Building a Healthy Dancer Virtual Parent Workshop
What Parents Need to Know About Training, Recovery, and Longevity
Dance is more than an extracurricular activity for many young dancers. It can become a significant part of their lives, with hours spent in class, rehearsals, performances, competitions, intensives, and private lessons.
As a parent, it can be difficult to know how much is enough.
How many hours should your dancer be training? When should they start pointe? Is soreness normal? Should they be cross-training? Are other sports helping their development or adding too much to their schedule? And perhaps most importantly, what can you do to help your dancer build a healthy body that can continue dancing for years to come?
At Performance Health & Rehab, we believe that supporting a dancer's health shouldn't begin only after something goes wrong. Understanding how dancers train, recover, develop strength, and progress throughout their careers can help families make more informed decisions about their dancer's physical development.
That's why we're excited to offer our upcoming Building a Healthy Dancer Virtual Workshop, created specifically for dance and artistic-sport parents.
Training Volume: How Much Is Too Much?
One of the most complicated parts of supporting a young dancer is understanding training volume. There isn't one magic number of hours that is "too much" for every dancer. A dancer's age, experience, physical development, training intensity, recovery, and other activities all influence how much their body can handle.
Training should be something the body has the opportunity to adapt to. Gradual progression and adequate recovery are important parts of building a dancer who can tolerate increasing demands over time.
This is why we want parents to understand more than simply how many hours their dancer is in the studio. We want families to consider the bigger picture of everything their dancer is asking their body to do.
How Do You Safely Start Pointe?
For many young ballet dancers, pointe is an exciting milestone. But pointe work isn't simply another class to add to the schedule. It introduces additional physical demands and requires a dancer to have developed the strength, control, mobility, and technical foundation necessary to manage those demands.
Parents may hear different opinions about when a dancer is "ready" for pointe, which can make the process confusing.
Rather than focusing solely on age or how long a dancer has been taking ballet, readiness should be considered more holistically. Current research and expert consensus continue to emphasize factors such as training history and the dancer's physical abilities when considering pointe readiness.
This doesn't mean parents need to determine whether their dancer is ready for pointe on their own. Instead, parents should understand what readiness means and what questions to ask.
Training for the Long Game
It's easy for dancers and families to become focused on the next performance, competition, audition, or level. But dance careers are not built in a single season. A dancer's body is constantly changing, particularly throughout childhood and adolescence. Strength, coordination, flexibility, body proportions, and training tolerance can all change as a young person develops.
That means the goal shouldn't always be "How can we get more training in?"
Sometimes the better question is: "How can we make the training they're already doing more sustainable?"
Strength training, conditioning, appropriate mobility work, recovery, and gradual progression can all be part of developing a dancer who is physically prepared for the demands of their training.
Cross-training can also provide opportunities to develop qualities that aren't always fully addressed through dance technique alone, such as cardiovascular fitness, strength, and muscular endurance.
A healthy dancer isn't necessarily the dancer doing the most. It's the dancer whose training, recovery, and physical development are working together.
Preparing for a Long Dance Career
Longevity doesn't happen by accident. Dancers need to learn how to listen to their bodies, understand fatigue, recover appropriately, and recognize when something isn't feeling right. Parents play an important role in this process.
You may notice things your dancer doesn't recognize themselves:
They're constantly exhausted after training.
Their performance starts declining.
They are repeatedly dealing with the same aches or pains.
They don't seem to be recovering between training days.
Their schedule leaves little time for rest.
They're adding more training without developing the strength or conditioning to support it.
None of these automatically mean that a dancer needs to stop dancing.
Instead, they may be opportunities to step back and ask whether the training plan needs to change or additional support is needed.
Our goal at Performance Health & Rehab is not to tell dancers to simply stop doing what they love. It's to help them understand what their bodies need to continue doing it.
Are Other Sports Helping Your Dancer or Hurting Them?
Many young dancers participate in multiple activities. A dancer might also play soccer, swim, participate in gymnastics, cheer, figure skate, practice martial arts, or participate in another sport. So is that a good thing? It can be.
Different activities can expose young athletes to different movement patterns, physical demands, and skills. However, adding another activity also adds another training demand. The question isn't necessarily whether another sport is "good" or "bad."
It's: How does everything your dancer is doing fit together? If a dancer has ballet five days a week, rehearsals on weekends, private lessons, and another demanding sport, the total workload matters.
Parents should consider not only what their dancer is doing, but also when they're recovering.
Parents Don't Have to Figure It All Out Alone
One of the reasons we created this workshop is because parents are often expected to navigate a world they weren't necessarily trained to understand. You may know that your child loves dance. You may know that they're working incredibly hard.
But understanding training volume, pointe readiness, strength and conditioning, recovery, cross-training, and long-term development can feel overwhelming. That's where education can help.
Our goal is to give parents practical information they can use when talking with their dancers, teachers, coaches, and healthcare providers. We want parents to leave with a better understanding of what their dancer's body needs, not just what their dancer can currently do.
Join Us for Our Building a Healthy Dancer Virtual Workshop
We're excited to invite dance and artistic-sport parents to join us for a virtual workshop led by Leah Bueno, DOMP, COMT, MMP, Osteopathic Practitioner and Dance/Sports Rehab Specialist.
Leah brings more than 20 years of experience in professional dance and performance-based rehabilitation and is passionate about helping bridge the gap between rehabilitation and performance.
During this workshop, we'll discuss:
Training volume: How much is too much?
How to safely start pointe
Training for the long game
How to prepare your dancer for career longevity
Whether other sports are helping or adding to their training load
What your dancer needs to be successful
And most importantly, we'll talk about how parents can support their dancers without feeling like they need to have all the answers themselves.
Building a Healthy Dancer Virtual Workshop
For: Dance & artistic-sport parents
Location: Virtual via Zoom
Date: September 20
Time: 2:00 PM
Spots are limited.
If you're the parent of a dancer, gymnast, cheerleader, figure skater, or another young athlete whose training demands a lot from their body, we'd love to have you join us. Because supporting a successful athlete isn't just about helping them train harder. It's about helping them build a body that can keep doing what they love.
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