Dance Like a Dancer. Train Like an Athlete

Dance is one of the most athletic things we can do—but most dancers still aren’t training like athletes.

In this episode, I break down what it really means to train like an athlete so you can dance like a dancer.

It’s not about simply doing more. It’s about figuring out what your body is missing.

If you’re doing a ton of Pilates, great—but maybe you need more strength. If you’re already lifting heavy and getting stronger, maybe you need more work on stability, control, and the smaller muscles that support the bigger ones.

Maybe your weak link is flexibility. Maybe it’s mobility. Maybe it’s strength, stability, recovery, or simply the way you’re moving.

The goal is to identify that weak link and train it.

Because your dancing can only progress as far as your body allows it to.

The dance world continues to become more athletic, more demanding, and more impressive—but our training has to evolve with it.

And right now, the biggest thing holding dancing back might unfortunately be the dancers themselves.

It’s time to start treating dancers like the athletes they are.

Train like an athlete. Dance like a dancer.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, Unbreakable Dancer Podcast, welcome back. It's been a few weeks, a few weeks, maybe like a month, because I've got some exciting news. I will be presenting at the Berlin Salsa Congress the Noviti Dance Experience, Noviti Life Experience, Dance Experience, I believe it's called in October. And also possibly the Mambo Training Week, which is going to be in the beginning of August, in maybe, just maybe one in between. I'm still waiting to hear back if they have time to in a room to allow me to present on one of the topics I'm going to talk about today. And this is that in the dance scene, the main thing holding it back are the dancers themselves. And what I mean by that is dance is extremely athletic. I mean, if you look at the movement that goes into professional sports, uh, basketball, baseball, soccer, I don't know, ice hockey, choose your sport. And then you look at what the dancers are expected to do, I would say that it is just as difficult, and in some ways, even more difficult, because, you know, I always said that in ice hockey or in a regular sport, you know, Michael Jordan, for example, in basketball or LeBron James, when he's jumping to dunk the basketball, he doesn't need to look good. I mean, if you remember the old school uh videos and pictures of Jordan, he had his tongue come, he had his he was sticking his tongue out, and they look like animals. Which, you know, because they're playing a game, they're going as hardcore as they can, and that's just what happens. However, if you look at dancers, dancers need the same athleticism, really the same power, and they have to look graceful and beautiful as they do it. I remember when I was helping out with the Stuttgart Ballet, this is a cool little side tangent, but cool story. I was uh in their building and I was speaking with a few of the coaches, if you want to call it coaches, teachers, whatever, and uh also the management. And I kept hearing this like boom, boom, boom. And I was like, yo, okay, I have an idea what this is, but I I'll be curious to see what it is. So either way, I'm speaking with the managers, and then they say, hey, you know, let me uh take you to where the ladies are, but the women are. And I said, okay, that's fine. So we go through a few different rooms, and the women are stretching, they're doing some practicing ballet, practicing some jumps, doing everything that you would expect a professional ballet dancer to be doing. But I kept hearing this boom, boom, and I was like, okay, what I'm really curious what this is gonna be. And so as we were walking to a door that was closed, the booms got louder, if you will. So now I'm gonna save the idea of what I thought it was, and I'm gonna kind of give the spoiler alert with exactly what it was. As we opened the door, one of the dancers that ended up being from, I think, Canada. So the first language of the Schrookka bellet is English. So he lands, and as I open the door, he's basically running directly towards me, full speed. And obviously he stops because if I wasn't there, the door would be there. The door is closed. So obviously he's not gonna run into the wall. However, when he saw me, like, I don't know, half a meter away, not even like 30 centimeters away, he was like, Oh, hey man, yeah, I'm really sorry. And I didn't move at all. And he was even like, but that's pretty impressive, man. I didn't scare you. I said, No, no, no, no. When we did these drills with the NFL and the NHL and players like this, we would have rubber bands on them and they would sprint directly towards us because the rubber band would pull them to us, and obviously they had the power in the athleticism to de-accelerate and not kill me, basically, right? So I would expect the dancer to have the same, because like I said, if I wasn't there, the wall was there. So now I'm in the room, I'm looking towards the room of where I hear this boom, boom. And what is it? Every single time one of the dancers is pressing off the floor to do one of their jumps, that was what I was hearing because the floor was an old wood floor. Obviously, the um the density of the floor underneath it had some padding, if you will, some air, because they need that in order to get the spring and also not to just destroy their knees. But that was the power in which these guys were landing with. Many of them were, you know, what a meter 90 or like 6'1, 6'2, and they were not small guys at all. I always said the only reason you could tell the difference between, you know, the these athletes dancing ballet versus maybe playing soccer or playing rugby or something else, was because the way that they stood like in the train, their feet would be open like a V. So no other athlete would stand like that except ballet dancers, because that's kind of their, I think, first position or sixth position. I always forget the name of that. But either way, that is the way in which they stand. Now the difference was, or not even the difference, the point of the story is look at the athleticism involved. They are slamming their feet into the ground, because that's what you have to do in order to get the rebound in order to move in the air. I always say that when we go, you know, on a side note, people sometimes ask me if running is hard on the body. I said, listen, anytime you you're you're running and your foot hits the ground, it needs to create the impact and the force in order to put propel itself forward. So anytime you go running, your foot is basically punching the ground as if I or someone were to punch you in the face. So is it bad to punch someone in the face? I mean, I I wouldn't do it unless you're doing it for a sport, but obviously not because people do it for a living all the time. Now, is it hard on the wrist and the hand? Yeah, sure, of course it is. But that is why athletes train like athletes. And this brings me back to the point of even the Schnuttgart Ballet, because when I saw what they were doing training-wise, hopefully things have changed, they were definitely not training like athletes, or at least the athletes they should be training like. They definitely had some things going on. But if you're gonna be dancing and moving like a top 1% athlete, you need to treat your body the same. And if you don't, at the end of the day, as Wim Hof used to say, the tax man will come and there will be consequences to pay. So, in my personal experience, in my belief with what I've studied and what I've seen, I believe that a lot of times, just like smoking, you don't smoke for a week and then die of cancer, it takes time to slow slowly break the system down. And because we have the science behind smoking, we understand that, okay, when you get lung cancer, that it was most likely the years and years and years of smoking that you've done. But what I have seen with a lot of athletes, and I'm gonna go more towards the dancers, is as they start getting chronic pain, they don't connect the dots to why they are getting it. Now, the thing with the Schutkat Ballet or other athletes, if you will, is they are, depending on their level of professionalism, they are training like athletes. And this is what I've been, I must must honestly say, shocked when I've seen the social dance community. Now, granted, I think part of the problem is the word social dancing. We think social and then we think somehow that that that takes some of the responsibility away because we're just having a good time. Maybe it's like, you know, Zumba that we used to do like three, four times a week. I never did Zumba, but I don't know if anyone did it more than that. And maybe that was just a fitness and a class for fun. But the things have changed in the dance community. Now we have performance teams, we have complicated movements such as, you know, chorios and afro, and we're moving in ways in which the spine is no longer in this stable position, but it's in a very segmented position, meaning, like, for example, if you were gonna pick up a weight, you would brace your core, you would get everything stable, and then you would lift something up. Well, anyone that's uh dancing for at least longer than two weeks would realize that body position while you're dancing is impossible. You need to have this fluid-like movement during a lot of the choreo, a lot of the afro, and a lot of the different movements that we're doing. Therefore, we need even more strength in order to make sure that our body can handle this pressure. And in return, we don't have any of it at all. So, again, I believe I said this at the beginning of the podcast is that the only thing holding the dance community back is the dancers themselves. Now, eventually something's gonna happen, and there's either gonna be a few dancers that come up, there's gonna be a generation that comes up, where they're gonna realize they have to start training like athletes, or they're just gonna limit their own performance. So we have like the social dancers and you know, the uh the performance teams. I don't want to call them semi-professional because that's not what they are. They are just often, what I've seen, full of chronic pain and just kind of pushing themselves through one show to the next, from one performance to the next, from one festival to the next. That that's okay, but it doesn't need to be like that. And one doesn't need to be in the gym five hours a day in order to make it not like that. It's actually very, very, very easy to fix because I'm fixing it on multiple dancers as I do this podcast right now. It's usually just a few small things that we need to look at within their lack of training program, I should say, and get them working a little bit harder. A great example is one of the things that I push back a little bit, uh should I go into this right now? Yeah, I'll go ahead and say it and I'll and I'll I'll come back to another point. But is this idea of fitness? Fitness is what we do when we want to become, I don't know, more fit, I guess. Strength in conditioning is what we do when we are athletes. So if we are going and we are doing air quotes fitness while we're trying to prepare ourselves and get ourselves stronger for dance, I mean it's better than smoking crack on the couch, don't get me wrong. But we need proper strength in conditioning, meaning actual exercises that are gonna help our performance and help us become stronger so we either can perform better or we don't get injured. I remember seeing a uh God, what was it? Was uh it was a uh an Instagram post, like basically a meme. And what was it? Um it was athletes don't diet and exercise, they eat and train. And I thought, yeah, that's so true. So I mean sure, diet and exercise and eating and training, it's like kind of the same thing, but it's not. The mindset is not only different, but also the programming in the state in which we're going at it is completely different. So when I'm going to the fitness studio and I've got two kilo weights, or not even a fitness studio, how many dancers don't even have memberships to a fitness studio? Which is fine when you have all the stuff at home. But when you don't have anything at home and you're literally just doing Russian twists with no weights, shoulder press with two kilo weights, and you're just doing all of this no offense to Pilates and yoga because we need Pilates and yoga, but we're doing this Pilates and yoga style training, that is not enough. And we know it's not enough because 90% of the people, 99% of the people doing that either have chronic pain or they find themselves unable to do what they need to do. I've heard some of the top professionals in the world tell me the reason they do not have acrobatics in their routine is their partner is not strong enough to lift them in the air, and they are not strong enough to be held in the air. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't want that in your routine. But if you don't want acrobatics in your routine, it should be because you don't want acrobatics in your routine, and not because the person being lifted doesn't have the core strength to hold it, and the person that's supposed to lift them doesn't have the know-how of the technique or the strength to do it. Now, I know this sounds terrible and it sounds like I'm just trashing on the salsa community. That's not my point, but I'm just being honest. I'm calling a spade a spade. And I'm curious, like I said about a few minutes ago, when it's gonna change. Because to wrap back to the other point I was talking about was tennis in golf, and actually NASCAR, uh racing. It also Indianapolis, what, NASCAR, Formula One. There we go. So NASCAR, Formula One, tennis, and what was the one I just in golf? Well, all the same. Me, it was more golf and tennis because I was working at a very, very, very, very famous tennis and golf academy, the Arnold Parnell Golf Academy, and the second slash first largest tennis academy in the world, done in Florida. And when I was there, a lot of tennis players and golfers felt that they didn't need to do strength and conditioning like everybody else because they were a tennis player or they were a golfer. Well, first of all, tennis, that's ridiculous. Because I mean, if you just look at what they're supposed to do on the court, sprint forward, backwards, lateral, diagonal, side to side, jump, lunge, squat. Uh, and then once they get all that down, we change the surface to grass, to clay, to different, two different types of hard surface. They're supposed to hit a ball, chase a ball. I mean, you couldn't find something more athletic. And they're all they're doing it by themselves unless they're playing doubles, then they got to communicate with somebody with only like one ball and two people on the other side. I mean, you literally couldn't come up with like a game that is more athletic. But then when you would say, okay, well, then that's why you need to train like an athlete. No, no, no, you don't get it. We're tennis players. Yeah, okay, no, I do get it. And if you look at the tennis players back in the John McEnroe days and also even the late 90s, and the tennis players now, they are all training like beasts. Most of them almost get popped for uh sports performance drugs, not because they need to get stronger, but because they need to recover better. So to say it's not an athletic uh sport was just ridiculous. And same thing with NASCAR, because when they were taking their heart rates, they would realize that as they were driving in that circle for like three hours with like a millimeter between their car, the next car, and the next car, and they were going like, I don't know, like 300 miles an hour, their heart rate was through the roof. Of course, because they are literally a millimeter away from death the entire time they are in the race. So they started realizing, oh wow, well, when we're more fit, our cardiovascular and our nervous system works better. Yeah, you would think so, uh, and also the lactic acid that you build up when you're in this anaerobic stressed state. Well, if you can clear that fast from your system, you can just ask Lance Armstrong that has the VO2 Max and cheated and took drugs so we could have a better VO2 max, how important that is. So we've already seen NASCAR, or let's say car racing, because both NASCAR and also for Formula One, we've seen tennis and we've seen golf change. It is only a matter of time in my eyes until dance does. Because, for short, mark my words for it, in 2026, we are gonna start to see uh big plethora, if can you say it like that, of injuries start to come because everything is getting more. Everybody's doing more, everybody's traveling more, everybody's dancing more, everybody's throwing something on top. And a lot of times, as I was just speaking with a friend of mine, when chaos strikes, someone gets sick. What did she do? She stepped in, got another choreo, did another choreo, and then performed the show, and then after it, her foot was destroyed. And people wonder why. We have to start training like athletes, which is why the unbreakable dancer, I literally say train like an athlete and dance like a dancer, because this is what has to start happening if we want to make sure that we're not injured. Number one, and number two, if we want to reach another level. So on the professional circuit, uh for the dancers that I know, the only the main thing holding them back is not their dance. It's in and many of them actually don't drink, which is fantastic. So in many ways, they're actually very healthy. But if they're not treating their bodies like athletes, yet they're doing some of the most I had a phone call there for my mom, so let me get back on track here. But if some of the best athletes in the world, the best athletes in the world, some of the best dancers in the world, which really should be some of the best athletes in the world, are not treating themselves like athletes, then yeah, it's a disaster. This is going to be a massive problem. So one thing that I really want to start seeing in the dance community is that we start treating our bodies in training like athletes. Because when we do that, that is when we're gonna see the explosion, especially in salsa. I think also on bacatza, I mean, bachatza is a little bit of an easier dance, so to speak, on the body. I mean, with the waves and in the head rolls and all of that stuff, it's obviously demanding in its own way. But just because of the speed of that, of the of the of the dance being slower, it's going to be, I think, different when it comes to the injuries, as when we're looking at the chorios and salsa, the afro movements, the complex movements, the acrobatics that we're doing. I think this is going to be a very, very, very big problem in the future if we don't start taking care of ourselves. And in a future podcast, what I'm also going to go into is how we really have no system behind which the way that we're training. You know, if you look at any other professional sports, you sport, you have a preseason, you have the season, you have a postseason, and you have like the off-season, so to speak. And within all of that, you also have D-Load times, meaning where you've done so much, you need to deregulate your nervous system and take some of the load off. And right now in dancing, this doesn't happen. I remember when I was at the um Latin festival in Stuttgart, I was joking with uh Javier Escobar because I didn't know how old he was. And uh, I figured he was like in his 20s like everybody else. And he's like, no, Poppy, I'm like 31, 32, I've got five years left, and then it's like game over. And you know, he was kidding as he said that, but I think that really embodies a lot of the mentality that a lot of these dancers have. I mean, a lot of the professionals have. You see them bouncing around weekend to weekend to weekend, doing festival after festival after festival. And I understand they they need to, they, that's their job. They need to make sure that they stay on the top so they keep getting booked and that they make the money that they need to make. I totally get it. But if we look at the longevity of their career and we start having them understand, or we start to understand as dancers, that if we take care of ourselves, that we can go all, I mean, we can go, God, I don't even know how long. I mean, so there's professional NFL football players out there that are still in their 40s, getting absolutely rocked by by linemen, and they're able to deal with the concussion, they're able to continue to play the game, and they're able to win championships. So dancing is not any different. And to go back to the tennis thing, I remember when I first started working tennis, they always thought that especially the women's career was going to be over by like 19 or 20, just because of, I don't know, somehow that's the science they had with the hormones and the body of a woman and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it wasn't much different for the men. And now you look at what Serena Williams, what is she, mid-30s, probably almost 40s, and she's making a comeback. Same thing happened with Martina Hingis, because I helped her with her comeback. She retired around 18 years old, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and then was so bored around 24, she came back to play again. And I even think Agassiz is playing like paddle tennis at the moment. So, this idea, this concept that we need to just get it all in before we break, it's only true if you're not taking care of yourself. So, if we start taking care of ourselves, if we learn about our body and we start doing the strength and conditioning we need, then this won't be a problem at all. So, really, which I said I was gonna go into the next podcast, but I'll do a little bit now is talking exactly about the the progression of how we should train. So, having the periodization of the brief season, so to speak, the season, the postseason, and then the off-season. So I don't know if these I mean the dancers I know are usually just traveling all the time to every single festival possible, and they take some time to go home and relax and then spend some time with their family, sure. But two to three weeks of relaxing and doing lessons at home, then practicing your next choreo does not count. So, what I would really like to see in the dance community, and which I will be lecturing more and more about and also helping people with, is understanding how to periodizar, periodize their training and also the difference between air quotes fitness and strength and conditioning. You know, it's again, it's like the quote I said, you know, uh what athletes eat and train, they don't diet and exercise. Sure, at the end of the day, it's semantics between the definition of the words, but it's not because when we eat and we train, we're doing this for performance purposes. And when we diet and exercise, we're doing this because we want to look good at the pool, or I'm dieting and exercising because I want to look good at the next salsa event. But when it comes to eating and training, this is how we need to think when we're performance-based. And the main thing holding the dance community back right now is they've got a diet and exercise and fitness mindset when they need to have an eating, training, and performance mindset. And when this changes, we will see the dance level go through the roof because the professionals, starting at the top, will be able to do much more with their bodies and they'll be able to go bring their bodies to a new level, a new limit, which they're not able to right now because they just don't have the strength or the endurance, which is not possible. And then the middle level people doing the performance shows, doing all of that stuff, will just find themselves that they're able to just enjoy life a little bit more. And this idea that the ankle, the knee, the foot, the toe, the shoulder, all this stuff just hurts because that's the way life is, is not the case. And I'll end it with this one right here. I was working with a dancer uh last week, and she is uh very mobile in her back. She's very good at bachata, and she's very good at the waves and her body movement. However, she was having massive back pain, and she thought it came from a yoga stretch when she had her feet over her head and she heard a bit of a click in the spine, which obviously is never good. That's most likely one of her facet joints, and her back did get thrown out a little bit, but we need to know why. Well, when I looked at her, she's actually quite fit. She's got good movement, she's got decent strength with a lunge and her squat and her press and all of that stuff. However, then I when I took her to some core exercises, yeah, her core was okay. But then I made her do the same things on a ball, like a stability ball. She was dying. She wasn't able to do it. So were I at 44 years old was able to do it easily, she was absolutely struggling and couldn't do it at all. Now the thing is, is if she was just socially dancing and not doing that much and just kind of dancing here and there, that would be fine. But your strength and your performance needs to match your, I would just say your strength needs to match your performance. That's the easiest way to put it. And so when I look at someone playing, you know, you know, first league professional sports, and they've got the body of someone playing third league professional sports, of course, they're gonna be injured. How could they not? And it might not happen right away, it might happen down the road, which makes it even more difficult for people to connect those dots. But again, it's like drinking or smoking. You're not gonna get the sepsis in your liver or kidney or anything like that within the first week. It takes time. And the same thing is happening with all of this chronic pain within the dancing. So, what we need to do as a community is we need to start training ourselves like the athletes we are, because even if you're social dancing, that would be like choosing to say, hey, you know what, I'm just gonna run a 10K every Saturday, but I don't really need to do anything because I'm not a runner. I'm just running 10K every once in a while. Yeah, okay. Well, that 10K doesn't care if you do it every once in a while or if you do it every single day. Your body needs to be prepared for it. And if you're not gonna prepare yourself for it, then there's gonna be consequences, sadly, to suffer. So I hope this wasn't too much of a doom and gloom podcast, because at the end of the day, it's very easy to fix. We just need to get you stronger, and that's actually what the Unbreakable Dancer is all about. So you don't have to buy my program to do it, you don't have to use me to do it, but you need to do something because every body, human body, is the same, but not everybody is the same. So when it comes to your strength and conditioning, when it comes to your flexibility, when it comes to your mobility, a general program will definitely be better than sitting on the couch and smoking crack, but knowing your specific weaknesses is also very important. So, for example, mine is flexibility. So I focus more on yoga at the moment than I actually do strength and conditioning, but I still do strength and conditioning. So to if you need help understanding what direction to go, please either hit me up on this wherever you're watching this piece of the podcast or listening to it, go to the unbreak, the unbreakable dancer.com, send me a message there, take a look at the program, start my free mini course, give me an email, write me on American PT Schutgard, do whatever because it's so easy to fix this issue to get you back to what you need to do, but it's not gonna fix itself because if it was, and if it did, I wouldn't be doing this podcast right now. So, with that being said, I got a client coming in 10 minutes. I gotta go. I love all of you. I'm gonna hopefully be more consistent with this. I got a new setup here with my camera, but then everything's being recorded over there. So I hope this works. And uh, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, the Unbreakable Dancer is the name of the podcast and the program. So please, I hope to see you guys there. If you are at, let's see, let me do this in order the Monbo training week, the sauce uh the Monbo Training Week, Berlin, the Salsa Rave, or the Noviti Dance Experience. Please come say hello to me because I will be at all of those and maybe a few more in between. And until next time, peace.