STRESS

Today I woke up to a feeling that most dancers greet with pleasure, Soreness.  Like most I love the feeling that I trained hard the day before.  It's a beautiful sign that what your doing is changing you, and hopefully making you better.  Today though it was different.  Today I was not about to put my body through a normal day's amount of stress.  For some odd reason, beyond me, the dance world loves to over train.  It's amazing how with all the information that's out there about athletics and recovery, the dance world doesn't believe in any of it.  I have to say that I was really no different until recently when I came back from Los Angeles.  I was just getting back and I told myself that I would ease my way back into a full training regime, but what I found was that most of my pears were injured, or stiff.  These were people that I hadn't seen for about a month and yet they seemed to be weaker than I!  What I soon realized was it wasn't the training, it was over training.  They were putting too much stress on the body.  Ballet asks us to move in very dynamic and unnatural ways.  It emphasises the extent of our human movement and is so specific within it's design that there is no room for any variation.  In Ballet there is a right and a wrong.  Well I think I'm evolving!  I think from now on I'm going to train with all the smarts of a modern athlete, and combine it with the grace of a classical dancer.