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The second post in "The Aramandi Series"
1. TURNOUT
The ability of your leg to rotate outward at the hip joint. If you have been forcing your feet backwards against the ground, STOP. The aesthetic diamond shape the legs make come from rotation at your hip joint, not your feet. There are variations in everyone’s hip joint anatomy, some may be more able than others to achieve turnout. Despite this every dancer should strengthen their hip rotators to allow for a strong and stable turnout within their own safe range. 2. CORE STABILITY This isn’t exactly how many sit ups you can do or how long you can hold a plank for. In a nutshell, the core is the synergy of muscles in the centre of your body, your thorax and abdomen. There are 5 parts to it: deep muscles of your abdominals, the muscles along your spine, muscles on either side of your abdomen, your diaphragm and your pelvic floor muscles at the bottom. Its like the centre pole to which your limbs attach. So if your core isn’t able to hold its self, then isn’t everything attached to it going to collapse too? 3. SCAPULA STABILITY Your scapula is your shoulder blade. The shoulder joint is formed by the shoulder blade and the head of the humerus (arm) bone joined together. They move in unison, they have a rhythm. For example, to lift your arm up towards the front and above your head, the shoulder blade needs to rotate and move forwards. You can see it in this animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpzBGlOEW4E . Unlike the hip joint for example, which has a deeper socket for the hip bone to sit in, the scapula is held up purely by muscles and this is why it’s so important to train these muscles, because a stable scapula means a stable shoulder. 4. ANKLE RANGE In order to sit into aramandi, our ankles need to be flexible. Specifically, how how much your knee can bend over your foot. Everyone has their own range but most of the time stiffness here is the result of a prior injury, such as an ankle sprain. If your ankles feel stiff when you sit into aramandi, you may find yourself rolling your foot forwards, or compensating in some other way to sit lower. This can then lead to other complications and referred pain else where. So if you are feeling this, definitely something to work on and improve. 5. CARDIOVASCULAR AND MUSCULOSKELETAL ENDURANCE Remember those aramandi competitions you did when you were younger. “Whoever holds the longest gets a gummy worm!” Would you get a gummy worm today? Strength and endurance for dancers is never just about a single essential muscle (i.e the core is not the only group of muscles to train). Dancers need their whole body, so they need to train their whole body. Doing cardiovascular and endurance training other than dance will bring more versatility of movement and will better increase your endurance. It will also make your dance practice more efficient because it will allow you to focus more on technique or abhinaya. In the coming series of posts we'll take a deeper look into each of these aspects, and see what we can do to improve them. Keep in touch and follow me on instagram @aangika.physio for all things dance and wellbeing! Comments are closed.
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