Dancers' Capacity vs Their Training Load

Dr. Chelsea Moehlenbrock Author

Many times we are told specific things about our bodies that are the cause of an injury. Ever heard someone tell you that you have very flat feet, your hips are misaligned, your glutes aren’t firing, your sacrum is “out”, or that you have one leg shorter than the other? We can’t blame an injury on one thing when it comes to how complex our bodies are. The bigger picture is that an injury occurs because of a large discrepancy between the capacity of your tissues and the amount of load that was put on them.

Let’s define those things first:

Load - This is the demand that is put on your body or a specific tissue (tendon, muscle, ligament, etc).

Capacity - This is the amount of load that your body or specific tissue can handle before it becomes injured.

There are several factors that contribute to the load on the body. These include the volume and the intensity of the classes and rehearsals on your schedule. If you increase the volume and/or intensity, the load on your body increases rapidly and puts you at risk for injury.

Volume - number of hours a week a dancer is in classes and rehearsals

Intensity - difficulty of and/or amount of effort needed in classes and rehearsals

Keep in mind that there are other factors that affect the load and capacity on our bodies. Some of these include stress, sleep, nutrition, and hydration. So when you have stressful things in your life outside of dance (school, work, family, relationships), they have a direct effect on your abilities in the studio. On the flip side, low stress, good nutrition, hydration, and quality sleep can increase a dancer’s capacity.

The best way to further improve the body’s capacity past just good nutrition, sleep, and hydration is through cross training. When done correctly, this gradually exposes the body to different loads and this forces the body to adapt and increase its resilience by increasing its capacity. At that point, we are able to handle a higher load without getting injured.

The opposite is true too. When we take a break from dancing, we greatly reduce the demands on our body, which is a good thing. However, the longer we take a break from dance, the more our capacity also decreases. This means when we try to return to our regular schedule of classes and rehearsals, we are prone to injury again.

The chart above shows three different scenarios that dancers might find themselves in when comparing capacity and load. Notice the load (orange) is the same in all three scenarios. 

• When the dancers’ capacity (purple) is lower than the load, then they are more likely to get hurt. When the difference between capacity and load is quite large, dancers will find themselves not having much energy, dragging into rehearsals, and developing overuse injuries. 
• When their capacity is equal to the load put on their bodies, then they may find themselves stagnate and not improving much over time. 
• The ideal situation is the one where the dancer’s capacity is higher than the load. This is when they will be able to perform at a high level for longer periods of time and require less recovery time.

So when we use this lens to look at dance injuries, we can’t solely blame alignment or anatomy. Those things definitely play a role. However, many times it comes down to our tissues not having the capacity to handle the loads we are putting on them. Over time, this overload will lead to injury even if you have perfect alignment and technique and avoid any random trips and falls.

Here’s a simple example that I see a lot in dancers: A pre-professional dancer returns to dance classes after about a month off. She feels normal muscle soreness the first week of classes, and gets back into her normal routine and feeling stronger by the second week. By the end of the third week, her knee starts to hurt just below her knee cap. That pain is an irritation of her patellar tendon. That tendon got a long rest from dance, so its tolerance for activity and stress was lower than it normally would be during the school year. As the dancer returned to multiple days of classes and doing a lot of jumps, the load on the tendon increased past its capacity. Jumps done on one day were fine and the tendon didn’t hurt afterwards. But, after a few weeks of being overloaded, the tendon then developed a tendinopathy, a failed healing response in an overloaded tendon. The dancer is then forced to modify her classes and focus on strengthening the tendon and the quadricep muscle attached to it to increase the tendon’s capacity so she could return to dancing without pain.

Take a look at the following graphs. They show the capacity and load of a dancer over an entire dance season, assuming that there are performances in October, December, March, and May (areas where load is at 100%). The first one is a dancer that is not doing any cross training and starts off the season with good sleep, good nutrition, good hydration, and low stress. However, as the season progresses, you can see how her capacity has trouble recovering back to her baseline and she isn’t able to perform at her best. It is normal to have a decrease in capacity after a performance week since this is a time when your body has to give 100% for several days (or weeks in some cases). The body needs some rest to fully recover and get back to its baseline capacity between these performance weeks. As the season progresses, she may also not be getting adequate sleep or nutrition. Stress also inevitably increases with performances.

The second chart here shows a dancer with the same load, but has been doing strength training and maintaining good nutrition, sleep, and hydration throughout the season. This dancer starts the season with a much higher capacity than the previous dancer, maintains her capacity for a longer time period, does not have as big of a drop in her capacity, and is able to recover more quickly after performances. This allows the dancer to be at her best at the time of the performances and be less likely to get an injury.

My advice is to take note of the number of hours you are dancing each week, how intense those hours are, and how you are feeling overall. If you’ve noticed a gradual decline in your energy and motivation, it may be time to find ways to give your body a rest, look at the nutrition you are getting, hydrate, and try to reduce stress; maybe take a mental health day if you can. Once you learn how to better balance this capacity and load, then you will greatly reduce your risk of injuries that keep you out of the dance studio. It is recommended that adolescent dancers not dance more hours a week than their age (i.e a 12 year old dancer not dance more than 12 hours per week). This is still a general recommendation since each of those hours in dance may not be equal intensity.

It may sound counterintuitive at first that adding more activity (i.e. cross training) to your week will actually increase your capacity, but there is a strategic way to go about this so you also don’t unintentionally overload your body. I have another blog that discusses periodization of a dancer's cross training and dance training schedule. This gives dancers a way to organize and optimize their technique classes, strength training, and rehearsals. This makes them more resilient and able to perform at their best as limitless dancers.