Are you an adult ballet student who finds themselves extremely tight after every ballet class?
Are you constantly foam rolling, using massage balls, epsom salts, and release techniques, but no matter what you do, you end up leaving class a bit too sore? You may find yourself wondering - is this simply because I worked hard in the lesson, or am I actually doing something wrong? Are you experiencing a loss of flexibility because of muscle tension? Or perhaps without really gripping and squeezing your muscles, you don’t feel stable. So what are you supposed to do?
Understanding Muscular Activation
As an adult ballet student, it can be REALLY hard to tell whether the tightness you are feeling is because you’ve simply worked out new muscles or if it’s because you’ve overworked the wrong muscles. If this resonates with you, read on! This article is all about what I’ve termed ‘appropriate muscular activation.’ I’m using the term ‘appropriate muscular activation’ to describe muscular activation which is proportionate to the task at hand. We should aspire towards economical effort - meaning we apply neither inadequate nor excessive force relative to the desired movement. It sounds a lot more complicated than it needs to be - it is in fact a very simple principle that can transform your experience and performance in class.
How to use Visual Cues for Proper Engagement
Photo by @emilydurhamphotography
A great place to begin is by understanding the concept of appropriate muscular activation through visual cues. Let’s take the example of gripping through the toes and feet due to instability; a common challenge for adult students and one that causes a lot of tension and tightness around the ankles and lower legs. How might we use visual cues to change this movement pattern to something more functional and effective? Let’s illustrate this with reference to the opening barre exercises of plies and tendus.
Firstly, it is VERY important to think of muscular activation as working along a spectrum, rather than a binary (on or off) system. For adults learning to engage muscles in ballet, I notice they often fluctuate between being completely relaxed and tensing to the extreme. This is why I’ve moved away from language such as ‘squeeze’ - because it often encourages maximum activation, which isn’t always the goal and can make us tight and restricted (especially around the hips) and ‘squeezing’ is usually accompanied by held breath. Here are examples of how visual cues can train muscles to engage along the spectrum, encouraging the appropriate amount of activation:
The slight resistance we experience when descending during plies can be likened to moving our bodies through a sticky substance - like honey.
The effortfulness of a tendu can be likened to drawing a line in the sand with your toes - it requires some downward pressure but it isn’t excessive.
Throwing of the leg in a jete should still be experienced as a lengthening - like tugging at a rope from two ends
Visual cues such as these are great for motor learning as adults: they help our bodies to understand that vital information - exactly HOW MUCH activation? Because of course the muscular engagement must vary depending on the goal - standing on two legs, on one leg, in releve, jumping - these all require varying degrees of engagement. It sounds obvious but most of us don’t differentiate, we simply think of our muscles as on or off, working or not. The ability to ‘fine tune’ our muscular activation or dial it up or down like a volume control is the secret!
Photo by @emilydurhamphotography
So step one is this: Do you have enough body awareness to differentiate between different degrees of muscular activation? How is light activation different from maximum activation - how does it feel different in the body? Learning to distinguish the differing sensation and effort of a ‘squeeze’ vs a release is a good starting point. Training this kind of body awareness is extra important for anyone managing chronic pain conditions. If you have hypermobility, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome or fibromyalgia, your body will have an even more embedded habit of 'bracing’ (gripping the muscles to counteract the instability you feel). Using visual cues to differentiate between different degrees of activation will help to start the long process of rewiring this habit for you! How is your muscular engagement different in a tendu that a two legged jump? What about a jump off one leg?
Improper muscular activation and instability
Coming back to the common challenge of adults gripping in the toes for stability, this is often due to insufficient or inconsistent activation somewhere up the chain (which destabilises us). When we use visual cues to engage the appropriate amount, the feet can broaden and ground without gripping. For example, in a plié, if we excessively (unsustainably) grip the glutes to our maximum in order to stabilize us, we cannot maintain this amount of activation during a prolonged exercise (let alone a class). And so we end up in a non-functional pattern; the excessive gripping in the glutes releases (this is inevitable because it was too intense), the toes and feet then instantly start bracing in an attempt to re-establish stability in the body, and we pendulum back and forth between excessive muscular activation in different parts of the body! When we use ‘appropriate muscular activation’ it is more likely to be sustainable and thus we can move beyond the pattern of excessive activation and sudden releasing. Instead, we adopt a more economical and functional approach of moving (which feels easier and generates less tension)! The rewards? Better balance, stability and consistency in our practice (and less loss of range of motion, mobility and flexibility due to unnecessary tension).
Photo by @emilydurhamphotography
To illustrate why this is important think of a long barre exercise where we utilise mainly the outside leg. Assume this barre exercise is 60 seconds long. During this time, your supporting leg (inside leg) will need to maintain a consistent degree of rotation (turnout). Now imagine you are achieving that turnout by squeezing or gripping. At maximum activation, 60 seconds is a REALLY long time for your body! Your supporting leg will fluctuate between switching off and then re-engaging (causing instability and a loss of balance). This is why so many students (even experienced ones) instantly wobble when you tell them to remove their hand from the barre. The supporting leg likely disengaged because it could not sustain the activation for the duration of the exercise.
If you’ve ever been given the correction that you are ‘sitting in your hip’ or collapsing on the supporting side, this is probably what your teacher was referring to. It takes a lot of body awareness and focus to notice that a stationary part of your body (like the supporting leg which isn’t moving) is disengaging. Ballet requires a lot of isometric work (muscles staying engaged even though they are not in motion). A supporting leg is working isometrically, and to make this consistent, we need appropriate, sustainable muscular activation, not bursts of ‘squeezing.’
Identifying Overactivation
If you are an adult ballet student, excessive muscular activation is most likely to occur with muscles which support turnout (because activation of these muscles can be a new experience for us when we first start ballet). If you are excessive in your squeezing, you will fatigue the muscles and you may even experience muscular tightness which restricts your turnout (counterproductive)! If you are prone to over squeezing, you will especially feel this restriction in exercises which require circumduction of the femur or lifting/throwing of the leg e.g Rond de Jambe and Grand Battement. So feeling tight in and around the hips, doesn’t mean we need to stretch more (flexibility is usually not the problem), it often means we need to strengthen more (gripping or bracing is often our body’s attempt to compensate for our lack of strength in an isometric hold)!
Remember, learning to activate the muscles appropriately will lead to a completely different experience than making it through an exercise simply by squeezing excessively. Sign that you are simply squeezing rather than engaging include:
feeling super tight or tense after a long barre exercise
You find yourself holding or restricting your breath often
Tension in your face, jaw and neck
Inconsistency in balances and holds (even though you feel strong and muscular)
Pressure or aches in the joints (especially knees and ankles)
TLDR:
To describe the consequences of excessive squeezing (inappropriate muscular activation) another way; your body is experiencing tension like an elastic band - like when a band is pulled too far and then rebounds back - the unexpected release of activation (instability) happens because the effort of the muscle was unsustainable. We want to reserve our maximum muscular activation for moments of short exertion like a big jump - not a prolonged standing position in a barre exercise. If you squeeze too intensely to stand, what have you got left to activate to give you power in a jump? So come up with your own visual cues that help you to activate and engage the ‘Goldilocks amount’ - the just right amount for the given exercise, without generating excessive muscular tension that is counterproductive and/or restrictive. At first this feels wrong because we are so hardwired to think we need to feel a very intense sensation to be working our hardest. But working our hardest is not the goal. Working economically is the goal! There are so many visual cues beyond ‘squeeze’ which will work much better in cueing your body to engage the right amount.
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