Eating Disorders In Ballet
HEALTH TIPS
Teaching Dancers To Use Breath To Enhance Their Dancing
Chelsey Bradley, a contemporary dance teacher, explains how dancers can connect their breath to their movement, by doing some improvisational breath exercises.
They can be done singularly at the end of a modern or contemporary class, or could be extended into a longer workshop.
Individual Exercise: Using Breath in Movement
Spread the dancers out in the space. Play soft music that the dancers can hear you speak over. Then, ask them to improvise movements while coordinating audible breathing. Encourage the dancers to experiment with the way they breathe, such as varying the speed of inhalation and exhalation, pushing air out in contrast with pulling air in, and changing the pitch of their breath sounds.
Partner Exercise: Using Breath to Communicate
Pair your dancers up and spread the pairs out in the space. Again, play soft music that the dancers can hear you speak over. Then, ask the dancers to improvise movements while incorporating audible breathing in a conversation, or call and response, with a partner. One partner begins by improvising a movement that uses breath their partner can hear, and the second partner responds, also breathing out loud while improvising a movement. I like to encourage contact between the dancers during this exercise to form a more intimate connection between the pairings.
Photograph by Kristi Fräzier.
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Vitamine D For Dancers
Selina Shah, MD, FACP, a board certified sports medicine and internal medicine physician and the Director of Dance Medicine at the Center for Sports Medicine in San Francisco, CA and Walnut Creek, CA explains why our bones are important, especially for dancers.
As dancers, we place a lot of stress on our bones. This stress can lead to damage of bone tissue. However, luckily our body is designed to repair itself, so bones maintain their healthy structure by containing cells that remove damaged bone and replace it with healthy bone, also known as bone turnover.
In order to achieve the highest bone mass possible and to ensure healthy bone turnover, it is important for our bones to have the right ingredients. Dancers need have enough nutritional intake based on activity level, adequate calcium, and adequate Vitamin D. Without these, a decrease in bone density can occur, making a dancer susceptible to fractures and stress fractures.
The best source for Vitamin D is from the sun. Vitamin D is formed by cells in the skin layer. Sun exposure to form Vitamin D in the skin is inhibited by sunblock and decreased by clouds and pollution. Additionally, the darker the skin color, the longer daily exposure time to sun is needed for the cells in your skin layers to form adequate vitamin D. Generally speaking safe sun exposure (no sunblock for the time allotted as long as there is no risk of skin cancer by family or personal history of skin cancer) is best obtained between the hours of 10am – 3pm on the arms and legs for a minimum of 20 minutes per day depending on skin color and the latitude in which you live.
via 4 Dancers