By: Dr. Mohammad Salman Murtuza, Asstt. Editor-ICN Sports
Warming-up is a short term activity but conditioning involves a long term and regular process.Regular practice is the focal point of conditioning and practice makes man perfect.
There are several scientific exercise principles that must be followed in order to get the most out of your training. Each individual has different needs to reach their goal or sport and personal strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, no one exercise programme will suit all. A well designed programme should look at the individual needs and address this within the programme. For instance, one dancer might lack strength and balance at the ankle following an injury. Therefore, their training focus would be to re-train the strength and proprioception within the ankle joint. It is therefore important to understand your personal needs as you train to optimize performance and reduce injury.
ADAPTATION
The level of adaption is proportional to the demands placed on the dancer’s body, such as the volume/quantity, frequency and the intensity/load of training. Training adaption is only developed when the athlete forces the body to adapt to the stress of physical work. If a dancer’s body is presented with a demand greater than it is accustomed to then it adapts to this stressor by becoming stronger. When the training load remains the same, little or no training effect will be had, and thus, no adaptation will occur. We have seen (in previous research) that traditional dance classes alone are insufficient to adapt dancer fitness, thus the body needs to be stressed in other ways. This may be done by means such as weight training and Pilates.
REVERSIBILITY
This is the reverse of adaptation and is the biggest challenge to developing training goals and a programme design. If you stop working a trained skill then that skill will become weaker and eventually diminish. Such an example would be dancers who experience the effects when returning to dance class following a holiday. This may be recognized through sore muscles following the return to dance class in once strong muscles which have weakened over the break through disuse. The moral of this is to ‘use it or lose it’. Regularly training if we want to maintain the capacity we have worked so hard to get. It should be noted that how often you need to stimulate the stressors to retain the capacity is dependent on the individual dancer.
SPECIFICITY
The specific nature of training is sometimes obvious. For example, doing develops will not make your arms and shoulders stronger no many how times you do them or how often you train. To train your shoulders and arms for dance you should train them specifically doing dancelike movements. This principle also applies to capacities as well as movements. For example, if you need to hold your leg in a high develops a la second for 30 seconds, then you need to practice holding your leg in a properly aligned high second position rather than doing high grand battements in a la second.
Holding your leg using your hand could be a useful step to acquiring the range of movement needed however, you will also have to practice holding your leg high using lower limb muscles to develop a develops a la second. Specificity also applies to speed of movement through a particular range and we must match the training we perform to the challenges we face and expect.
The influence of gravity is also different during dance movements, for example, balancing after a triple pirouette is different to balancing after a plié-relieve. Therefore, practicing a variety of movements will make your balances more versatile as a dancer. To design a specific exercise or programme we must know the exact movement, speed, range and quality needed. This will best prepare us as dancers for what choreographers may throw at us. This suggests the need to study more than one technique to accommodate the different styles which may be required of you.
If you are unsure of what demands to develop and maintain you would do best to train a variety of capacities. This way you will not be far from what is required when you are presented with new challenges. There will still be a period of adaption, however you will adapt quicker and be less at risk from injury.
Using various sports or exercises to improve overall performance. Cross-training creates different physical stresses on the athlete’s body than those associated with the athlete’s usual routine, improving the athlete’s overall performance and also decreasing the risk of suffering an overuse in how can conditioning injuries be prevented?
TO BE CONTINUED….
