Is your flooring kinda iffy, ?

Most floors aren’t built to support dancers through all the jumps, turns, and pointework ballet offers. Between my touring Nutcracker days, and some teacher training deep dives early in the pandemic, I’ve learned to protect against injury and keep having fun — on just about any surface.

When I teach online, the classwork I give is customized for the kinds of flooring most folks have at home. I also want to give you the tools to modify for your body, and any other environments you’re dancing in.

Here are my top tips for online classes, strange studios, and unique performing locations:

1. Your number one strategy for injury prevention will always be good technique. In beginner ballet, we’re practising a juicy triple fold in your plié, active posture, and the quality of ballón for bouncy rebounding jumps. This does dancers a world of good in distributing load and managing less-than-ideal surfaces.

2. Choose the best floor available — ideally one with a little shock absorption, that isn’t too slippery ⛸️ or sticky. Cement basements make for hard landings (duh, Natasha) and higher friction surfaces like carpet can lead to stuck toes and nasty torsion injuries 😬

3. Sneakers and supportive taping techniques to the rescue! 🦸‍♀️ If you’re on a hard floor or your joints could use some extra cushioning, these tools protect and strengthen your whole body, not just your feet. You can wear dance sneakers onstage until the curtain goes up, and most tape won’t show under your costume. Wear a brighter tape if you want to remind your teacher (or yourself!) that you need to be extra gentle with a certain body part.

4. Most importantly: listen to your body. If something doesn’t feel right, change it up! You can always modify the choreography, adapt with floor or chair barre 🪑, or learn an exercise by watching and try it in a different environment. Take it from a chronically ill and disabled ballet teacher — watching can absolutely be active learning.

5. Jumping not working out in your living room? Try:

   👟bringing your sneakers to a wooden deck, back yard, or park to practise after class. Check that the ground is flat and even — I’ve known many a dancer to sprain their ankle in a hidden divot.

   💪 using the jumping patterns you learn online as part of your pre-class warm up.

Wherever you’re dancing this week, stay safe, keep breathing, and be kind to yourself!

-Natasha

P.S. Join me here for ballet classes that are made for your living room, or book a private lesson to jump into the nitty gritty of supporting jumping in YOUR body

P.P.S. If you’re an absolute beginner (less than 6 months of ballet experience) you should also be enrolled in beginner ballet (live or catch the recordings) in order to sign up for private lessons :)