Tag Archive: ballet

1. Men In Tights! Lessons to be learnt from training for the performing arts.

   29th May 2014 9:11 am Leave a Comment

   Nick Allen is the clinical director of the Jerwood Centre, and looks after the dancers of the Birmingham Royal Ballet.  His lecture was well structured, informative and entertaining. He gave an overview of the different aspects of dance training, the problems he encounters and some of the solutions.

   Dancers are athletes

   The dancers do 150 shows a year, about 8 shows a week when it is running. Their day might start with a 90 minute class, rehearsal in the afternoon, perform in the evening. They sometimes rehearse and perform different shows on the same day.

   They train on a flat studio surface, with good force reduction properties. The stages are irregular in nature, with variations in force reduction properties, and it has a 4% rake (tilt) from back to front, to allow the audience to see all the dancers.

   So they train and perform on two very different surfaces. Allen then went through some stats and ideas on how they have tried to bridge this gap through improving the home stage, but travelling is still problematic.  

   The impact is not helped by the fact that the dancers wear shoes that they proceed to batter to make them look better, and thereby negate any hope of having support in their footwear.

   Wearing costumes also adds stress to the body, with some dancers losing 5kg of weight in each show, despite taking on 3 litres of fluid. Allen has been working with costume designers to try and make the costumes more breathable.

   Injury management

   All this led into the type of injuries the dancers have: medial tibial stress syndrome (shin splints) is very common and the males have more thoracic back injuries (due to lifting females) and the females have more facet joint injuries in the lumbar spine.  The ACL rupture protocol is for a 9 month rehab, which leads to stronger knees on return. Allen used to work in premiership rugby, where 6 month protocols were used, and this led to further injuries.

   Allen then went through the training philosophy, which looked at building the foundations first. This involved 4 layers of “bricks”with the bottom being motor learning; the next layer being flexibility, strength and skill, the next layer being endurance and the top layer being performance. (I really liked this graphic and it makes a lot of sense to use something similar with all athletes).

   Allen then compared the likelihood of injury between athletes and dancers at 2 different ends of a continuum. An athlete will have levels of strength and fitness, with less skill, so if they get a move wrong they can cope with it.

   But get it wrong too often and then they will get injured.  A dancer on the other hand will be very efficient at each move, but weak, so if they land or jump or lift out of place- they get injured.

   Allen then described how he looks at the function of the movement, understanding the asymmetries within the dance. He looks at function over pathology, and efficiency of movement.  He ended the lecture with an aside about bone health – 80% of the dancers have vitamin D deficiencies, some smoke, some are amenorrhoeic – which leads to more stress fractures.

   Summary

   A very informative lecture, which showed a sound methodology of analysis and training, together with some imagination and innovation.  I will be following up on a lot of this information over the next couple of months.

   You might like: are girls more flexible than boys?

2. Monitoring and Assessment of Strength and Power in High Performance Athletes- Mike McGuigan lecture review UKSCA conference

   26th March 2013 8:33 am Leave a Comment

   Mike McGuigan works for the New Zealand Academy of Sport and has moved from sports science to coaching. He reviewed how he collects data, but more importantly how he can use it to help the coaches and athletes within the sports.

   Using an isometric mid-thigh pull test

   Here the bar is placed under a fixed pole and the athlete stands on a force platform. The 3 second isometric pull produces a high reliability for peak force measurement, but not for rate of force development.  This test is easy to administer for large groups of athletes and saves time instead of loading up barbells for cleans.

   McGuigan uses the data and publishes it on a spider chart using the z-score which is (athlete’s score-team average/ team standard deviation). The disadvantage of this system is that if the good players aren’t testing it screws the average up, player’s z scores can go up even if their actual performance declined.

   Now you have modified z-scores and you can plot these against benchmarks. You can manipulate the scale for lower level athletes to allow progress.

   The Eccentric Utilisation Ratio (EUR) of CMJ to SJ performance

   The Counter Movement Jump (CMJ) is 10-15% more than the squat jump (a static jump which eliminates the Stretch Shortening Cycle) and this gives a useful indicator of athlete power. (I use both in the Jump Higher programme)

   McGuigan then highlighted the need to develop measures that allow decision making on training emphasis- to fine tune the process for each athlete.

   Measuring load management and fatigue monitoring gives a power profile for each athlete, plus some hormonal and perceptual measures. A measure of monotony was (average load/ standard deviation of load sessions). As you know, monotony of training is a key factor of overtraining.

   How to measure effort: the Global RPE

   The Global RPE is taken 30 minutes after the session, it allows the athlete to reflect on the whole session, rather than what happened in the last 10 minutes.

   In practical terms, 10-15 minutes of recovery is enough, it is tricky getting the athletes to stay longer, and waiting for them to get home leads to adherence issues.

   If you multiply RPE by the duration of the session over the course of the week, this gives a good indicator of training load. Then each session can be compared to the SD over all the sessions.  Montotony and strain are good indicators of actual work done and how it relates to the athlete.

   Summary

   Quite a lot of information in this lecture, but it was the first one of the day, so I was fresh. McGuigan was good in relating his transition from researcher to practitioner, and finding useful tools that actually help the coaches.

   More on testing here 

3. UKSCA conference review

   10th June 2010 9:06 am 1 Comment

   Last weekend I attended 2 days of the annual UKSCA conference in Milton Keynes.There were a variety of lectures, breakout sessions and also some poster presentations.

   This was the fourth conference of theirs that I have attended, and I probably took the least away. ( I wasn’t going to go, but my alternative course was postponed).

   However, there were a couple of key exceptions: Dan Baker and Nick Allen. There seems to be an element of confirmation bias within the UKSCA and they do hire lecturers who reinforce the prevailing thoughts.

   The practical element was very limited, and this may be due to their insistence on presenting scientific evidence for everything- if that is the case, then we coaches will always be waiting for research to catch up with practice.

   The organisation, venue and hospitality were all very good, and it was useful (as always at these things) to discuss practice with other coaches at the break times.

   Over the next few blogs I shall be putting a more in depth perspective on each lecture that I attended.