- Dance Medicine is a form of health care that originally branched off from Sports Medicine. It focuses on preventing injury, healing injuries and educating dancers so that they can perform at their highest level possible while also maintaining overall health.
- The main focus of dance medicine is how and why the injuries occur instead of only curing the injury. Dancers have to have enough control over their entire body in order to allow them to take shapes, and often times, an injury occurs because the alignment of their bodies is out of balance.
- It is essential to know the root cause of an injury not only to help aid the healing process and prevent further injury, but also to improve overall technique.
- There are many different perspectives that exist in dance medicine such as physical therapy, personal training, educational seminars and psychology (Nicholas Dinubile, 2015).
- A key component of dance medicine is an understanding of the types of injuries that most dancers may likely experience.
- As with any athlete, there are always risks involved and some injuries are not preventable, such as a dancer falling out of a lift, but the main focus of dance medicine is for chronic and overtime injuries.
- The repetitive nature of dance means that if one area of the body is injured or chronically tense, the other parts of the body have to compensate and often worsen the injury.
- This is when injuries such as tendonitis, ligament strains and stress fractures will occur.
- It’s also important to note that some injuries are more common based on gender based on the task each dancer is performing.
- For female ballet dancers, leg, ankle and foot injuries are more common due to landing and the focus of having to be light on their feet to make movements seem effortless.
- Men on the other hand have more ankle and back problems because they are often lifting females and doing large jumps (Nicholas Dinubile, 2015).
In the video below, we interviewed a dancer on her process through her various injuries.
