I was lucky enough to see many kinds of people and stories in dance. About Odyssey Community. Health + Wellness for Tap Dancers « Audible Odyssey. Sound Bites: 3 Tips for Making it Easy to Eat Healthy. Tap dancers face many challenges when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet. ![]()
Fortunately, Alisa Bloom of Live Your Best 3. Prepare ahead. Alisa asks “Can you meet yourself halfway?” Even just a little bit of preparation for your week or day can make a huge difference in the quality of your diet. And because good nutrition is tied to energy levels, mood, and both physical and mental function, a little bit of prep can mean a huge improvement in your life. Shop Thursday and Sunday. Shopping on Sunday helps you get prepared for the week, and shopping Thursday night helps you be ready for your weekend. Because plans often change mid- week, you are less likely to have too much food or have fresh produce go to waste if you shop for only a few days at a time. Plus, shopping twice a week can help save money because it is easier to plan only a few days in advance (instead of for a whole week) and you are more likely to purchase exactly what you need instead of more. Tap dancers face many challenges when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet. Some tap dancers also take other types of dance or exercise. As the Associate Artistic Director of Odyssey Dance Theatre. Opera audition notice for nixon in china dancers ballet. Concert and Theatre Dance. Use Portable Refrigeration. Refrigerated items such as smoothies, yogurt, cheese, hummus, and hard boiled eggs can be very welcome variations to a diet that might otherwise rely heavily on jerky, peanut butter, and trail mix for protein. Added bonus if you like your fruits and veggies cold. Sound Bites: Bite- Sized Nutrition Strategies for Tap Dancers. On Saturday, May 1. AO hosted “Fueled for Sound”, a nutrition seminar for tap dancers with nutritionist Alisa Bloom of Live Your Best 3. Alisa’s presentation was JAM PACKED with great information about the unique nutritional needs we tap dancers have and she shared some great advice about how we can conveniently and effectively meet those needs. Alisa Bloom presents nutrition information and shares samples of tasty foods for tap dancers at AO’s “Fueled for Sound”. For those who couldn’t make it, we are happy to share some tidbits and morsels of what we felt were the highlights of this fantastic presentation. ![]() We will spread them out over the next couple of weeks so you can digest them in small “bites”. Ok, enough with the food puns. On with the information! Reasons Why Tap Dancers’ Nutrition Needs are Different From Those of the Average Person: 1. Because of our often long days, with high activity levels of physical activity often occurring in spurts, we are at a high risk for large blood sugar fluctuations. Eating highly concentrated sweets and carbs can make these fluctuations worse. We need to focus on feeding ourselves appropriately to stabilize our blood sugar throughout the day. This means eating often enough and including high- quality protein and fat in our diet. Because we exercise often, our lean body mass (muscle) is often greater than that of the average person. Lean body mass requires more hydration than non- lean body mass, so we need to be extra sure that we stay hydrated. Physical stress can take a toll on our immune systems. Physical stress is also necessary as we strive to perfect our craft. Fueling ourselves with healthy food can help counteract that stress and keep us healthy. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more “sound bites”- tips and strategies to meet your specific nutritional needs. Pain, Love, and Tap Dance: A Valentine’s Day Riff on Healthy Relationships. Dancers, typically, have a poor relationship with pain. It is a part of our history and culture to think that pain is normal, even necessary, to our existence. We have been known to court pain by continuing to push ourselves despite its warning and sometimes by actively seeking it out. Yet, pain is often what ends our careers. Our relationship with pain can either empower or destroy our dancing lives. This Valentine’s Day, I propose we take a moment to understand pain a little better, so that we can enjoy a happier and healthier lifetime of tap dancing. Pain is a warning signal from the brain. The brain compiles signals from both your body and your mind to determine whether you are in danger. If it determines that you are, it says: Stop before you hurt yourself! Pain is produced by the brain. Note: Pain and injury are not the same thing. Although they can occur simultaneously, one can have pain without injury (just watch some videos of people falling down on you tube) and/or injury without pain (ever have a splinter or blister and not even know it?) Generally speaking, pain that is not accompanied by other signs of acute injury, such as swelling, redness, bruising, numbness, or severe difficulty moving, is probably not indicative a full- blown injury. This discussion is focused on the pain you feel when you’re pretty sure you’re not actually broken or are actively working on healing. Also note: Pain, like love, is a subjective sensation, based not only on physical signals from the body, but mental and emotional cues that are intrinsic to who we are and what life experiences we’ve had. Pain is not productive to your dancing and should be addressed ASAP. When we feel pain, we human beings are typically are driven to change our behavior to relieve or avoid it. In dance, however, we often believe that we must work through pain in order to make it better, get stronger, or get better at dancing. The attitude that pain is necessary in dance supports a masochistic pattern that actually does little to keep us healthy or safe. If we pursue or keep attempting to work through pain, we come on way too strong. The brain gets smothered with danger signals. The brain must then repeatedly remind us, in a louder and more insistent voice, that what we are doing is not safe. It does this by actually lowering our pain threshold and putting stricter limits on what we can do without feeling pain. Working through pain doesn’t make it go away or make us better dancers. It’s more likely to make us weaker, more dysfunctional in our movement, and more prone to injury. On the other hand, if we always avoid pain completely, we become reclusive- too afraid to put ourselves out there. The fear of pain, like fear of rejection, also stunts our growth and restricts our life. Our fear can become so significant to the brain that it will respond, again, by lowering our pain threshold (just to be safe!) and, again, limiting how much or how well we can move. Either way, pain becomes disabling. Our brain becomes convinced that we are, indeed, in danger and does a very good job of protecting us, even if that means keeping us from dancing. We may even become locked in this perpetual relationship dysfunction as we fight injury after injury or chase pain around our bodies. However, when we respect pain as a vital and helpful tool in our lives, the course of our relationship to pain changes entirely. We can begin to appreciate that the pain is there and maybe, just maybe, become friends with it. I like to imagine what it might be like to actually talk to our pain as we develop our relationship. We might hold polite conversation at first, as we get to know each other: “Hello, pain, I heard you. I’ve gotta go rest now, I’ll talk to you later.”If all goes well, we soon understand and trust each other: “Oh, I understand that I pushed a little to hard on those flams today. That was a lot of torque on my knees.”We know what we can ask for and when: “Ok. Two more toe stands, then I’ll rest.”We know how to give back: “Not so many firecrackers next time. Plus, I’ll make sure I warm up my glutes and abs before next class so I’m more ready to do them.”And, if needed, when to give in: “Oh, ok. I’ve been trying to listen, but I just can’t make you happy. Time to go see the doctor.”When we are responsive to pain, our brain no longer senses danger, so it no longer has to protect us. We are already doing that by resting, changing our movements, and respecting our limits. It doesn’t happen all at once, but these habits have a more positive effect over time. With a healthy relationship to pain, we heal more quickly, we move more effectively, and we dance more freely. Gregory Hines. Photo by Rose Eichenbaum. Pain is not the enemy, it is a gift of love. Without it’s protective warning, none of us might be able to tap dance, or even be here, at all. If we can be patient, understanding, and appreciative as we manage pain, it will help us love ourselves and continue to love to dance. Happy Valentine’s Day! The Power of Pronation. Among many people, many dancers, and certainly many tap dancers, I hear a lot of discussion and questions about pronation. Dancers often tell me they “pronate” or “pronate too much” as if discussing some inherent flaw their systems. I’m always a little disheartened to hear dancers say this, not because of the pronation, but because of the automatic belief that pronation is bad. Previously, we discussed how the feet function like springs- dynamic adapters that help absorb shock and propel movement. The action of pronation, or loading, accomplishes the task of absorbing shock. Pronation’s counterpart, supination, is the 3 dimensional unloading of the foot that allows it to become rigid for push off. We all pronate and supinate to some degree any time that our feet are in contact with the ground. These are normal, functional movement patterns for any and every human being. Check out this video for a nice explanation and animation of how pronation and supination occur. How exactly each of us pronates or supinates varies pretty widely, and this variance contributes to our individual differences in how we move. We are often told (by healthcare providers as well as by shoe companies and sales people) that how much we do or do not pronate may make us more susceptible to pain or injury. However, I feel that paying excessive attention to labeling this one component of movement sets us up to miss two important facts. Our bodies are integrated systems. The foot does not function in a vacuum. Any movement that occurs in the foot is balanced to some degree by movement elsewhere in the body.
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