Dancers Living with Debilitating Training
Athletes train every day, three-hundred sixty-five days of the year to be able to do the thing they love most in this world to their fullest potential. But what happens when they push themselves too far? When their bodies need help beyond personal repair and an athlete is suddenly told NO, there’s an instant emotional shock. The instinctual fear sets in knowing you will not be able to do the thing that makes you happy. You won’t be able to do things normally for a while and there is always risk involved with the slight uneasiness worrying that the 1%-5% might be you and you’ll no longer be able to perform again.
Going into a situation with an assumption about the outcome can be difficult. Usually what you expected to happen doesn’t and the last thing you could have anticipated does. I find that the hardest part about surgery is not the surgery itself, but rather the before and after. The unknown is terrifying, and especially for young athletes, almost everything is an unknown variable. Injuries are hard for everyone, but it is especially difficult for young adults because navigating adulthood for the first time comes with lots of responsibility. Parents are no longer allowed to make decisions for you and your fate is completely in your own hands. This was extremely troubling for me because being a minor, I was ignorant to how much responsibility would be places on me after becoming a legal adult. I not only had to think about what I wanted, but now I was the one who was in charge of making tough, potentially life-altering decisions. I was not simply deciding what classes to take for the following school year, I had to choose for myself whether or not to go through with a surgery that could have detrimental effects on my future as a performer. I was running the risk of possibly never getting to dance again if the surgery did not go well. This was unlike any choices I had made in the past. Surgery is not something that will impact your life for the few months following, but rather would directly affect my quality of life from now on. For the first time, I needed to make my own decision regarding personal health, and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever faced.
I was not the first young athlete to have to make such a difficult, life-altering decision and was not going to be the last. D1 baseball player Andres Lou sheds light on this pressure and explains that for him, “The hardest part was that they made me decide.” Like most athletes, he has been struggling with his injury for a long time as we are training and classically conditioned to push through the pain. Adrenaline takes over and for the performance or game, an athlete’s mind cannot only focus on succeeding. The pain temporarily goes away and later returns stronger than before. Andres had to miss junior year baseball season due to his injury with his UCI and eventually went back senior year and landed a was blessed to have been recruited by LMU for college baseball. He was in practice one day at the university when he felt it pop during practice. It was a second-degree partial tear on his UCI. He was faced with an awful decision to either attempt restoration using PRP and potentially missing more of his season if it is not successful or having Tommy John surgery right away. He decided to try PRP first and was out for three months. When he final went back, he was able to play for a month until her completely tore his UCI.
Andres discloses, “Tommy John surgery has an 85% success rate… I couldn’t help but think about that 15% of me never playing again”. Having to decide one’s own fate it one of the hardest things a person can do because there is that constant fear before, worrying that it might have been the wrong decision. That is too much pressure on an eighteen-year-old who is not only trying to adjust to college life and get good grades, but now on top of that must make a potentially life-changing decision.
This then leads me into questioning how often it is for a young person to have to make these kinds of decisions. The Pro Athlete Law Group write an article called Student-Athletes Unaware of Their Career Ending Injuries. It explains that “In the NCAA alone there are 20,718 football injuries a year, and of those, 841 are spinal injuries… There are around 4,000 knee injuries per year in collegiate sports, which… leaves the athlete vulnerable to further injuries.” This is solely discussing collegiate sports that have recruitments for college. This is not even mentioning other artistic sports such as dance. If there are 20,718 football injuries a year, how many injuries are there including baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, etc.? Again, this is not even including dance. Then I decided to take a look at how often dancers develop injuries from the sport they love.
The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital conducted a study on dance-related injuries among children and adolescents between the ages of three and nineteen. Between the year 1991 and 2007, they “estimated 113,000 children and adolescents were treated in U.S. emergency departments for dance-related injuries”. The article called Dance Related Injuries by the Numbers explains this and goes further in depth to reveal that 41% of these dance injuries are in teens and young adults between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years old. Majority of dance injuries are from the bottom half of the body with 58% of the injuries from the lower extremity. To be more specific 12% being injuries to the foot, 17% to the knee, and 21% to the ankle. The bottom half of the body holds up the top half, which proves a more drastic hinderance to one’s quality of life during recovery and a lot longer to not be able to participate in dance while trying to heal. Although this time away from the studio has offered me some time to reflect on what it means to be a dancer and how dance training differs greatly from other professional sports training.
An athletes training is the foundation for their performance. Muscle memory kicks in during performances and the body will naturally revert back to what it has been trained to do up until that point. This is where the dancer or athlete’s foundational training matters the most. Cary Orthopaedics’ article Sports Injuries: Trends and Prevention points out that, “Each sport or exercise has associated correct techniques [and] It’s important to learn correct movement and body alignment, as well as come to understand how the bones and muscles are working to support the activity. … By practicing proper exercise techniques, you can make your bones, muscles and connective tissue (tendons, ligaments and cartilage) more resilient and less susceptible to injury.” Both athletes and dancers have warmups, although dancers use different parts of their bodies every day and exercise different muscles all the time in new choreography exploration. Other sports athletes do not twist their bodies in different contortionist ways, but rather have set positioning for each action and reaction of their sport. Without the necessity of emotional expression alongside the athleticism, there is much more of a ritualistic routine. Having a stricter routine for your body, if trained using the proper techniques, makes sudden injuries less likely. Muscle strain is still very much a high possibility when working habitually, but the likeliness that a football, baseball, or basketball player completely breaks or tears something without potential preexisting injury signs if much more unlikely compared to that of a dancer.
This article also advocates to never play through the pain because, “Pain is a signal from your body that something is wrong. If you feel pain during exercise or while participating in a sport, always take a break or stop the activity to assess the pain. It’s very likely that you could make the injury worse if you decide to ignore it or ‘play through the pain.’” As a dancer, I was always taught to push through the pain when working out during conditioning classes. This mindset of “the performance must go on” has a very similar intention to get the performer to push through whatever struggles they are going through for the storytelling of the artform. This is a beautiful way to instill perseverance into a young athlete, although the true intention can get lost in translation. This expression in no way is meant to encourage pushing oneself to their breaking point. It is there to inspire and motivate, not silently tear apart a person from the inside out. Words are just as important when training teenagers and young adults because they are at a time in their lives where words mean the most and can be the most impactful form of mentorship. Dancers are also taught that the body is capable of so much more than people think. With that said, dancers accidentally become brainwashed and believe they can simply push through anything with the adrenaline.
Pushing through the pain for a performance may appear to be a great idea in the moment but can ultimately lead to much greater setbacks afterward. I was once preparing to dance in my end of the year recital show in which I performed in nine, 2–4-minute-long dances, three times in one day. It was always a long day for the mind and the body, but it was the most exciting and fulfilling day of the year because that was when we got the chance to showcase all our hard work throughout the season. Five days before the show I was dancing in a class when I ripped off my toenail on my big toe. It hurt really badly, and I was forced to sit out for the rest of rehearsal. The head of our company told me to take it easy and to wrap my toe and see how it felt up until the day before the show. I did so but I refuse to not practice the days leading up to their performance, so I did every dance with a bandage on my toe and simply partook in dancing in flat ballet shoes for my pointe piece. When it came time for the day of the show all my teachers told me to just dance on flat foot without my point shoes, but there was no way I was going to be the only dancer on that stage in a pointe dance not dancing on pointe. I have always been a fighter and refuse to say, “I can’t do it” because I knew I could. The phrases that I had been instilled on me such as “the show must go on”, “you’re stronger than you think you are”, and “beauty is pain” just kept ringing through my head and this dance was everything beautiful about ballet. I was unable to simply not showcase all my hard work from the year, so I disregarded everyone’s advice and did all three performances full out in point shoes. I knew it wouldn’t hurt during the show because of adrenaline and I did not have time after the dance to dwell in the pain I felt, as I had little to no time in between dance numbers to change costumes and go over choreography. I felt so accomplished and proud of myself. I was so unbelievably strong, and I had just done what many dancers would not have the guts to do. Although what I failed to realize when I made that decision, was what my injury would look like after the show. I was then forced to take time off dance for a week following the recital because my toenail had gotten worse. The most difficult part about an injury is the recovery. It is the fact that a person is not only in pain but is then forced to take time away from doing what they love.
In the article Perceived Happiness of College Students Measured by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it mentions that “Wilson (1967) proposed that prompt satisfaction of needs causes happiness, while the continuation of unfulfilled needs causes unhappiness. [He] suggested three kinds of needs important in determining happiness: physiological needs (food and shelter), pleasure-seeking needs (stimulation and action), and acquired secondary needs (affection, acceptance, status, achievement, and self-actualization)” (759). This draws a direct correlation of basic human needs to a person’s overall happiness. Usually, one fulfills these needs through multiple mediums, but for a dancer one form of artistic expression encompasses all areas. When the average person cannot use their foot, they lose a physiological need but are still able to fulfill the rest of their needs through other outlets. For a dancer, there are no other outlets, dance is everything. It is their physiological, pleasure, and all other secondary needs; losing one (the physiological ability to dance) means they lose everything.
To prevent this complete loss of all happiness for dancers, it is imperative that we find a sustainable preventative solution to lower the injury rate. I recently had an impromptu interview with my physical therapist who is currently helping me recover from major invasive foot surgery and he reinforced the idea that is it all about the training. We discussed how he sees many young dancers getting injured and then asked me, “When you train are there weightlifting exercises you do to build up muscles and endurance like other athletic sports? Do your coaches talk to you about healthy nutritional habits?”. This was a very harsh reality for me to face because this was the moment where I realized that the artform I loved so much was not giving the same amount of love back. It is more common for teenage, young adults, and professional dancers to develop eating disorders over athletes and there are more injuries in dancers per year. Clearly something is wrong. There is still a lack of equality towards dancers as it is still not considered a sport. Dance is not a category in the Olympics and the equipment provided for dancers compared to sports athletes is drastically diminished. This prejudice against dancers is causing more harm than good and is taking dreams away from young aspiring artists who are unable to get proper training to maintain a healthy physical state.
It can sometimes be difficult to see good out of an unfortunate situation, but I am glad I had to get surgery on my foot March 9th, 2021. Without this I would have never come to the realization that dance is still underappreciated and lacks proper training for the standards of a young athlete. However, this is not the dance instructors’ fault that they don’t receive the same equipment. The studio is not at fault for undersupplying weight training and nutritional classes. This problem is systemic and goes beyond individual studios. These resources also do not exist at nationally funded dance conventions or events. Recovery has certainly not been easy, but more important than how quickly I can get back to dancing, is that I will be able to continue doing what I love without being forced to take any more time off with a healthier way of training. Sustainability is key to everything in life, including dance. Being a person who for the first time is someone on the outside looking in, I am only now truly realizing how much inequality still remains in the dance world. Dancers should not have to break themselves to receive the proper health treatment they rightfully deserve; this is something that must be in the foundation of dance training. Looks like it’s time to redefine what it means to be an athlete and finally include dancers in the revision.
Works Cited
Riley Way: Personal Experience on this topic as a current dancer going through recovery
Physical therapist Interview with Anthony 4/9/21.
Interview with LMU baseball player Andres Lou 4/5/21.
Cary Orthopaedics: https://www.caryortho.com/sports-injuries-trends-prevention/
Nationwide Children’s: https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/research/areas-of-research/center-for-injury-research-and-policy/injury-topics/sports-recreation/dance-related-injuries-by-the-numbers
Pettijohn, Terry F., and Terry F. Pettijohn. “Perceived Happiness of College Students Measured by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychological Reports, vol. 79, no. 3, SAGE Publications, 1996, pp. 759–62, doi:10.2466/pr0.1996.79.3.759.
