Training Like a Pro with the Body of an Amateur

But there’s also a price to pay if we don’t start taking better care of our bodies.

One of my clients said it perfectly: “I’m training like a pro with the body of an amateur.”

And the truth is, even many professional dancers are guilty of this. They live with chronic pain, tightness, injuries, and fatigue, and they start to believe it’s just part of the game.

But it’s not normal.

In this episode, I talk about why the demands of the modern dance scene are increasing, why so many dancers are breaking down, and why strength, mobility, flexibility, and recovery need to become part of the culture.

This is also exactly why I created The Unbreakable Dancer — to help dancers train smarter, prevent injuries, fix chronic pain, and build bodies that can actually keep up with the way they love to dance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, today's podcast is gonna be about how everyone's gonna die. Not necessarily, but we're kind of going this direction where, as my client said it the best, she is training like a pro with the body of an amateur. And I think this has been going on for a long time. However, the difference is now the amount of events that we have. I mean, yo, the scene has blown up, which is fantastic. More conferences, more marathons, more socials, more classes, more schools, more dancing, more training, more performance teams, more, more, more of everything. The problem is we weren't really taking care of ourselves before. And I think this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. And I'm already starting to see it. I'll get into some stories after of some of my clients that came in the program or some of the pros that I know, and just people dancing that are now starting to feel the effects of adding that extra amount on top or going to those extra festivals and congresses and really just loading their year up even more than they were before. Now, a lot of times we're like, oh yeah, you know, when I was younger, I could do everything. Yes, sure. However, let's look at this as like a car example. So if you didn't change your oil in your car, and let's say you drove a decent amount for a year, you might be okay. It depends on how much you drive. Two years, yeah, you're pushing it. Three, four, five, yeah, not a good idea. And when your engine just catches on fire and explodes, you can't really blame the car because you didn't take care of it. And this is the same thing with us. Life gets difficult, let's say, around, I mean, I say 10 years old, but it was probably before that. Used basically, life gets difficult once we stop sitting on the floor playing with Lincoln logs and Legos. And we go into a school where we got to sit at a desk and we got to start just reading books and writing all day long. And the crazy thing about that is I'm a pretty small guy. And uh when I was younger, I was even smaller. But those like big dudes and girls in class, they sat at the same desk as me. So that's like child abuse, man, like fitting in one of those kids in that desk next to me. I mean, the desk should be at least, I don't know, to people's height and legs and all of that. And it wasn't at all. So that is when we start moving, and that is basically when we get like jammed in a box. So if that starts at 10 years old, then when you're 20 years old, that's one decade. So, you know, everyone's like, oh my God, when I was 20, I could do all of this stuff and I was totally fine. Sure. Because if one decade in this analogy is like one year, then there you go. But then when you turn 30, you're like, oh yeah, you know, 20s was great, but 30s was still okay. Yeah, now you got two decades where you haven't been changing your oil. 40s, now you got three. So it just keeps adding up. And yes, of course, it plays, uh plays a part in that, sure. However, I'm 44 and I'm definitely not hypermobile. I have to get work for every millimeter of flexibility I have. And I feel better now after also having seven screws and a plate in my knee after a surgery than I did when I was younger because I take better care of myself. And if you want to talk about taking care of yourself, let's talk about the real pink, big pink elephant in the room when it comes to sleep and nutrition of the dancers. So not only has the it has the physical activity, if you will, picked up, but the sleep is a disaster. Many people throw alcohol on top, many don't, which I think is fantastic, because at the end of the day, alcohol is 100% toxic. And uh something funny about that, actually, is I was uh doing some research on it and I asked Chat GPT, I kind of set ChatGPT up for this to happen. So let me explain. I said, yo, ChatGPT, is alcohol toxic? Basically, and came back with yes. I said, okay, is crack cocaine toxic? And it was like, well, you know, and I got this answer that was like a page long because obviously it doesn't want me to smoke crack cocaine. And I'm sure there's chemicals in there that are toxic, but alcohol by itself, when we it breaks down in our body, turns into a toxin to our body, where crack cocaine, please, boys and girls, don't go smoke crack cocaine instead. However, the point is it's actually technically not toxic like alcohol is. So again, I'm not saying go smoke crack. However, I am saying alcohol is terrible for you. So I think it is great to see in the scene how many people have uh stopped drinking alcohol. But with that being added in, the diet is absolute trash. Now, I don't want to go into vegan and vegetarian and if meat and animal protein is good for us. However, I am a believer in animal protein. And I found it very interesting when I was uh watching some reel of Adolfo in like his home talking about like his personal life or whatever, and he was talking about how he basically only eats meat and fruit. Well, that's the carnivore diet, boys and girls. And I find it not surprising at all, actually, that when someone his age, I guess he's probably in his 40s, yeah, you have to start taking things more serious because as I said before, with oh yeah, changing the oil and all that jazz, we are getting older and we're still doing the same thing or even more to our bodies. So of course we have to start taking care of ourselves, but we just can't blame everything on age because if we're not changing the oil in our car and we're driving down the interstate and the engine explodes and catches on fire, but you haven't changed your oil for five years, you can't put it all on the car. So I personally unfortunately believe that we're gonna see a massive amount of, sadly enough, injury uh that's gonna prevent people from dancing in the next, I would say it's gonna start in three to four months. I think it already has, actually. And I think we're gonna really see it within the next year because I think people were hanging on by a thread. I think this is gonna be the straw that broke the camel's back, basically. And I think the other problem is is, you know, when you when you look at sports, you if I walked onto a soccer field and I was like, hey man, Mike, I want to play first team, they'd be like, yeah, that's not gonna happen. You need to learn how to play the sport first. You go into, you know, team 15 and you move yourself up. However, in dancing, everything is possible. Someone can walk into school, and I'm not saying this is bad, I'm just saying this is fact. Someone can walk into a school and say, hey, listen, I don't know how to dance. I want to learn how to dance, and I also want to be on the performance team. And many times, many schools and many teachers will not only allow them on the performance team, but I've actually had friends that were complete beginners where someone approached them and said, We have a performance team, it's X amount of euros a month, we would like you on our performance team. Now, the problem is many things with that, but let's just go ahead into the physiological anatomical problem of that, is a lot of times the body is not ready for that level of training. And I will go into a perfect example of a friend of mine that was an unbelievable dancer and started and had a performance team within his school and only took the more advanced dancers. But as they started going through the choreo, this uh teacher of mine is from Africa. So he started teaching or it in the chore, he had a lot of contemporary style African moves where the spine was moving in uh if you're watching this, I'll kind of show it. It was breaking forward almost in this segmental way, which the spine can move like that. So that's not a problem. However, what we started noticing, or what he started noticing about three, four months down the road after so many, after practicing the choreo so much, is a lot of people started having a lot of back and hip problems. The problem is the professional dancers have been moving like this forever. So of course, their muscles are used to it, their movement is cleaner, of course, but their ligaments have gotten stronger because that's also possible. I spoke with a physio from Serge du Soleil when I was interviewing with them, and she tried to tell me ligaments can't get stronger. That's complete BS because ligaments hold bone to bone, and if the bones are moving a whole bunch, the ligaments are gonna be very weak. And if we strengthen the body and the bones become more stable, so I don't want to block my mic, then the ligaments are gonna stop moving as much. Therefore, they're gonna gain a new position of being shorter and more stable, therefore, they are stronger. So these dancers are gonna have not only stronger muscles, cleaner movement, which is good when you're re when you're doing a lot of repetition, the ligaments are gonna be more stable, if you will, more supportive, but their bones are gonna be stronger. And their bones are gonna be stronger in those specific patterns because they have been stressing them a very long time. So, what do I usually see happen in that situation? Well, a lot of people start getting chronic injury, and one of them actually had to stop dancing for a little while. Not because anything was injured, but because it was just bothering him and he couldn't get it to calm down. Because, back to the point of this topic of this podcast, there are so many events going at the moment that people just keep going. They're kind of always in chronic pain, but they just think that's normal. They think there's no way out of it, and that's just the life of a dancer. This was how all the sports were before. And then the sports were introduced to sports medicine, if you will, and things started to change. So I think before this is gonna happen in the in the, if you want to call it the Latin dancing, I don't know, salsa, bachata, I think more salsa than bachata because bachata is a little bit more in chill mode. I think the salsa dancers are either gonna A, need to really start taking care of themselves, understand their body, understand nutrition and the importance of sleep to prevent this, or we're gonna see a wave of some bad stuff happening in the next year. I also don't want to mention the name of this super famous dancer that my friend was in a conversation with, but she, this super famous dancer, was uh just talking about how she was in pain all the time because she's hypermobile, which many dancers will be, just like the really strong, thick guys, for example, usually play American football or rugby. Well, a lot of times the very hypermobile people that can move very graciously, gracefully, will often go to yoga and dance. So this super famous professional dancer was saying how she's often always in chronic pain because she's hypermobile, which, again, I would say is almost an advantage for dance. But when someone is hypermobile and they're focusing often on stretches, that's kind of counterintuitive because stretching is not necessarily important. Range of motion is. And if the person already has too much range of motion, they probably don't need to stretch. If anything, they need to strengthen the muscles and the joints, if you will, the joint capsules, so they can control that range of motion and that excess range of motion when they are doing what they do best. This high, high high, super famous professional dancer, I guess, unfortunately thinks maybe it's normal that she's in pain all the time, but it's not. Most likely, that just means we need to look into why they are in pain. Now, hypermobile people that are dancing all the time, that are not focusing on strength, that's probably, I'm not saying this person is or not. I don't know what she's doing in her, in her, in her personal life. So I'm not judging by any means. I'm just speaking fact about hypermobility. GLL is what we say, generalized ligament is laxity. And the fact that when we have this, because it also exists in other sports, a lot of times, believe it or not, the NFL, the NHL, the guys that do have those, you know, the big broad bones and muscles, so to speak, many times also are GLL too. That is most likely why they're in the 1%, because they have all the strength, the power, the speed, and the flexibility to allow them to move like that. However, with them, we focus more on strength and stabilizing and protecting the joints through strength than we do stretching. Because if I want them to do the like pancake stretch, that's when you open up your legs and you reach forward. And they call it the pancake because if you can pancake down, then you just fall like flat on the ground like a pancake. And if these guys are able to do that, then okay, good, they can do it because it feels nice, but we don't need to bring them into that position because they already can. So what we need to do is we need to make sure we use weights, basically, to protect, so to gain, to have them have the strength so they can be protected in that movement and that they can have the strength to not move too far. Because many people can do the hyper splits. Another client of mine, for example, was told to stop kickboxing because kickboxing was hurting a lower back, and that that doesn't make any sense because it's like saying someone's bad at algebra. No one can be bad at algebra. Algebra is math, math. Algebra is addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. So if somebody says your kid or whoever is bad at algebra, nah, they're idiots. They're not bad at algebra. They're probably weak in one of those or all of those four things. And once we address that, then their algebra algebra will get better. So don't tell me kickboxing is hurting her back. We need to find out what about kickboxing, if you will, was hurting her back. So I had a conversation with her and she's GLL also. And she was always doing all these stretches before she went kickboxing. Well, we stretch, obviously, to warm up the body and get us going for the sport that we want to play. But if you already have the range of motion, there's other ways to warm up. We can do dynamic warmups, so like exercises, if you will, to basically prep the nervous system and get the joints and the muscles firing. We can do mobility, so something with a foam roller to activate the tissue, again, get the nervous system working. But we don't need her doing the splits because she's gonna go kick a bag. And if anything, the last thing we want is hypermobility when she's kicking something. So I just told her to stop stretching before and do the other things. And within one day, her pain was gone. It didn't come when she was kickboxing and it was, it never came back. It was gone. So the doctor wanted her to stop kickboxing, which again makes no sense. And I just looked, we reverse engineered the problem through looking at her five pillars of chronic pain: movement, mobility, strength, flexibility, and lifestyle. And then when we found out for her, which that was, which most GLL generalized ligaments laxity people, it's always going to be a mix of like strength and mobility. It was the same when I worked with the Cercle du Soleil athletes, the Stuttgart Ballette, when I was here with them for like three weeks here. Uh, same thing. They all have great range of motion, so we don't need to focus so much on stretching. We need to find out what they need to work on, and that is what we focus on. And a little shameless plug here. This is exactly what the unbreakable dancer is that I created with like, I don't even know. I think it has over 400 videos. You start with a three-month blueprint training program that goes into the strength, the flexibility, the mobility in something called accessor an accessory program, accessory exercises. And this is where we focus on joint-specific movement and strength. So then we can not only make the bigger muscles stronger, but especially in the GLL people, the generalized ligament is laxity, we can, the hypermobile people, we can also make sure that their joints are protected and that they understand the range of motion that they are moving from. Now, I'm gonna go to a few other stories here. Another client of mine, and this is gonna be like all of you, had some foot issues. Life gets busy, everything still continues, the job, the dancing, the training, the this, the that. And then I asked her if she did anything for her foot or how her foot pain was. She didn't do anything, and her foot pain was terrible, but she has to perform Friday on a stage. Guys, we're gonna kill ourselves. We can't do this. We have to find a way in this sense to work smarter and well, smarter and not harder, and sometimes smarter and harder. I'll get in that in a few minutes. But we have to do something, or nothing is gonna change for the better. Because the one thing that will change is the pain's gonna get worse. It's gonna go from chronic pain to a more of a serious injury, a stress fracture, you're gonna get tired, you're gonna sprain your ankle and actually have an injury if you don't do something. Now, you don't have to do everything. Literally, five to 15 minutes a day is better than nothing when you're doing what you're supposed to do. Problem is if you just go to a regular physio that doesn't really want to be there anyways, if you go to a doctor that tells you to stop all the time, if you're pounding a bunch of ibuprofen pain medication to basically just turn the signal off in your body that's telling you what you're doing hurts, that's like unplugging the check your engine light in your car. That's not a good idea for anyone. And if we're not doing what we need to do, then of course our body is gonna fall apart. Now, you could go on YouTube, you could go on Instagram and look at the best exercises for dancers. That's great. But if the best exercise in the video that you see is a stretch and you're hypermobile, that is not only not the best exercise for you. I mean, it's better than sitting on the couch and smoking crack, of course, but it's probably gonna not do much for you and in the long run, actually, be a bit counterintuitive. So we have got to start thinking a little bit smarter and training a little bit better. The problem is I've worked with enough pros one-on-one to realize most of them, or at least many of the ones I know, are guilty to the extreme of this. So if you want to talk about leading by example, this is exactly why the scene is how it is. Again, I'm new to it. I'm the physio that comes in. I'm by far some professional dancer. I don't want to tell everybody they're doing everything wrong. I am just speaking fact. Well, okay, that, okay, people being injured in like three or four months is not fact. That's actually future. But I'm just speaking fact that everybody's doing a lot and they're not probably doing, or at least the ones I'm speaking of, what they need to be doing. And at the end of the day, one plus one will eventually equal two. Now, if we obviously listen to the media and the news and everything going on in the world, they will do everything they can to make to convince us that one plus one doesn't equal two, but it always does. So as Wim Hof says, eventually the tax man will come and he's gonna what does he say? What does actually Wim Hof say? He says, uh, there is no free lunch, and eventually the tax man will come. And it's so true. So I really hope that we start to recognize A, that we really need to start taking care of ourselves, and B, this idea that we're always exhausted and in chronic pain is not like that's not normal. That's that's only the dance scene. And trust me, because I'm coming from the NHL, Major League Baseball, the NFL, professional tennis. I mean, I was in Florida working all of them. And this is this is not how pro sports function. I think dance is a little bit different. It's obviously a pro sport in some sense, but it doesn't have the team aspect of the physios and the trainers and the education and all of that behind it. But I think we need to bring it. I mean, I know I've spoken with some event organizers about having like physio rooms, and they're like, no, that's not the look that we want. So the compression boots, Farraguns, it's not the look that we want. Okay, well, I I mean, I get it, but at the end of the day, I mean, Serge du Soleil invests millions per year in this. And that is the look that they want because their athletes are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and they don't want them to get injured. Now, obviously, none of us, or not many of us, I don't think, are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing this, but we're still pro-athletes. We're still dancing like pro athletes, we're still training like semi-pro athletes, whatever, and we're not treating our bodies like this at all. I'm gonna go through one more. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And before I let this podcast end, another client of mine was uh having some knee pain, and she had a few weeks break a few weeks off. And so a lot of times when people are training hard and they have a few weeks off, they take it off. They just go, they chill, they don't really do anything, actually. I mean, usually athletes when they have two weeks off, we still go running, we still enjoy fitness, we still do a little bit of mobility and stretching and all that stuff, of course. But they like this example, my client literally did like nothing. She's like, Yeah, you know, I was just eating less and I was just chilling because I you didn't want to eat too much because I wasn't training as hard. And I get the process of it, right? But at the same time, that is what D-Load in regeneration is. So, meaning the exact opposite of that. So if someone, I have a client right now that is also the one that gave me the uh the quote like a pro with a body or dancing like training like a pro with the body of an amateur. And she goes on vacation for 14 days and she asked me what she should do. And in her case, I said, yo, don't do anything. I mean, actually, maybe I should write her and tell her to eat a lot. So if you're listening to this or watching this, eat a ton because you need to replenish your body of all of those calories for sure. But it's also okay to chill when you're in a periodized program. But this idea that, you know, something is bothering you. So we have like, you know, school break or whatever, and we take a few weeks off and we don't do anything, like even decrease our diet. Well, then we're gonna start back exactly where we were before. When we have now, if you're gonna take like three months off, okay, maybe you don't eat the same, you're gonna come back the size of a whale. But if you're just taking a few weeks off, a three weeks off, even a month, we definitely wanna use this as a deload time. So, like download is what deload stands for, but not like computer download. D-load? What is deload? Download, yeah. Like you load yourself down, whatever. I usually just say regeneration, but deload was always the term that we used in pro football, pro-American football. So, either way, the point is you want to have everything, everything planned, so to speak, somewhat. We want to have an idea. And right now, what I've seen in the salsa scene is a disaster. We have got to start planning better, which again is why I created the Unbreakable Dancer, why I have this podcast. I like to interview the pros and the stars and all that jazz. And I think I'm gonna start bringing this a little bit more into the conversation. But on the other ones, I like to go into topics like this, where either A, I see where I can add my two cents, B, I can call B Nostradamus and add my vision of the future and hopefully change it a little bit because I still think this can be changed, which again is why I created this program and why I'm starting to coach a lot of the athletes and dancers, because this is preventable. But if we keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different result, as I always tell the Germans, it was their boy that said that is. Definition of craziness or the definition of insanity. That was Einstein that said that. So we just need to come to reality of what we are doing, what we need to change, and how simple it is to change. But if we want to dance at this high performance level and we want to just go crazy all the time, we have to start taking better care of ourselves. And the easiest way to do that is to do a program or get with someone that knows what they are doing. Sure, it's nice to know what how dancers dance and dancers should train, but dancers don't need like a dancing specific program, if that makes sense. At the end of the day, dance is what you do, but you are an athlete first. I mean, okay, I guess you're a human being first, but putting that to the side, since we're all hopefully humans, then the number one thing you are is an athlete and then you dance. You're an athlete and then you play soccer. You're an athlete and then you play badminton, volleyball, whatever. But you are a dancer second and an athlete first. You're an athlete that specializes in dance. And if you don't treat yourself like an athlete, you're gonna either A, fall apart, or B, what I didn't even get into is your performance is gonna be limited. So for the people out there that are doing the same thing, but they don't really have any chronic pain, well, then you're you're you're you're limiting your ability to perform at a higher level. I know a very good pro, I mean, I've heard this a few times. I don't want to say any names, but a few times I've been told that a lot of times people spare themselves the aerial stuff, the acrobatics in their dance, because either one, the female is not strong enough to be like lifted, so to speak, because you need to have a really good core strength to be able to also be lifted. But to be the lifter, the guy usually doing the the uh heavy lifting, no plan intended, you doesn't have the strength. So they're just like, you know what? So we're just gonna leave out the acrobatic stuff because uh we can't do it. Now, there's many styles of dance where you don't need the acrobatics anyways, but that should be the reason you're not doing it, not because you can't you can't do it. I mean, especially, I mean, okay, I don't want to get rude with some of the jokes, so I'll just keep this PG here, like, you know, for kids, PG, I think only the Americans know what I'm talking about when I say that. We have like G-rated movies, which is like Disney. PG, PG 13, meaning you have to be, I think, 13 or older, and then like R, and then NC17 too. I think there's another one, but whatever. That's off the point. Point is you you shouldn't be not doing something in your dance because you're afraid of X, Y, and Z, or you're not able to do it. If you don't want to pick someone up and flip them around like a taco, don't do it because you don't want to, not because you can't. And so this is the problem. I guess you would say flip them around like a pizza. I don't know if anyone flips tacos around. Whatever. We can start flipping tacos if we want. The point is if you want to flip a taco, goddammit, you should be able to do it. And it should be your choice to not flip a taco. Not because it's, I don't know, too heavy or this is a weird analogy. So I'm gonna move on, but you get my point. And uh it's gonna be really interesting because I've been working on this program and some other things too. And uh I'm gonna get back into the dance circuit, if you want to call it that, start going to more festivals. And yeah, let's see. I think, I think I'm gonna have a lot of chronic pain conversations because it already was bad before. And now, I'm telling you, man, three, four months, as my friend's wife said, it's time to pour some fire on it. And I think this is exactly what's gonna happen is some fire is gonna get poured on it. Now, usually you say you pour gas on the fire. Hers was let's pour some fire on it. So unfortunately, I think the salsa scene in a bad way is gonna catch on fire. And I hope that this podcast and me chatting with people and other people realizing that chronic pain is not normal, we can prevent this fire from getting too bright because I already think it's burning at the moment. This is like the analogy podcast here. And uh, and I would like to see it not as the siren goes by. And on a side note, it's actually really funny. Germany is all about like not being too loud. And there's something called, I think it's called Larm, Lammschutz, Lammschutz, and it means like shit shouldn't be too loud. Yeah, the sirens. I mean, game over, man. They won. It is deafening loud. When they go by, I literally have to close my ear because you just you can't hear any. It's like, I don't know, man. I've never had a bomb explode next to me, but it's bad. And you, yeah, it's horrible. So I always find it a bit funny that Germans, that, you know, I love Germany, hard, but uh, yeah, it's crazy. The sirens are absolutely one thing. If how do I say this? You know those memes that come up where it's like you say there was say, for example, maybe they'll say one thing that a German would never say, or there's a whole bunch of them like that on Instagram. And I always wait for the one that says that, what would be one thing a German would never say? And my answer would be that the sirens are not loud enough because it is crazy. So maybe you hold it, heard it, go by there. But either way, that's going by, and I'm going by. I think this has been a long enough podcast. Share this with your friends. I'm gonna make some small clips out of it too. So if you're obviously you've um yeah, if if you're listening to this now, you must have downloaded it somewhere. So please share it with your friends. The more this grows, the better. I'm gonna try to release one every single Wednesday. Next week, I tomorrow actually, tomorrow? No, today's Monday. In two days, I think I got Luis Vasquez. We're just trying to iron the time down. So that should be coming up soon. And um, yeah, if you guys have any questions, let me know. The Unbreakable Dancer is my small channel on Instagram. And American PT Stuttgart, this beautiful thing behind me, is my big one. So hit me up anywhere. Say hi to me at the festivals. I think I will be for sure in Cologne. And I think I buy my ticket tonight for the Mambo training week in August in Warsaw. So uh Javier Escobar, I always sound like such a drug dealer there, is a buddy of mine. So he's gonna be there. So I'm gonna say what's up, what's up to him there? And I've never been to Warsaw, and it's always on my list to go. So uh yeah, if you guys are gonna be at any of those, let me know. And um, you have a beautiful, well, I would say Monday, but by the time you're gonna listen to this, I think it's Wednesday. So no matter what day it is in the world, have a beautiful day.