EP 47: Letting Great Technique Go

Are your dancers losing months of progress every summer? This episode explores how to preserve dance technique, maintain dancer growth, and start the new season stronger than ever.

In this episode of It’s All Relative, Cara tackles a challenge every dance teacher and studio owner knows well: watching dancers reach their highest level of technique at the end of the season, only to spend the first months of the next season rebuilding what was lost. Drawing a powerful comparison between traditional schooling and dance training, Cara explores why dancers often lose momentum during breaks and how studios can create intentional summer dance training strategies that support both recovery and continued growth.

This conversation is packed with insights on dance technique retention, summer dance programs, cross-training for dancers, and building a plan that helps dancers maintain strength, turnout, alignment, and technical consistency without increasing the risk of burnout or injury.

Cara talked about:

• Why dancers often lose technique over the summer and spend the beginning of the season relearning skills they once mastered
• The balance between rest, recovery, and maintaining dance technique during off-season training
• How strategic summer dance training can prevent setbacks and accelerate dancer progress
• Why every studio needs a customized summer training plan based on dancer goals, timelines, and technique gaps
• How teachers can use the summer months to prepare dancers for stronger results during the "golden months" of the upcoming season

3 Summer Strategy Tips from Cara:

1. Identify the specific techniques and skills most likely to decline during the break and prioritize maintaining them throughout the summer.
2. Create a focused training strategy instead of trying to improve everything at once during summer classes and intensives.
3. Use cross-training, restorative movement, strength training, and targeted technique work to maintain progress while allowing the body to recover.

This episode is a reminder that summer does not have to be a season of lost progress. With the right strategy, dancers can maintain the technique, strength, and body awareness they've worked so hard to build throughout the year. Rather than spending the fall rebuilding old skills, teachers can help dancers arrive prepared, confident, and ready to reach new levels of growth from day one.

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Transcript

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. Hi, friends, and welcome to a new episode of It's All Relative. Today we're gonna talk about something that actually happens. I think we're used to it happening with our kids in school. And as teachers, as dance teachers, we also internally are processing this with our dancers, season between season. And I feel like it wasn't until recently, maybe this week, that I actually put this parallel into action. And this thing that I'm gonna talk about today is the idea of just letting something go, right? Just letting something that you have done very well or mastered go. And so I am gonna kind of refer to schooling, just in the general sense of going to school, also going to dance, right? And paralleling these two concepts. So one thing I wanted to say is that recently, and this is where I could see the parallel unfolding in real life. Recently, my kids and I we started homeschooling. And so we have three kids, the littlest one's in preschool. So he finished out his little year, but our oldest two are nine and six. And so they started homeschooling at the end of February, first week of March. We went into that transition. They stopped going to school at the last week of February, they started homeschool the first week of March. And so they've been homeschooling like a little less than three months, essentially around three months. And so about two months in, my two kids completely finished their math curriculum. And this is where I'm gonna let the story unfold. I did a quick post about it, but I was also like, you know what? I really want to dive a little deeper into this because I think it's important. So they finished their math curriculum. And I was like, all right, you know what? Instead of like being done for the year, because we're a month early, school isn't out yet, let's get the next grade. And so we got the next grade. My oldest got his fourth grade book, and my middle, he got his second grade book. Now, the interesting thing is they're like, yes, we're excited to learn this new stuff. And so they open their books and they're starting up their lessons. And I'm like, okay, guys, let's sit down. What do you need help with? Let's dive in. And they were like, well, actually, we know all this. And so they're starting this school, and I look at it, I'm like, what? And it's all review. Now, logically, of course, right? It's review in the beginning. Now, look, I was like, okay, it's probably gonna be the first couple of pages. We're just gonna do a quick flashback of what we did last year, quote unquote last year. Essentially, if this was their new book, they would have started in August, September. But no, look, they are, it's been a month or a quarter of the way through this book. And we're still just like kind of reviewing, kind of like tinkering in new ideas, but it's still just wrapping up that review, okay? A quarter of the way into their next book. And so my kids got really excited. They're like, well, wait, we know this so well. If we don't ever take this downtime, if we just keep learning, then we don't ever have to drop it and learn it again. So we kind of figured out your review is so long because kids, they're pretty decent at understanding their concepts, but these concepts were kind of introduced to these kids in April and May. They go into summer right after they've practiced a little bit. It's not like for dancers, for essentially, it's not like muscle memory, right? They're just starting to get to the point where it's beginning to be a concept they understand. It's not completely natural yet. And now we're breaking for summer. And so I'm looking at this, and the kids were like, Well, I actually do understand this pretty well. But you know, if you think about it, typically kids would put these concepts down for three or so months on average if you're not doing year-round school, right? And so a kid would come back in August or September, and this concept that they had just been introduced to and maybe we're starting to get familiar with now feels like a relearn, right? Now we actually need to really spend some time on this. And what I'm seeing is they're not spending some time on it, they're spending a quarter of a year on it. They're spending a quarter of that next year reviewing what they had last year. Now, my kids, because that's the case, they're done with that. So they're a quarter of the way into their school for next year. Now they got pumped. They were literally like, wait, if we do this while we still know it, then we can just be a year ahead of our friends, basically before the end of the summer. And because that quarter of a year should have taken, you know, September, October, potentially part of November. And our kids are going to be doing that in June. And so they were just like, we're gonna be a whole year ahead before the next year starts for our friends. And so what it challenged me with was one, the kids were excited about that because they didn't have to go up against their same struggle. They weren't like, oh, we have to go through the process of forgetting it, backtracking and relearning it again, only to in four or five months feel the way we do about this content right now. We can actually go on to new concepts and feel good and keep going. So they don't even really want to take a full summer. They're like, can we keep trying to plug into this over the summer so we don't have to feel like that? And so, of course, right now I want to translate this over into us as dance teachers because look, this is what we feel as dance teachers all the time, right? We get the kids to the spot. It feels like they're maximum, like they're in their flow by May and June. You know, the technique is unfolding. They're starting to feel things that felt really foreign in September are starting to feel really good to these kids in May and June. They're starting to think, oh my goodness, the possibilities. What am I capable of doing technique-wise if I keep this going? Right. And so we get to that May June session, the kids are on fire. They're feeling it, they're understanding it in their max capacity. They're really working at their highest technique for them in that moment. And they have this fork in the row, right? They're at this boundary line where it's like do the kids keep in that flow, in that direction, in that learning, going for it, or do we break? Now I go back and forth in my mind, right? Because for school, it's like mental, right? And it's okay kind of to keep going. In dance, it's very physical. Dancers don't have an off-season or a different training season where other muscles are being used that might complement but aren't like exact, right? So dancers are more susceptible to injuries than potentially some athletes that cross-train and do this type of exercise for or this sport for half the year and this sport for the other season. Dancers are continuously working the same muscles over and over, and a lot of injury comes from overuse and exhaustion. So there's the one part of this where we have to be really smart, right? And just like, hey, we don't want to get into this overuse pattern, we don't want to get into this exhaustion pattern, we don't want to make you more susceptible to injuries. That's our number one. How can we give the body rest, but also keep the technique level that we've trained? And so this is the challenge, right? The challenge is how do we not backstep? How do we not completely stop while still giving our body the rest it needs, while still giving the body that time to restore itself, that time to get back on track. And I think there's so many concepts we can touch on here. There's the concept of cross-training, really using your muscles but using them in a different way. There's a concept of restorative movement, right? Restorative stretching. There's the concept of training things that are the most likely to kind of atrophy, the things that are most likely to be unlearned in that season. There's also the concept of continuously doing strength training of some sort that could still build into those technique concepts, not completely losing some of the muscle we've developed, not completely losing the steam that we've built. And then also concepts that you're not using in everyday life that are easy to kind of lose if you don't, you know, they say if you don't use it, you lose it, right? But concepts like turnout. If a dancer completely isn't dancing for a month, two months, they probably are going to be doing very parallel activities for most of that time, really quad-heavy activities. So, how do we still engage them in external rotation, like moving between internal and external rotation over the course of the month? So there's so many little things, little theories and concepts and things that we can hone in on. Now, the one thing I want to challenge is that whenever you're going to succeed in something, you have to know what it is you're trying to succeed in. So I think a lot of times for dance, we're like, okay, we have four weeks of summer classes and we need the kids to get as much technique in these four weeks as possible. Let's throw everything at them and see what sticks, like that type of thing. And I do see why that mindset unfolds, but I want to challenge us to go into the summer with strategy. Let's sit with this and say, okay, what do we as teachers feel in September? In June, recital season, national season, we're on a high, right? In September, how are we feeling? We're excited for a new season, but what are we feeling as the dancers are coming back? And we see maybe some of the technique they lost or where we're at, where we're starting. So, starting there, what do we hope our dancers are able to do? Look at them right now. This is their height of the season. And what from here in one year, what do you hope that looks like? And then how much time do you really have with them over the summer? This is a big one because some dancers are off to different intensives over the summer. Some dancers are just doing a four-week summer session at their studio. Some dancers come in for these intensives and they're like so high level, but maybe just a burst, like a week, right? And then they have the month off, and the next month we do a week, and then they have their choreography intensive. So different studios are working with different things, right? And different dancers have different commitment levels. So you're dealing with a lot of moving parts here in the decision of what would be best and how to build strategy. And the other thing is that every dancer is different. They have different strengths, they have different weaknesses, they have different technique gaps. So it would be a disservice, a huge disservice of me to keep you on a podcast and just talk for an hour about all the possibilities when we know they're endless. This is really something you work with personally, with one-on-one, get some strategies, get some technique. But the cool thing is, our team is building this formula out that we have taken from a process that works really well, and we're building it into a summer strategy, a summer strategy formula. And the cool thing is we are gonna do a free class on it. So, teachers, I know a lot of people that are in our podcast are jumping into our free classes pretty regularly. And we've had the privilege of having a couple hundred people register for these free classes, which we're so grateful for. So, what I want to do is I want to share that we are gonna do a free class on summer technique strategies. And what this class is gonna do is it's gonna give a formula, it's gonna give this starting point where, okay, what are you seeing? What are you up against? What do you have? What are your resources? What's your time that you have? What are the dancers' commitment level? And we're gonna put it all together to give you something tangible that you can take away. There's a workbook that's gonna come with this free class that you can work through and get real answers for yourself based on your situation, your dancers, your timeline, what you need, the level you're at now, the gaps you're seeing, all the things, how you need your dancers to be when they show up in August or September when the new season starts. And just giving you valuable takeaways because here's the thing: no teacher has just barrels of extra time, right? So if you're putting your time aside for a class, that's your most valuable resource, you know, time. And so if you're putting your time aside for the class, we want to make sure you leave that class with very tangible takeaways, very readily usable, ready to go, straight, just customize it to use stuff. So jump into this class. It's going to be so informative and it's going to be so powerful. And so, what we're gonna do is just dive into look, how do we make this summer the summer for you? How do we get to the point where we're not doing that? The thing that we're doing in regular school, right? Where the kids get it, they're starting to really grow, they're starting to really understand, they're starting to really do, and then we put it down and then we pick it up. And a quarter of next year is us trying to get back what we had at the end of this year. And you know, it's hard to because at the end of this year, dancers are doing comps, they're getting tired, they're doing recital. So some of our class time is actually taken towards stuff like that. And so we seek the class time being chipped away at at the end of the year. The beginning of the year is the class time that we can really capitalize on and see the progress and see the growth and see the movement. And so if we're starting at behind where we are here, those months that are kind of like the golden months between September and November, right? August and November, the months where we can really stack the technique and get the fundamentals and layer those fundamentals into these advanced techniques. That's becoming a wash, right? Because we're just trying to get back to where we ended at the end of the season. So what I'm gonna challenge us to do is think about those golden months, right? The start of the season month. And what can we do? We know what that feels like when we're not where we used to be. And sometimes it sneaks up on us. We're like starting the season, we're excited as teachers, and we we get kind of surprised when the dancers come and they've lost a lot of the technique. A recent thing I've started telling myself when something has been repeated in the past, I like to say, like, oh my gosh, I'm so surprised by that. And I stop myself and I'm like, okay, really? I know this happens. Why am I surprised by this? This happens every time. And why can I even start a sentence with, I'm surprised that, you know? An example, and this is just random, would be like giving my kids sugar and they get super crazy. And I'm like, oh, I'm so surprised they're doing this, you know? And then I'm like, why am I surprised? Every time they have sugar, they do this. So if I get them sugar, then they will do this. And so when we get to September and we're excited for the season to start and we're like, oh, we're so surprised that dancers lost all this technique or that we have to go back to this, this, and this, or they're not able to do this now. And we got to stop ourselves and be like, you know what? Actually, we're not surprised. We knew this was coming. So knowing that's coming, how can we in June get ahead of it? If we know that's coming and we have three months to prepare and we know the resources we're looking at, we know the timeline we're looking at, we know the accessibility of the dancers we're looking at. Can we prepare ourselves so well that we end up in September surprised in a good way? The dancers came back and they are ready. And we as teachers know that they're ready because we prepared them to be ready. And so we're surprised, but we're not surprised, like, oh, I'm so surprised. But we're like, I am so surprised. Look at this new year we're starting with. Look at these golden months that we get to really take and make the most of. How awesome would that be? So, what I want you to do is I would love to see you in our free class. Jump in the link. We're gonna put it in the show notes, jump on our social media, the links are all over that. Jump on our newsletter, the links are all in that. And get in this class because it's gonna be an hour, it's gonna be amazing. The teachers that are in there that have already registered, we just launched the announcement. We have so many registrations already, and it is so awesome. So jump in. You're gonna love the other teachers in there with you. And I truly believe you're gonna love the content and feel like it's gonna support you and what you're needing this summer. It's what every teacher needs to go into the summer. It's gonna be so good. And we would love to see you there. And if we don't see you there, we'll see you here next week. But our class is gonna be June 9th from 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern time, and it's gonna be incredible. So I'll talk to you soon. 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.