Injuries can seem inevitable, and to some extent they are. Dance long enough and something will sprain, tweak, or ache. Research on injuries suggests that dancers can average as many as seven injuries in a year. That’s a lot. Now that same research study, published in 2012 in the Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, found that many of those injuries resolved in a few days. Those are the tweaks, not the tears, sprains, or breaks.
Other than completely beating the odds and avoiding injury, that means the key is to keep small injuries from turning into big ones, the ones that take months to rehab and derail a season or a year. Injuries aren’t just for the professionals; they can happen at all levels of dance and in every age range so, whether you spend all day or a few hours a week dancing, it’s important to lower the odds of injury.
Dance injury prevention is crucial for maintaining long-term health and performance for dancers of all levels across multiple techniques and forms. Given the physical demands of dance, which involve a great deal of repetition, intense mobility, and complex movement, dancers are at risk of various injuries. The most common dance injuries are to the lower body and back, including ankle sprains, tendon problems, stress fractures, and hip injuries. Fatigue, muscle weakness, and excessive joint mobility can add to the repetitive nature of dance and lead to overuse injury.
Dancers, like other athletes, demand a lot from their bodies—long hours of dance class, rehearsals, and performances. With that, to keep injuries at bay, dancers need a high level of cardiovascular fitness, strength, coordination, agility, speed, and movement control. Sometimes though, despite training and performing like serious athletes, dancers may not venture outside the studio to train those other aspects of fitness like other athletes.
If you want some evidence, just head down to the soccer field. There’s extensive evidence across field and court sports, especially in soccer, that the risk of injury can be reduced. In sports that involve jumping, sprinting, and quick direction changes, injury prevention programs can reduce the risk of serious injuries by over 50 percent. Though dance movements and injuries are different, involving overuse injuries in equal amounts as acute, many of the same injury prevention principles still apply.
Though social media would have us simplify injury prevention and performance—or the opposite, making every strength training exercise into something from the circus—into one exercise or a single training principle, don’t believe it. Here’s the thing, you can get stronger with a variety of exercises, in or out of the gym. It’s equally how you do the exercise—and how and where you feel it— as which exercise you pick.
Here are the important principles: to reduce or prevent dance injuries, training needs to include a solid warm-up, lower body and core strengthening, stability, balance, and control. Increases in muscle strength and function need to be complemented with good movement technique.
Borrowing again from research into soccer injury prevention, much of the “right” technique involves performing the strength training and jumping/plyometric movements with attention to the torso, knee, and hip position. Specifically, keeping the torso upright and stacked on top of the lower body, preventing the knee from collapsing inward, and bending the knee when landing a jump. All of those small details are why it’s also helpful to start a program under the guidance of a physical therapist or sports medicine professional.
Research on injury prevention programs for dance suggests that they can be very effective in reducing the risk of injury, with even a modest dedication of time. In a group of professional ballet dancers, one such program reduced the rate of injury by 82 percent. These reductions were seen in dancers in as little as 4 weeks of following the program for 30 minutes, 3 times a week.
But here’s the problem. Despite the strong evidence that injury prevention programs in a myriad of sports are highly effective in reducing the rate of injury, many athletes, dancers, instructors, and coaches don’t follow them. Why? Maybe because injury prevention programs are not nearly as exciting as practicing the sport or activity itself. Most of us would rather dedicate our time to the actual ‘doing’—to dance, perform, practice, or compete—rather than the comparatively boring task of strengthening.
Wait, don’t walk out of the weightroom just yet. Injury prevention programs need to be rebranded as performance programs because they actually do more than just prevent sprains and strains—they improve performance as well. That’s right, they help you jump higher, turn faster, and move more dynamically. Sounds better, right?
The importance of a dance-specific training program for improvement of key physical variables was especially evident in a 2021 study, during which researchers implemented a 5-week program. At the end of the study, researchers found improvements in function, balance, hop distance/stability, and upper extremity stability. What’s more, dancers felt better and stronger after the 5-week program.
However, while these programs work, you have to stick with them to maintain the improvements. In the above study, many of the physical gains had disappeared just four months after the program ended. To maintain the benefits—improved performance and decreased injury risk—strength and movement training workouts need to become a regular part of your schedule, even if it means taking a little from the studio to give to the gym. And, if you prefer to keep it simple, that gym can be your living room or garage. Another option might be the best—learning exercise technique, muscle isolation, and movement skills from a physical therapist.
Just like in other sports and activities, the dance injury prevention and performance program doesn’t have to mimic dance to be effective. That’s right, to get improvements in dance, exercises don’t need to be in dance positions. For example, if you’re a ballet dancer, it’s ok to parallel squat, in fact, working muscles in a different fashion may be part of maximizing the effectiveness of non-dance training.
So, the primary emphasis should be on achieving gains in muscle strength, balance, coordination, agility, and muscular power. The more functional training—jumping and side-to-side motions—can adhere more closely to dance-specific movement. Meaning that jumps and dynamic movement (side to side movement, change of direction, and turning, among others) can be more specific to the form or art—just use the landing technique I mentioned earlier: stacking the torso, bending the knee when landing, and avoiding collapsing the knee inward.
The foundation of your program should be lower body and core strengthening and should include bridges, planks, squats, single-leg deadlifts, and plyometric/jump training. Of course, it’s also important to not just do the exercise, but to do it with correct mechanics and an eye towards symmetry and exact muscle recruitment. This last detail basically means that if you’re doing an exercise to strengthen the quads, you should truly feel the burn and fatigue in the quads, by no means a given. If you are looking for a comprehensive and thorough analysis on how dancers should approach a squat, check out Lisa Giannone’s article, “To Squat or Not to Squat,” here.
Dance injury prevention works, it just takes, well, a little extra work. Sure, spending a little extra time in the gym might not be as fun as dancing. But it beats spending a lot of time rehabbing and recovering from a serious injury and missing out on what you love to do—dance.
This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of In Dance.
