How to Lose Some Weight and Keep it Off For Your Dance Recital Or Ballet Exams

Writing this in mid-April, I'm thinking back to the tension that begins leading up to the end of the term ballet recital and ballet exams. And after that comes the summer swimsuit. Do you look long and lean enough? Dancers never think so.

Sugar is a great tranquilizer.

When tension starts to build over the coming ballet recital or ballet exams, the human brain knows what to do. However if you don't eat your cookies before a long rehearsal or dance class, you will wear them for a while.

So as stress kicks in, planning realistic goals to maintain your weight, or lose a little, is what will help you succeed.

For example, if you think you might want to lose four to five pounds, count the weeks between now and your performance.Calculate how many parts of a pound you want to lose per week.

A quarter or third of a pound a week is easy to lose by this simple strategy:

• don't eat any bread, crackers, buns, muffins, chips, pasta or potatoes

• make sure you DO have some healthy snacks with you at all times

• use a protein calculator to make sure you eat enough every day

• if you have to eat on the run, choose a wrap or lettuce-wrap instead of a bun

• keep a fork in your dance bag or purse in case you can't get a lettuce wrap, then you can eat out of the bun and discard it

• choose water, never a sugary sports drink

• in a juice bar, get vegetable juice with apple juice, but skip the frozen yogurt (unsweetened berries are okay to add)

Healthy snacks could be walnuts (two or three big ones are quite filling), an inch cube of cheese with celery, jerky (try to get the no-nitrate and no coloring added brands) or fresh fruit.

Make sure you sleep well. Most health food stores sell powdered calcium/magnesium which relaxes your tense muscles and also usually results in a deep sleep.

(If you have any kind of medical condition check with your doctor about this.)

Control your weight with a protein calculator.

Healthy fresh foods also give you the brain power to think rather than worry. "Train Your Brain" by Deborah Vogel will help you stay living smart with positive emotional intelligence.

Just remember, you always look more long and lean than you think you do. With realistic goals you can lose some weight, keep it off, and stay healthy.

D. Buxton is a writing partner with Vone Deporter, of The Sedona Series, about a surfer girl in pointe shoes.

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Dance Pointe Shoes - Setting Realistic Goals

Get your copy of highly effective yet simple exercises for training in dance pointe shoes. Even before you explore getting exactly the right fit, or the brand of pointe shoes you will look for in the ballet store, choosing your daily routines carefully will give you an edge in the competition of the ballet field.

Here are some areas to focus on and analyze for yourself. I hope the male ballet students read this too, because any pre-pointe exercise (and everything is pre-something) that is chosen because a student understands the anatomy, the function, and the aesthetic of a ballet exercise, will also help a male ballet student understand the ways to both stretch and strengthen his feet.

Do you have tight joints/ligaments/muscles in the ankle or foot area or are you hypermobile?
(hypermobile is what every dance student wishes to be. However, there are problems in the highly arched foot, just as there are problems in the foot that doesn't curve over the top of the instep.

Also, the audience is not aware of the aesthetics that dancers and choreographers are obsessed with. I once took a neighbor of mine to see Swan Lake. The ballerina was a very popular dancer who had highly arched feet. My neighbor is a trained artist, familiar with human anatomy. Sometime during the ballet, she leaned over to me and whispered "what's wrong with her feet?" Later she confessed that it made her feel nauseous to see the ballerina's feet pointe like "they are broken".

Quite a new experience for me to hear THAT.

If you need more flexibility in the ankles and foot, did you know that stretching from the knee down can help with that? Using a soft rubber ball, knead the muscles of the tibia (shin) by kneeling and sitting on your feet, and placing the ball under the tibial muscles below the knee. Press into it gently,moving the ball down the shin to the ankles, and you will get some relaxation in those muscles. You may feel some very tender spots where tension has built in the muscles.

And next (I learned this from Deborah Vogel) place the ball under your metatarsal area, above the joints, and lean into it GENTLY, and you'll feel a fabulous stretch over your instep area, right where you would like it to curve more.

Do you know how to strengthen your feet?

Did you know that cramping in your feet, lower calves and even upper calves, usually means that your tiny foot muscles are weak? If they cannot do the job, your calf muscles that end down in your foot area, will have to do the extra work.

This results in calf tension which will shorten your demi plie, lessen your ankle flexibility, and prevent the development of the arch you want.

The foot muscles are strengthened by lifting the big toe off the floor while relaxing the other four, then lifting the four toes off the floor while relaxing the big toe. This increases strength and also enhances the brain/foot communication a lot.

Another exercise is like playing the piano with your toes, starting with the big toe, and then starting with the little toe.

Choosing and consistently practicing exercises for your daily routines will help you achieve realistic goals in dance pointe shoes.

The Ballet Barre - Setting Realistic Goals To Improve Your Ballet Exercises

Sometimes working smarter means doing less. For daily routines, realistic goals may be achieved by picking one aspect of your ballet barre exercises.

What is the easiest way to do this?

Optimum results for muscle memory may come from a super slow motion repetition, such as press ups, maintaining your postural plumb line.

The Perfect Pointe Book shows such self-testing methods for improving your pointe shoe exercises.

For example, if you find the tiniest deviation from your plumb line in a slow motion press up, you can identify a joint or muscle that needs to be relaxed and stretched, or strengthened.

If your weight moves a tiny bit forward at the end of your rise, pushing your hip joints forward, that means your core muscles are not holding at that stage of the movement. Or it could mean that your rise was on a tiny slant.

And that movement forward may be the result of a tiny movement backward at the bottom of your demi plie. So which came first?

 First Position

When your are standing in first position, you require tension in your rotator muscles, your thighs, and your core muscles.

Some students pull down at the front of their diaphragm to add to the stability of their core muscles. This will lead to:

• Shallow breathing 

• The shoulders collapsing forward slightly

• Rigidity at the back of the neck.

If you do basic training like this for a couple of years, you will have difficulty spotting when you get to chaine turns, just to name one out of many negative results.

Back To First Position - Core Muscles

So, back to first position, your core abdominal muscles can be held tightly, yet the chest can still move up and down easily for breathing, for allowing the chin to be free and for the muscles at the back of the neck to be free.

This way you will have graceful head positions, free arm movements, easy spotting on pirouettes and plenty of oxygen going to your muscles.

You relax your thighs and knees and ease into a demi plie, until you feel the weight press into your heels, and then you push upward, before your heels lose their pressure into the floor, and before your weight moves backward.

If your muscles are working well, you will go straight up from here and end in a perfect rise. No tension in the shoulders, neck, arms or fingers.

And you will be on balance, breathing easily, able to do a simple port de bras, able to turn or incline your head, and able to control the movement down with your foot muscles, until the heels touch the floor.

Now you are back where you started.

No matter how your proportions, your height, your weight, your flexibility, your looks, approximate the ideal ballet body, you CAN do basic movements perfectly, if you study all of them with  The Perfect Pointe Book.

Here is a video where Lisa Howell, author of The Perfect Pointe Book, shows on of the preparatory pointe exercises.

Enjoy it!

Your goals are truly realistic if you use this fabulous dancer's manual.