Ep 37: The Greatest Chronic Injury Lesson

In this episode, Cara dives into a major gap in dancer training that shows up in auditions, competitions, and even class settings. Dancers often wait until the last run to fully perform, but in real opportunities, that moment may never come.

This conversation unpacks how performance is not something dancers turn on at the end. It is something they build from the very first rep. Cara also explores the powerful connection between technique and artistry, and why separating the two is one of the biggest mistakes in dance training today.

From warmups to combinations, transitions to textures, this episode gives teachers and dancers a clear framework for creating performers who are consistent, confident, and fully present every time they move.

Cara talked about:

• Why dancers tend to hold back during learning and only perform at the end
• How this habit directly impacts auditions and casting opportunities
• The idea that dancers are 100% athlete and 100% artist at all times
• Why warmups should include artistry, not just physical preparation
• How transitions are where dancers actually connect and get noticed
• The gap between technical execution and performance quality in training
• Why feedback often focuses too heavily on technique instead of artistry

Key Tips for Teachers & Dancers:

• Train dancers to perform from the first rep, not the final run
• Keep energy, intention, and expression even when marking
• Build artistry into warmups, not just combinations
• Give feedback on transitions and movement quality, not only tricks
• Use textures and dynamics to create contrast in choreography
• Strengthen foundations through foot articulation, coupé, and passé work
• Help dancers understand that consistency builds confidence

Great dancers are not the ones who show up at the end.
They are the ones who show up every time.

When performance becomes part of the process, not just the result, dancers stop hoping to be seen and start becoming impossible to ignore.

—
Connect with us! 🎧

Relative Motion: https://www.instagram.com/relativemotiondance/
Youtube Relative Motion: https://www.youtube.com/@relative_motion

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to It's All Relative, the podcast where dance technique meets purpose, progress becomes visible, and passion fuels the path forward. I'm Kara Dixon, co-founder of Relative Motion, and our team is made up of professional dancers, teachers, and choreographers here to make high-level training feel doable, measurable, and exciting again. Whether you're a teacher searching for fresh cues, a dancer craving more clarity, or a studio owner chasing a bigger vision, this space is for you. Each week, we'll break down complex technique, dive into real studio strategy, and share tools that spark transformation from the inside out. Because in this community, we train with intention, we lead with love, and we know that better dancers start with better teachers. So let's grow, let's move, and let's rise together. Because at the end of the day, it's all relative. Hey friend, today we are talking about chronic injuries. And this episode is going to be more teacher focused. So if you are a dancer, this is going to be a resource for your teachers. We're gonna be talking about training dancers away from chronic injuries, us as teachers having chronic injuries, and all the things in between. So part of the inspiration behind this conversation is my recent injury. So if you did not hear the episode three back, I talked about how I just got diagnosed with an ACL tear, which let me just briefly tell you how that happened. I won't go deep into details, but essentially I was teaching. I wasn't even doing anything too crazy. I was doing the transitions of a combo, but I wasn't doing the leaps or the turns or anything like that. I pivoted to one side, I stepped on my foot, I pushed off because I was going through what would be essentially a prep in the opposite direction. I pushed off and I felt my knee pop. I stepped on and it was incredibly unstable. And that is the gist of what happened. So when I went in to get tested for it, I actually, as they were guessing ACL tear before my MRI came through, I was like, I don't think so. You know, everything seemed like something completely different where I felt the injury, where I was experiencing instability, it all felt different to me. Mind you, move ahead. I read my MRI results before I actually had an appointment. And they said chronic ACL. That sounds to me like I've had an ACL tear for a very long time. And so when I got into the doctor's appointment, one of the main things they asked was, are there other times when you felt knee pain or knee instability? And for me, I just had not. I had not felt knee pain or knee instability. I've never really considered myself as having knee problems, other than, you know, like the normal stuff, right? And as teachers, we know there's times when certain things ache or like that just twinged a little bit, but nothing like severe pain or severe instability. And so it was all a surprise to me to the point where I was like, I actually don't think that could be what I have. But I'm no doctor and the MRI does say it. So what we're gonna talk about today is that chronic injury because this is what we're trying to get our dancers to avoid. And sometimes I feel like no matter how safe we are, it is unavoidable. We are essentially putting a lot of wear and tear on our bodies. We are doing a lot of training, we are doing a lot of pivoting. There are things that over time are deteriorating. What we as teachers are trying to avoid is giving that to our dancers, passing that down. Now, are they gonna have things they're working through that are hard on their body? We're trying to protect their body, we're trying to give them the technique in the proper alignment. We're trying to build the strength so that their body is stabilizing and supporting the physical activities that we're giving them. This is a sport, right? And since it is also art, it's very abstract at times. We're getting them in lines that are unique. There's gonna be times when one leg might feel completely parallel and the other leg's completely rotated because we're trying to get them in these lines that are showing a picture, showing this art. And what we don't want them to do is just mimic the shape. And we talk about this a lot at relative motion because a lot of times dancers don't really understand what we're asking them to do. So they're mimicking shapes. For example, a little dancer sees the big girls kicking to their face, right? And so that little dancer, maybe he or she just tries to whack the leg up there. They don't understand if there's all the mechanics of how the body has to move to get there. There's all the muscle memory and also the muscle support and stability that has to be there for the bigger kids to get there. And instead, they're just like, this is the shape, and I'm gonna mimic that shape. And so we get what the hips are up, the leg is digging into that hip bone, right? The pelvis is out of alignment. Maybe they're doing an anterior tilt, maybe something else. And so it's that deterioration in the hip over time, that joint, the deterioration starts to happen. Same thing with the knees when we're going into this hyperextension, same thing with the ankles, same thing with muscle tears. So we have to think what are we giving our dancers that they truly do not quite understand? And so, as the director of relative motion, a big thing for me is talking to teachers about are your dancers just mimicking shapes? Are they doing something that from an outsider they're like, wow, look how flexible they are? Wow, look what they're doing. But if you slowed them down, could their body actually do it? If you had them develop to the height that they're kicking the leg, is their hip square? Is the pelvis neutral? Are the knees straight? Are the feet stretched? But are they being supported by muscles? Can they do this slowly and still get to the same position? And that's something that's so important to ask ourselves. I was actually surprised. The surgeon, when I met with him about the MRI, he asked, you know, when in the past have you felt knee pain or knee instability? We said that a little bit earlier. And I basically didn't. That surprised him like, is this something that's ongoing for you? And they're surprised that that hasn't been the case. Now, here's the thing: the surgeon basically said, it seems like you've gotten micro-tears over time. And this was not a big movement you did, but it was the final straw, essentially. And so, what I want to challenge us as teachers to do is two things. One is to understand the mechanics and the strengthening enough that we do not pass this down generationally, that there's no generational wear and tear on our dancers. But then the second thing is also to challenge us as teachers to constantly support, stabilize, and still build our own bodies. Maybe we're not doing these tilts or we're not doing huge leaps, or we're not doing a fate sequence. I don't know. But we've had so many teachers coming through our program and some of them are still full-out dancing with their students, and some of them are just marking through things, and everything is fine if you can get your dancers to understand it. But on the flip side of that, we still need to protect our bodies because if I could show you how non-crazy the move was that tore my ACL. And so the thing that we have to remember is that our bodies have been working on this over time. We have been going at it over time, and so it'll take way less for something to happen to our bodies. So, just the idea that we've already put all this stress over the years on our bodies. And so anything, even the small thing that I was dealing with, could be that final straw. So, are we building our alignment? Are we building our support? Are we building our stability to be able to bounce back from that? When I saw the surgeon, he said, you're actually pretty stable. He said, I feel like with the stability that you have, your body's been accommodating over time to support itself and to protect itself. And so you should be fine with PT. Now, what a miracle! What an incredible prognosis for what this is. But if my body had not accommodated, if I hadn't spent alongside maybe all the times that my body was taking the wear and tear, also being in the right alignment, also building the strength, also finding ways to move my body that were supportive and constantly building the muscle, I probably wouldn't have had the support and stability to just be able to PT it back. Because not only would the leg not have had that support for itself, but my supporting leg took such a beating for the weeks that I was accommodating on the other side and limping or even the crutches and the other leg is just taking. I'm at one point I was like, my other leg, because the leg that had the ACL tear didn't actually really hurt, it just felt unstable. But the other leg was getting sore and the knee was starting to pinch. It was just so much pressure and not in the way I should be walking, not in the alignment I should be having. And so now I'm accommodating on the other side in a way that it should not be used in the first place. And so the other side was actually taking a bigger beating. But if that other side hadn't been strong and been stabilized, it couldn't even supported the first side. The other side would have gone too. And so what I'm trying to encourage us to as teachers is to constantly be thinking, okay, we have to protect our dancers. If they get an injury, they are doing like a thousand hours probably of dance a year. And the statistic is one injury for every thousand hours of dance. So we have to think about that. Okay. We are putting a lot of pressure on our dancers. They are doing a sport. And so how are we not only making sure that they're not just mimicking shapes, but how are we honoring their body, stabilizing their body, giving them this injury reductive information and making sure that they understand it. Now, the cool thing is with our apparel, and I'm wearing it for PT because I'm like, I really want to make sure my alignment is right. With the apparel, we can see that our dancers are not just doing shapes, but they're understanding how the muscles are firing up. They're understanding their alignment, they're understanding, okay, my body can't even do this unless I see this panel. My body can't even do this unless I feel it here. And we keep dancers from overcompensating in other areas in order to make a shape happen. So that's one thing I want to really emphasize is when I was off the one leg, I was overcompensating so bad on the other leg. And I could feel different muscles that shouldn't be firing up for certain things, firing up. And I was like, I can only do this for so long before am creating a muscular imbalance in this other leg that shouldn't be here. So our dancers aren't gonna think like that. They're not gonna feel like that. If they've been doing it a certain way the whole time, that way feels right. You know, we grow up in our families. If we only see what's going on behind the walls of our house, that feels normal. And then you go to a friend's house and you're like, ah, this is so weird. To the friend, that's normal. And so when a dancer is trained and the way their muscles fire up feels normal, if we know they're out of alignment and we try to retrain it, that's gonna feel wrong to them. And so we have to try to catch them early. We have to try to catch the littles and help them understand early. The apparel is fantastic for that. The older dancers, like your preteens, your teens, they've been doing it wrong for years, it's gonna feel like pushback because the right way is gonna feel so off from what they're used to doing. So just thinking about that as we're training our dancers, we have to not just think, are they injured right now? We have to think, is this gonna be something chronic later? Is this gonna be something that not only holds them back later, but maybe they're gonna have deteriorated joints? Maybe they're gonna have these muscular imbalances that wear away at their muscles, that wear away at their hips, their knees, their ankles, their shoulders. Are we creating these chronic issues? And I know that one thing that we hear all the time, well, it's always worked. And this is the other challenge is, and we hear this all the time at our live events, especially when we have a group of teachers together, is we get to a certain part of the event and it gets pretty emotional. People are sharing, they've learned part of the program and they're diving into the next part. And we start to share. And a lot of times it becomes a very emotional moment where a lot of teachers start sharing that one, if they had had this when they were younger, they wouldn't have been injured. These are teachers that have dealt with these massive injuries. Second thing is they said, you know, if I had had this when I was younger, my career would have been way more. I would have been a performer. I would have understood my technique better. I would have had just more access to opportunity as far as performing from a young age. And they were like, I never understood this about my body. And I'm understanding it for the first time as an adult, as a teacher. And all I want now is for my dancers to understand this too, for my dancers to really, really get the complexity of their body in the simplest form so that they can master technique that right now they're just looking at and trying to mimic, like we had said earlier. And so that's our challenge, right? That's our challenge as teachers is to make the next generation better. We are guiding, we are leading. So not only do we now have this access to information, but as teachers, are we putting that access to information on our own bodies and circling back to that that we talked about a little bit earlier? If you're gonna give a strength training exercise to your dancers, even if you haven't danced in a while, try the strength training exercise out. Make sure that you can find alignment and like squats in your turned out first position, that you're still accessing these plas for yourself, that you're still working on pelvis alignment, that you're still trying to rotate from the top of the leg, that you're still working through releve and feeling your feet pressing into the floor and feeling all those engagements. See if you can build strength for yourself as a teacher, even if you're not dancing full out. See if you can build that in your body, because no matter what level you're teaching at, we've all had these deteriorations in our body. And we're all going to be up against our body needing to be strong, needing to support. And we are examples to the younger ones of how to treat our bodies. And so if we're letting our bodies not be as strong, then they're gonna see that. Now, obviously, things happen. Teachers might have arthritis, they might have dealt with multiple surgeries, they might have illnesses that they're battling. There's so many things that could be going on. And I'm not discounting that. I'm just saying a lot of times as teachers, we move into that teaching role and we become more sedentary. We become less active in the actual dance aspect. And again, we don't have to be doing leaps and turns, but let's still build our strength, build our alignment, show our power so that we can demonstrate that to our dancers. We can show them, hey, look at the strength you want to have, even as a teacher. As a teacher, we're role models and we're demonstrating to the dancers what it is that they're moving towards. What are they building towards? And have we felt it in our bodies? Now, we don't have to feel a full all a second at le pay, but can we feel the process in our bodies? Are we feeling as that leg goes into Posse, what are our dancers gonna experience here? Where are they gonna feel it? And with our panels, we're like, okay, which panel am I targeting? If I cue this panel more, what is that gonna make the dancer feel? Now, from there, what panel is most likely to let go when we go into this next position? Okay, I actually feel the release in my thigh. I feel my quads gripping here. All right, check. That's good to know. So feeling things in our own bodies and also building our own strength and alignment to protect ourselves because yeah, you never know when your body over time has been accommodating or feeling something and not knowing it, and then everything just goes in a minute. And I even think, and this is just so random, but for teachers who have had babies, so I think a lot of this deterioration for me is probably less from dance training and more from activity level when the relaxants in your body. So when you're pregnant and right after you have a baby in that next year, if you're nursing, you have a relaxant going through your body. And so all your joints are loose, right? And so for a dancer, we probably love that because you're in yoga and everything's fluid and stretchy, and you're in Pilates and everything moves more. You're taking dance classes, everything just is like it goes there. And so I think for me, that's where I let things get out of control. And so just continuing the activity level and pushing. And for a dancer, we always go to our max, right? We're always like, oh, 110% in my yoga class. And so as I've been dissecting where the joints probably loosened up for me, I'm imagining it's right around that time. But you can picture that. So if you have gone through that process of pregnancy and having young children, you know that that happens. And so until you get to this moment where something actually snaps or clicks or breaks, it's hard to put a stop on it. And so just always honoring our own bodies as teachers and always passing the torch to the younger generation and just knowing we're here not only to teach them, but we're here to protect them. And saying we've always done it this way is really not good practice because so much has developed since we were young. So much has developed since we were training. And so to say, well, it's always worked is not really good logic. We need to always be learning, we need to always be growing, we need to always be pushing ourselves as teachers to that next level. And how beautiful that then we can not push dancers, right? We don't need to do that, but we can inspire our dancers to the next level. And isn't that a beautiful thing? So as we close out this episode, I want to personally invite you to our next teacher training event. It is in Orlando, July 17th through 19th. And one thing that's really important about this, as I referenced earlier, is it's a major moment for teachers connecting with each other on all these things. Teachers really get that support and that nurturing environment from other teachers that are going through the exact same thing that you are. But along with that, we go through all our resources and all our training so that we can train dancers away from these chronic injuries. We can train dancers into these safe alignments and these safe techniques. Another thing is that for our teachers, we are bringing in a lot of mindset coaching. And so we are going to be talking not just about approaching our classes at teachers, but 10xing our classes by coming into them as mentors. And how can we really speak to dancers and use empowering language alongside our technique to really develop them in their journey as well? And we would love to invite you to that. So jump into our show notes for a link to get all the details and to register for that event, and we would love to see you there. That's a wrap on today's episode of It's All Relative. Thank you for spending your time with us. We believe what you bring to the dance world matters, and we're honored to support the way you teach, read, and inspire. If this episode moved you, made you think, or gave you something new to try, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's next. You can connect with us anytime at Relative Motion Dance on Instagram or visit relativemotiondance.com for more tools and training. Until next time, keep growing, keep leading, and keep dancing with purpose. Because remember, it's all relative.