label flexibility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flexibility. Show all posts
How to Create More Flexibility in the Ankle Joint For Ballet and Pointe Shoes
For the less flexible ankle joint, safe stretching can be done daily to get you closer to the perfect look in pointe shoes . Avoid pain and muscle strain by ignoring some of the drastic measures you will see dancers do. Do not put your toes under the piano, for example, and pull your knees straighter. You are heading for foot injuries.
Many years ago a friend, a non-dancer, Vone Deporter and I would do yoga together a couple of times a week in the National Ballet School, in the evenings. We would play some relaxing music and do our own routines.
Over the weeks, I felt more flexible, slightly, and got good results, experiencing less aches and pains, and overall tension.
I used yoga to stretch the ballet way - forcing every position and deep breathing to distract myself from the pain. I thought I was getting into much better positions.
Vone, however, did yoga the gentle yoga way. She picked a few yoga positions and stretched comfortably with a stretchy feeling, but no pain. A few weeks later her positions were drastically more flexible than mine. She had no workout routines, no warm up routines, she'd just show up and do it.
That does not seem fair. I thought I was working much harder. But that was the way I was trained. Take it to the limit.
In recent years I've read much that has been written by dancer/dance medicine specialists who have a very different view on how dancers should treat their bodies. How to stretch the foot and ankle joints to improve the curve that is part of ballet fashion, is important.
Another moment I remember is watching Swan lake with Vone and her husband. Karen Kain was performing. Vone, an artist and student of human anatomy, leaned over and whispered "What's wrong with her feet?" Huh? What ballet student would not like to have feet like that?
It's a matter of perspective. So what is safe stretching for the top of the arch curve?
Author Deborah Vogel describes how to relax and knead out muscle tension down the front of the calves to the ankle area, using a Pinky ball. This is a small,dense, high bounce sports ball. If you sit down on your feet, you can roll the ball under the top of your calf muscle, below the knee joint. You will feel some very tender spots where the muscle is especially tense. If you lean into the ball on those spots, you will feel some release there. Do not push too hard, because you can do this every day, and gradually condition the muscle.
Working your way down the leg, you can knead and massage tension out of the muscles.
Now, you can do a stretch recommended by Lisa Howell, another dancer/dance medicine specialist who has written much about care of the feet for ballet dancers. Staying in this position (or stretching out for a few minutes if your feet are going to sleep) you can now slide your hand under one knee, and gently raise the lower leg up. Make sure your ankle is in a straight line, not sickled in or out. You will feel a stretch along the arch curve. Hold the stretch, relax and repeat 10 times, each side, every day.
This is a gentle stretch that produces results. You can also put the Pinky ball just higher than the tops of the metatarsal joints, and gently lean into it for an extra stretch.
None of this should produce pain. Look at an x-ray of the human foot and the many tiny foot bones. These bones and the soft tissues supporting them need to be treated gently in between your ballet classes. They are tough, but as you push them as far as they can go every day in the ballet studio, they deserve rest and care.
With these two exercises you can increase flexibility, avoid muscle sprain and foot injuries, and improve your look in pointe shoes.
Get more flexibility in the ankle joint and many more good ideas for improvements in your ballet and pointe shoe work.
Many years ago a friend, a non-dancer, Vone Deporter and I would do yoga together a couple of times a week in the National Ballet School, in the evenings. We would play some relaxing music and do our own routines.
Over the weeks, I felt more flexible, slightly, and got good results, experiencing less aches and pains, and overall tension.
I used yoga to stretch the ballet way - forcing every position and deep breathing to distract myself from the pain. I thought I was getting into much better positions.
Vone, however, did yoga the gentle yoga way. She picked a few yoga positions and stretched comfortably with a stretchy feeling, but no pain. A few weeks later her positions were drastically more flexible than mine. She had no workout routines, no warm up routines, she'd just show up and do it.
That does not seem fair. I thought I was working much harder. But that was the way I was trained. Take it to the limit.
In recent years I've read much that has been written by dancer/dance medicine specialists who have a very different view on how dancers should treat their bodies. How to stretch the foot and ankle joints to improve the curve that is part of ballet fashion, is important.
Another moment I remember is watching Swan lake with Vone and her husband. Karen Kain was performing. Vone, an artist and student of human anatomy, leaned over and whispered "What's wrong with her feet?" Huh? What ballet student would not like to have feet like that?
It's a matter of perspective. So what is safe stretching for the top of the arch curve?
Author Deborah Vogel describes how to relax and knead out muscle tension down the front of the calves to the ankle area, using a Pinky ball. This is a small,dense, high bounce sports ball. If you sit down on your feet, you can roll the ball under the top of your calf muscle, below the knee joint. You will feel some very tender spots where the muscle is especially tense. If you lean into the ball on those spots, you will feel some release there. Do not push too hard, because you can do this every day, and gradually condition the muscle.
Working your way down the leg, you can knead and massage tension out of the muscles.
Now, you can do a stretch recommended by Lisa Howell, another dancer/dance medicine specialist who has written much about care of the feet for ballet dancers. Staying in this position (or stretching out for a few minutes if your feet are going to sleep) you can now slide your hand under one knee, and gently raise the lower leg up. Make sure your ankle is in a straight line, not sickled in or out. You will feel a stretch along the arch curve. Hold the stretch, relax and repeat 10 times, each side, every day.
This is a gentle stretch that produces results. You can also put the Pinky ball just higher than the tops of the metatarsal joints, and gently lean into it for an extra stretch.
None of this should produce pain. Look at an x-ray of the human foot and the many tiny foot bones. These bones and the soft tissues supporting them need to be treated gently in between your ballet classes. They are tough, but as you push them as far as they can go every day in the ballet studio, they deserve rest and care.
With these two exercises you can increase flexibility, avoid muscle sprain and foot injuries, and improve your look in pointe shoes.
Get more flexibility in the ankle joint and many more good ideas for improvements in your ballet and pointe shoe work.
Labels:
avoid pain,
ballet,
flexibility,
foot injuries,
muscle sprain,
pointe shoes
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