Conditioning for the Weather-beaten

Dancers are all for adaptation. At least, we try to be. Dance practice chases after new experiences, but a dancer’s conditioning is often seated in repetition. This isn’t a bad thing, repetition, for many reasons, is a very good thing. It instills good habits, brings with it a sense of grounding and coming back to yourself. For this, I find it useful. Those moments of repeating something you’ve done one hundred times, and a thought flows through your head: there I am. Hello body. You can sense changes, what has adapted and what has stagnated.

Those moments are wonderful, but are often not inspiring enough for a dancer to keep actively conditioning his or her body for peak performance. It’s something to grapple with – keeping physically engaged in a world where certain realities can take away time and inspiration.

Lately, I’ve found myself caught in this loop. Days go by without me realising that I haven’t connected to my body, to myself. I feel stiff and sore and disconnected and I’m embarrassed to consider why. There are several excuses, but none that will ultimately bring me back to a sense of peace until I do something to alleviate the restlessness.

England is COLD in winter. For an Australian born, this weather can be bitterly cold, and I haven’t been doing so well in coping with it. So, I’ve taken a lesson from my dance self and I’m adapting. The idea of leaving the house rugged up in enormous amounts of layers was not conductive to me wanting to do anything. So, I brought it to me.

I’m bringing back this idea I’ve reflected on a few times: this idea of chance approaches and taking it into a solid dance practice. One of my conditioning methods of choice is yoga. I find it incredibly meditative, but fantastic at working strength and flexibility. It’s what I like to do. For something inexpensive, and driven by curiosity, I went onto YouTube: The Forum for the Everything (or so it should be called, don’t you think?).

There is so much information out there. There are key points of difficulty, and I wouldn’t recommend this to the uninformed, but if you are aware of your body and it’s capabilities, and know something of the type of exercise you’re looking for, I think this can be a very lucrative method of conditioning.

I did an hour and a half of yoga. I sweated, my muscles shook, and afterward I realised I had pushed myself in my own home as much as I would have pushed myself in a class I had gone out for. The beauty of the internet is the variety of options. If you choose, and have the patience to filter through a lot of rubbish, you can find gem’s that can alter (minutely or drastically) your choices for your conditioning practice. Be an information hoarder. Learn what you can, implement and adapt yourself to the things you find helpful and discard the things that don’t serve you in a positive way. Take the onus on yourself to explore what it is that you like to do and will keep you engaged in a physical activity that keeps you in condition and attuned to yourself.

Be aware that with a wide array of choice comes limitations, but these limitations can also lead a way to greater understanding and excitement. I found a 20min sequence of “power yoga”. Hailing from New York, and true to form, there are sirens in the background, interruptions that you will get in a bigger city. The sequence is strength focused and lacks the serenity achieved by other yogic forms, but as a hybrid for a dancer’s conditioning, I found it quite helpful:

For something longer and more serene, try this:

I’m reminded to take my conditioning into my own hands, that if things in your head seem too difficult and it dissuades you away from what you want to do, find a way around it. Work with what makes you happy in a positive way.

Did you try either of these videos? What did you think?

Do you have a favourite way of conditioning? And hints?