The MEDICINE of MOVEMENT

When dancers move up to the professional level, staying well-conditioned and injury-free is crucially important.

That’s why companies such as BalletMet keep sports medicine practitioners around to minimize the risk of injury.

Hope Davis, an athletic trainer at OSU’s Sports Medicine Program for Performing Arts Medicine, is the head athletic trainer for BalletMet. Davis earned her undergraduate degree in dance at the University of Akron, but realizing the physical pressures of professional dance were not for her, she went into athletic training.

Dancers rely on their flexibility, but the strength needed to maintain that flexibility is not to be overlooked.

“Having too much range of motion and not enough strength can actually predispose them to the possibility of injuries,” Davis says.

Traumatic injuries such as ankle sprains are important to avoid, but dancers are much more prone to overuse injuries like stress fractures, particularly in the lower extremities. Among the most common fatigue injuries are tendonitis, patellofemoral pain syndrome, snapping hip and lumbar and spine issues.

Because the average dancer has developed a high tolerance for pain, he or she may attempt to ignore nagging pains, so Davis instructs dancers to consider their pain on a scale from one to 10 and go to the doctor if pain exceeds a score of three for more than three days in a row. Communication with instructors to find the possible root of the pain is critical, as is accurately describing the kind of pain experienced.

“All my dancers have a very wide vocabulary of the kind of pain they have,” Davis says.

By Scott McAfee