HOW much should a dancer be training at any given age? This is a really difficult question to answer, and like all difficult questions, the answer is always: “It depends”. However, hopefully I can give some general guidance about how to make a decision when it comes to your particular situation.
I became interested in this question because I was seeing an increasing number of dancers coming through my clinic over the years with a couple of things in common. One - extremely high training loads on very young bodies – in excess of 30 hours a week of dance activity in dancers aged as young as nine; 2: significant performance pressure; 3: a very high competition workload.
To be honest, I came through my own career as a dancer with a similar mindset – the more training the better – right? Who wasn’t inspired by stories of dancers practising pirouettes late at night, spotting a candle, dancers who fell asleep in the splits trying to gain that elusive flexibility, or even tying
